A Week Without Food Delivery: Can Someone Already Hooked Break the Habit? | Hack Your Life

National Day digital-detox series, No. 4

Happy holidays! Starting October 3, QDaily Lab is running five holiday life experiments, each built around quitting something. What we want to know is which of the endless internet services and technologies on offer end up lodged in daily life as things we can't do without — and whether their presence makes life better or just feeds laziness and dependence.

Today's experiment: a week cut off from food delivery.

I depend heavily on food delivery. My fridge almost never holds a vegetable or a piece of fruit — some bread, milk or Coke at most.

I own a full set of cookware, and my family buys rice, flour and cooking oil on JD.com with next-day delivery to the rented apartment where I live alone. I still order in constantly. Meeting a courier in red, blue or yellow at my door and taking one steaming package after another has become a fixed part of my life.

Not everyone lives this way. By the end of 2017, active online food-delivery users made up only about 9% of all Chinese internet users — most people in China still had not picked up the habit. But inside certain groups it is entrenched. In first-tier cities full of couriers, you don't have to look hard to see that the people waiting for the office-building elevator at lunchtime are no longer white-collar workers but delivery riders.

I first ran into food delivery in college. In 2015, as a junior, my roommates and I threw ourselves into a frenzy of milking venture capital. For students who spent at most 20 yuan a meal, Meituan and Ele.me knocking 8 to 10 yuan off every order was impossible to resist — no wonder Ele.me got its start on campuses.

Huge subsidies bought delivery its first users. Meituan's prospectus shows that Meituan Waimai spent 2.6 billion yuan on subsidies in 2016 and 4.2 billion yuan in 2017, up 60.5% year over year. Marketing spending rose 31.0%, from 1.7 billion yuan in 2016 to 2.3 billion yuan in 2017, most of it on marketing and brand promotion.

This July, Ele.me CEO Wang Lei said the company would spend a total of 3 billion yuan between July and September to push its market share above 50%.

Both platforms subsidize far less now than they used to. Users like me grumbled at first and talked about going back to eating out, but in the end we gave in to the convenience — happy to pay a little more in packaging and delivery fees for a little more free time.

Our experiment targets heavy users in first-tier cities, the ones used to two delivery orders a day, to see how hard it is to break away.

Light meals and meal replacements instead of real food — and I was never full

On day one I decided to start as simply as possible.

MissFresh sells radish-and-beef breakfast pancakes, five for 9.9 yuan. I bought ten to cover the week's breakfasts — much cheaper than the street stalls I pass on my way to work.

For lunch and dinner I decided to substitute Soylent, the Silicon Valley meal-replacement drink.

In the morning I took a pancake out of the freezer and microwaved it for a minute and a half. Each one is about the size of a palm. If you're only a little hungry, one is enough; two will carry you to 1 p.m.

Over the following days I also bought four packs of soy milk on MissFresh, 4.9 yuan for two bags, and had one pancake and one bag every morning.

At noon I started drinking Soylent. It comes from a Silicon Valley company of the same name that makes powders and drinks meant to replace food, aimed from the start at people who can't be bothered to cook but won't eat unhealthy fast food either.

We tried the Soylent powder once before; this time I drank the ready-to-drink bottled version. Each bottle carries 400 kcal and claims to replace one full adult meal. It is mostly protein, with no excess sugar, saturated fat or cholesterol — besides speed, it sells itself on health and weight loss.

At lunch I drank the cocoa flavor. It tasted fine, with a texture close to milk tea; run it over your tongue and you can feel fine, sandy grains, like coarsely ground soy milk.

By 3:30 in the afternoon I was hungry again, stomach growling.

So I opened the second bottle without waiting for dinner. Less than three hours later the hunger was back. It drinks like soy milk and fills you like soy milk — nothing like the miracle the Taobao reviews describe.

A bottle of Soylent costs a little over 40 yuan in China, bought through Amazon China, with a Prime membership to save on cross-border shipping.

