A few years ago, when I lived alone in New York City, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to feed myself without opening DoorDash or Seamless or UberEats.
Most days, sometimes twice a day, I ordered food delivery. Even though whatever I ordered, whether greasy, lukewarm fast food or a favorite $18 kale caesar salad, rarely felt worth it, and almost always made me feel varying degrees of shame.
I earned a good salary at the time, but my food delivery habit—alongside my online shopping addiction—wasn’t technically within my budget. I’d just throw everything on my credit card and hope for the best. Cooking (and even worse, food shopping, let alone dishes) was, for much of my 20s, one of the most dreadful chores adulthood demanded of me.
At least whenever I had a partner, we could carry the burden together, divvying up grocery trips, recipe ideation, the actual food prep bit, and washing up afterward (as much as we might bicker about it all).
But when I lived alone? All bets were off. With no one but myself to judge me, it was devastatingly easy to fall prey to the luxury offered by these apps’ thoughtless convenience. Press a few buttons, pay $20 that didn’t feel real since it existed in the cloud and not in my own two hands, and food would find its way to me, without me having to move, or work, or think.
Food delivery apps are not merely changing how we eat; they are reshaping our relationship to labor, money, and our capacity to care for ourselves.
When I was growing up in the 90s, food delivery was a straightforward relationship between restaurant and customer. We’d call up a favorite spot, then the restaurant would pay one of their employees to get in their car or hop on a bike and deliver it to us. We’d leave a cash tip.
Delivery did not need Silicon Valley “disruption.” Like rideshare apps and taxis, delivery apps leveraged Venture Capital to create a marginally more convenient service where one already existed. In the process, delivery apps shifted consumer behavior and undermined a longstanding and once-sustainable business model.
What’s more, delivery apps do not always deliver a better experience. Social media is full of food delivery horror stories. A typical tale: the wrong order gets delivered two hours late, and the app responsible refuses any refunds. I’m sure you, reader, have some yourself.
How often have you used a food delivery app only to wait longer for your order than it would have taken you to walk, drive, or take public transport to the restaurant and back? How often has your order arrived cold, or with missing items, or squashed, or spilled, or otherwise ruined? And how often—even if you’ve been delivered the right order, at the right temperature, relatively intact—have you looked at the seemingly ever-growing “service” fees tacked onto your bill (almost all of which go back to corporate, not the human beings who made your food or delivered it to you) and thought: Yeah, this was definitely worth it?
Even when I was addicted to delivery apps, I believed they were a ripoff. Now, I am much more aware of the fact that they often undercut restaurants that already operate on razor-thin margins. And I am horrified to see reports that some apps are exploiting delivery drivers who are often paid far less than a living wage. At a certain point, not even a generous tip seems like enough to offset these harms.
But many well-intended people keep using these apps because they’ve been so thoroughly normalized. Because they’re easy. Worse than easy: mindless.
I can’t really claim any moral high ground here. Over the past couple of years, I’ve managed to wean myself off food delivery pretty much entirely. But it wasn’t easy, and it didn’t happen overnight.
If I were still living in the same circumstances, with the same salary, I might never have quit food delivery, not to mention my other addictions. It took me losing my job, moving to the U.K., and starting over at a new industry to face the fact that paying more than £20 after ever-rising fees for a fast food burger and fries is, frankly, absurd.
And it’s not only the expense. I was concerned about what on-demand convenience culture was doing to my mind and to my soul. I do not want to be a pod person languishing in my house, with every element of my life outsourced, speaking less and less to real people in the real world, and spending more and more of my precious time staring at screens.
I think we all need to be—as The Cut put it earlier this year—friction-maxxing, by rejecting the escapism of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands. Nothing less than our collective humanity is at stake.
In his forthcoming book, Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease, journalist Gabe Bullard argues that delivery apps can claim to make our lives easier, while actually threatening our long-term physical and mental well-being.
“We’re surrounded by tools, gadgets, apps, and schemes that claim to save us from needless effort and undue stress,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “If our so-called conveniences do save time, money, or energy, the savings are short-lived, while the costs linger. These costs are paid in dollars and in the degradation of daily life.”
I know as well as anyone that when you’ve just got home from a long day at work, the temptation is stronger than ever to simply check out: open your phone, gobble up teeny little dopamine hits in the form of endless short-form videos, place an order for something (relatively) cheap and filled with easy, empty calories, perhaps imbibe a substance or two, then pass out on the couch before finally making your way to bed.
It took financial necessity to force me to get creative in these moments, and it turns out, even when I’m tired and cranky and can’t be bothered to make anything elaborate, not every meal needs to be some big, fancy, crazy-delicious production; all it needs to be is wholesome and filling.
Rice, frozen veggies, and a fried egg on top takes 10 minutes max (my rice cooker is my salvation). I’ve learned batch cooking that works best for me isn’t about preparing whole meals I’ll get bored of by the time I’m pulling out a third round of leftovers; it’s about spending five minutes here, 10 minutes there packing a jar with pickled onions to render quick, boring meals more jazzy throughout the week, or baking a couple trays of chicken thighs on a Sunday to eat in different variations for packed lunches at work, or mixing a cup of chia seeds into some frozen berries on the stove with honey and lemon for some fiber-maxxing at breakfast.
I wouldn’t necessarily say I’ve been converted into a full-on cooking enjoyer; there are still plenty of days when I look in the fridge and groan. But I have grown to appreciate cooking so much more: the meditative aspect of putting on some music and getting into flow state while chopping garlic and onions, the satisfaction of making something with my own two hands.
The post Why I Quit Food Delivery Apps appeared first on TIME.