By the time I left the office at 7 p.m. I was starving. Luckily it was a Friday, so I called a friend and we went to the Grassland Shepherd hot-pot restaurant behind our building for a real meal. The two of us spent more than 200 yuan, and I walked out happy again.

Is light food really the better deal?

Light meals and meal replacements are less trouble than delivery, eating out or cooking. But a choice made for lack of choices isn't necessarily what you want, and this one was neither tasty nor filling.

Cooking the lazy way doesn't always save effort

One reason people order delivery is that cooking seems to waste too much time. There are ways to cut that time sharply:

1. Look at what's already in the fridge and build a simple meal out of it;

2. Order ingredients online and skip the shopping;

3. Buy semi-prepared dishes and finish the last few steps at home;

On day two, my fridge held two tomatoes and a box of eggs I couldn't remember buying, and the freezer held a bag of thinly sliced chicken and a bag of ground meat my mom had left when she visited in early September. The kitchen cabinet had noodles, scallions, ginger, garlic and wood-ear mushrooms.

That afternoon I made the one dish I'm good at: tomato-and-egg noodles.

The whole thing took 32 minutes, about what I'd estimated. Fifteen minutes later the bowl was empty, and that hot, full feeling beat every light meal and meal replacement by a mile. Because I controlled the heat and the salt myself, it suited my taste better than delivery. The only drawback was the time; doing this on a workday would be a bit of a squeeze.

Later that afternoon I decided to turn the leftover wood-ear mushrooms, chicken and ground meat into two dishes. I had no idea how to combine them, so I called in outside help. My mom suggested chicken stir-fried with chili peppers and wood-ear mushrooms, plus a tofu-and-minced-meat soup, and wrote out both procedures in detail on WeChat. To make them I had to buy green peppers, tofu and beech mushrooms as well — something I hadn't counted on.

The stir-fry took fifteen minutes, the soup twenty. I never expected to finish a dish on my own in fifteen to twenty minutes. I'd always assumed cooking for myself ate enormous amounts of time — one of the excuses I used for living on delivery.

The cooking itself was not pleasant. I'm a beginner, and I got splattered with hot oil on my arm.

On day three I decided to cook a dish entirely from MissFresh ingredients. I opened the app, went straight to the discount section and saw a two-pack of steaks for 19.9 yuan. Scrolling down, the recommended recipe under the listing ran to just four short steps, so I ordered without hesitating.

But ingredients alone weren't enough, and MissFresh couldn't supply everything. I searched for butter — in stock, ordered. I searched for thyme — out of stock, gave up.

When the order arrived I started cooking. Thawing the steak took nearly an hour; marinating it, prepping the seasoning and searing it took another hour. (Looking back, that split alone tells you the steak was never going to be good.)

The session took a full two hours. Had I gone to the supermarket to pick out the steak myself, it would probably have taken at least an hour more.

The entry bar for cooking is higher than I imagined. Even home-style dishes take long practice to get right, and an office worker who leaves on time a few days a month doesn't have the hours to practice.

On day four I bought semi-prepared dishes and tried an easier round of cooking.

Through WoChu's official account I reached its online store, which turns out to sell nothing but semi-prepared dishes. Order di san xian, the stir-fry of potato, eggplant and green pepper, and it ships you a box with the potatoes cut into strips, the eggplant in chunks, sliced red and green pepper, chopped scallions, cleaned crab meat and a sauce packet. All you supply is cookware, oil and salt. The product page lists the cooking steps; when the box arrives you follow them into the wok.

In other words, WoChu takes over most of the cooking and leaves you the last few steps.

I bought a 35.9-yuan braised beef brisket with potato and tomato, a 21.9-yuan sweet-and-sour pork tenderloin, and two 14.9-yuan portions of pan-fried pork dumplings.

The sweet-and-sour pork box held tenderloin strips already coated in flour and half-fried, plus a packet of sauce. The instructions gave me two steps: fry the tenderloin until golden, then bring the sauce to a boil and pour it over.

The dumplings were simpler still. Take them out of the box, fry until golden, add water, cook until the water is gone.

The pork took 10 minutes, the dumplings 20. Made from scratch, each dish would have taken me at least two hours — no use at all on a busy workday. WoChu removed the shopping, the meat slicing, the flour coating, the mincing and the dumpling folding.

Cost-wise, semi-prepared cooking is about even with delivery: a semi-prepared dish runs roughly what a finished dish costs on a delivery platform.

But it takes more of your time, and even with the platform doing half the work, a beginner can still ruin the other half — so there's a real chance the food ends up worse.

Doing every step myself took longer than I imagined

On day five I downloaded the recipe app Daily Cook. With its help I would run a whole cooking process alone, including the step I dread most: going out to buy groceries.

I browsed the quick-dish section and picked pan-seared salmon with rosemary.

The dish needs five ingredients — salmon, salt, rosemary, lemon juice and black pepper — and seven steps: slice, prep the seasoning, marinate, pat dry, sear, flip, plate. The ingredients are common enough and the cooking is simple. Daily Cook's instructions are detailed, with a photo and a note for every step.

My nearest supermarket is the RT-Mart in Yangpu, half an hour from home by bus. At 10:30 I set off from the corner of Xiangyin Road and Yingkou Road; at 11:10 I was standing at the RT-Mart entrance.

The only things I didn't have at home were salmon and rosemary. It took about ten minutes to pick a small piece of salmon in the seafood section. Then I went looking for rosemary and was still looking at 11:30. It isn't a seasoning Chinese cooking uses much, and the store didn't stock it, so I gave up on it again.

At noon I was home. An hour and a half out of the house had bought me one piece of salmon, one loaf of bread and one bottle of shampoo.

That kind of efficiency is demoralizing.

At 12:30 I started on the salmon. Having marinated a steak the day before, I felt much less resistance to marinating fish. Once it was ready I put it in the pan, and since I wasn't sure how long to cook it, I pulled it out as soon as the flesh turned golden. At 1:35 p.m. I sliced the bread and the lemon, plated everything, and was done.

From buying the ingredients to eating, the whole thing took two and a half hours — longer than any dish earlier in the week.

Cooking a meal entirely on your own is a genuinely lavish way to spend time. If it weren't for the experiment, I would never give up delivery for it.

Still, apart from the missing rosemary, the day went smoothly, with no serious mistakes. The beginner's work of the previous days had taught me something: I had plastic gloves ready, I kept the oil quantity and temperature under control, and this time I didn't go hungry because I'd forgotten to cook anything starchy to go with the fish.

So my advice: if your workload is already full, don't try cooking for yourself on workdays.

Upgraded instant food — how is it different from instant noodles?

On day six I turned to instant food.

Before the experiment started I had bought a 39.9-yuan Barilla pasta kit on JD.com and a 32.9-yuan box of Three Squirrels "lazy" self-heating hot pot on Taobao. These were the day's meals.

At noon I opened the Barilla kit and cooked the pasta myself. The noodles aren't fried, so you can't just steep them in hot water; they have to be boiled. The process was simple, no different from cooking any noodles, except that this pasta is harder and needs at least 11 minutes in salted water. I opened the jar of sauce that came with it, scooped out five or six spoonfuls, microwaved them on low for 2 to 3 minutes, and stirred them through the noodles.

The sauce was too plain — almost nothing but tomato. No onion, no meat. The bowl held noodles and sauce and not even a flake of dried vegetable, which somehow made it look shabbier than instant noodles.

Mediocre taste, moderate fullness. A letdown, and not really worth trying.

In the afternoon came the self-heating hot pot.

The process could hardly be simpler: no pot, no bowl, no microwave, not even hot water. Open the outer packaging, tear open the food packets and tip them into the upper tray of the double-decker plastic box. Pour cold water into both the upper and lower layers, drop the heating pack into the lower one and close the lid. A minute later the material in the pack reacts with the water and gives off heat, warming the food above; fifteen minutes later it's finished, and everything inside is steaming.

To me it wasn't as good as real hot pot, but it was still tasty. The meat, vegetables, base sauce and vermicelli were all vacuum-sealed fresh rather than dehydrated — the meat tender, the vegetables crisp. The one flaw was the heat: every flavor was so spicy you couldn't tell how fresh the vegetables were.

Two things to watch. First, use only about a third of the sauce packet. Second, in the lower layer, always add the water before the heating pack, and close the lid immediately, so a sudden burst of steam doesn't scald your fingers.

I once put the heating pack in first and poured the water slowly. The reaction started when I was halfway through, and it burned my thumb. Neither Three Squirrels nor Haidilao stresses this in the instructions; both describe the steps in the order "insert the heating pack… add cold water…".

Instant foods share one weakness: the ingredients have all been processed twice and stored for a long time, so the taste suffers, and there are health drawbacks too. Their strength is convenience, which makes them a decent emergency option for office workers on a punishing day.

Like most office workers, eating out after work

Three meals a day are not a solemn occasion for office workers. When work is busy, people grab whatever is near the office — or just order delivery.

I don't know the restaurants around my office; it wasn't until the last day of the experiment that I began exploring. I had to fall back on Dianping, and at 6:20 p.m. I started filtering. The office is near Shanghai's iapm mall, and many of the bigger restaurants around it are wrong for one person eating a quick meal. Awkwardly, Dianping's filters have no option for the number of diners.

I took a shortcut: most Japanese restaurants suit solo eating, so I picked "Japanese food" outright. At 7:20 p.m. I walked out of one, and the experiment was over.

For most people who go into an office every day, the restaurant-hunting problem I had usually only lasts through the first week at a new job. Over the far longer stretch that follows, the real problem is being sick of everything nearby and unwilling to walk farther. At that point, short of handing the walking off to a delivery rider, there's no better way to eat food from a restaurant three kilometers away — the lunch break only stretches so far.

After a week without delivery, I saw how much it matters

When the experiment ended, I had to admit I'm still badly dependent on food delivery.

After I left the college cafeteria in 2016, I went straight into a life of delivery every day, and never had to feel how hard cooking for yourself is, or how dull it gets eating at the same few restaurants near the office. Delivery erases the whole chain — buying ingredients, prepping, cooking, cleaning up. Food arrives and you open your mouth.

This week threw my routine off. Eating took more time, so my working hours shrank. With the same workload, daily life felt considerably more stressful.

Nor did cutting delivery help my finances.

Over the seven days I spent 672.5 yuan. Ordering delivery, I spend about 80 yuan a day, or 560 yuan a week.

The biggest gain from not ordering was less trash at home — no more hauling used containers downstairs every couple of days.

But convenient delivery is only a few years old, and I happen to be at exactly the stage — newly independent, newly out in the world — where it solves the problem of eating.

The pace of first-tier cities has also drained eating of much of its ritual and its social function. Once a meal is purely functional, and delivery cuts the time it costs, people naturally take that path.

Cooking for yourself now and then has instead turned into entertainment or relaxation — a "lifestyle" that lives on Moments and Instagram, a label, an attribute.

The delivery industry has grown fast on exactly this demand, using cost control to speed up delivery and pushing more and more people to pay for their own laziness. Meituan estimates the labor cost of a single delivery order at around US$1, and that figure is falling about 7% a year.

UBS once compared ordering delivery on an app to the shift from making your own clothes to buying them ready-made: once the supply chain exists, consumption follows. Tens of thousands of restaurants and riders have become the front end of your food supply; you sit at home and enjoy the laziness you paid for.

Finally, if you also want to try breaking away from delivery, a few suggestions:

• Stock the fridge with light meals, instant food, and ingredients that combine easily and keep well — eggs, mushrooms, scallions, ginger, garlic.
• Make full use of grocery and semi-prepared-dish delivery; shopping in person is the most time-consuming step.
• If your knife skills are poor, keep bandages around; if you've barely used a wok, keep burn ointment around.
• The worse your cooking, the more it's worth buying decent cookware.
• Cooking takes longer than you think.
• Try cooking a week's worth of food in advance and eating from the fridge each day.

Cover image/Giphy