Is food delivery a form of ‘short-lived labour’?
At the cost of their own health, riders spend their days in a relentless race across the “last mile” of the food supply chain. Few realise that those rushing to bring meals to customers are often the people in the system least likely to eat a healthy meal themselves.
“Riders often eat only twice a day; many suffer from stomach problems.” This sentence, mentioned by Sun Ping, author of 《Transient Labour》, during the *Random Fluctuations* podcast, left me deeply unsettled. This wasn’t out of shock, but empathy. As a nutritionist, this paradox made me realise that we should be concerned not only with the food and health on the table, but whether those delivering the food are able to eat properly.
I. Regular Eating Sacrificed for Work
The nature of delivery work dictates an unstable routine. Meal times and dietary quality are usually determined by order volume, shift length, and even the accessibility of the pick-up point, rather than whether the rider “knows how to live healthily”. The reality is that the pace of their work does not allow them enough time to prepare nutritionally balanced meals. The health crisis facing riders is not because they do not want to eat well, but because their working conditions deny them the possibility of making better choices.
Therefore, when addressing the stomach problems of riders, prescribing a “regular three-meal-a-day” diet is both arrogant and futile, as it is incompatible with a survival logic based on “pay-per-delivery”. Common expert advice found on social media—such as “drink fewer fizzy drinks”, “eat more fruit and vegetables”, or “exercise more”—may be specific, but in the real world, these suggestions often stumble over various social hurdles and remain unattainable.
Xiaomin: A female rider enduring the pain of a divorce, “working ten hours a day, she rarely eats lunch in order to deliver more orders, carrying instead biscuits and pieces of steamed bun bought from Pinduoduo”.
Wu Zhifeng: To cope with the “no-entry, no-exit” pandemic policies, he chose to sleep rough while delivering, using a portable gas stove and a small pot to cook two meals a day, “boiling noodles or vermicelli, sometimes making mixed noodles with chilli sauce”.
Brother Hong: “He opened his breakfast bag to find two Roujiamo (meat burgers), golden-brown and steaming; he munched on the Roujiamo while drinking Pepsi”.
For some riders, the act of “eating” is not even a priority in their lives. In a post on the WeChat official account “Riders Have Something to Say“, a delivery team leader noted that weight gain is very common after starting the job; conversely, if a rider loses weight, it may actually be a signal of an illness such as hyperthyroidism. Another crowdsourced rider, Xiaobai, who participated in a dietary survey, stated bluntly that he does not consider “dietary balance” at all:
“There is no consideration, no room for a refined lifestyle or careful planning. If there’s a surge in orders today, I have to keep running; I don’t want to eat, I only want to earn money. Many riders only stop when the orders run out; they won’t go offline voluntarily. As long as the orders keep coming, you get an adrenaline rush and forget you’re hungry.”
Eating healthily is not a privilege, but for riders who believe that “as long as you’re alive, keep delivering”, eating only twice a day has almost become a prerequisite for a “successful” rider. The pressure of survival means that, amidst the daily hustle, they gradually lose their agency over their food and their health.
“Sometimes, like when the child is eating or coming home from school, it’s exactly the peak time for deliveries. You have no time to look after them; the most you can do is order a takeaway for them.”
The conflict between the roles of “rider” and “mother” makes it difficult for Fangli to sleep, giving us a direct look at how gender and labour jointly impact the health of individuals and families. As the boundaries between work and life blur and constant volatility becomes the norm, the pressure to make a living turns “eating healthily” into an exhausting trade-off. Health, which should be the most basic baseline, becomes the easiest thing to sacrifice.
II. Does Gig Work Make People “Short-Lived”? What Medical Research Says
Medical research shows that in the gig economy, the mode of work itself has become a significant variable affecting health: “one’s employment status is a better predictor of the risk of death from coronary heart disease than any traditional risk factor.”
An article published in *JAMA Cardiology* points out:
“The work environment of the gig economy should be viewed as a new social determinant of health, and potentially even an intervenable risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Researchers, policymakers, and employers should systematically understand the health status of gig workers and develop targeted health interventions.”
(1) Research from the 1950s shows that occupations with low physical activity (such as bus drivers) had a coronary heart disease mortality rate approximately twice as high as those in high-physical-activity occupations (such as manual labourers).
(2) In a survey of 130 taxi drivers in San Francisco, USA, 35% had four or more cardiovascular risk factors (including lack of exercise, smoking, unhealthy diet, and chronic stress), with 36% smoking and 33% lacking regular exercise.
However, systematic research on the health of gig workers remains limited. The specific health challenges facing China’s 200 million gig workers represent a gap in the public health system that urgently needs to be filled. Future health policies and labour regulations must directly confront the health plight of this group and implement systemic safeguard measures to prevent the gap of health inequality from widening further.
III.“Digital Resilience” and “Health Resilience”
In these jobs, irregular mealtimes have become a common struggle for millions of workers. The plight of delivery riders prompts us to reflect: why have food security and economic development not made it easier to eat properly?
Behind the convenience of the digital economy often lies a health cost borne by the workers. I greatly admire the bottom-up approach used in *Transitional Labour*; I was particularly struck by the various labour strategies used by digital workers to resist algorithmic supervision, which Sun Ping terms “digital resilience”. This has led me to wonder: beyond “digital resilience”, should we perhaps place more focus on the “health resilience” of workers?
From a nutritionist’s perspective, I hope that delivery riders can eat properly and enjoy the same health equity as those in other professions. In the future, while considering issues such as labour protections and fair remuneration for riders, could “health resilience” also be included? This is a question that everyone concerned with the plight of workers should consider.
Fanzhou Yiheyuan. “Taste of the Streets: The Health Challenges of Food Delivery Riders”. Accessed 22 February 2025. https://www.wyzxwk.com/Article/gongnong/2024/01/485889.html.
Random Volatility. “Feeding the Algorithm with the Flesh: Delivery Riders and All of Us are ‘Human Batteries’”. Accessed 23 February 2025. https://www.stovol.club/143.
Sun Ping. *Transitional Labour*, 2024. https://book.douban.com/subject/36985251/.
Kim, Min-Seok, Juyeon Oh, Juho Sim, Byung-Yoon Yun, and Jin-Ha Yoon. “Association between Exposure to Violence, Job Stress and Depressive Symptoms among Gig Economy Workers in Korea”. Annals of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 35 (2023): e43. https://doi.org/10.35371/aoem.2023.35.e43.
Mulhollem, Jeff. “‘Triple burden’ of invisible labor major stressor for farm women, study finds | Penn State University”, 2024. https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/triple-burden-invisible-labor-major-stressor-farm-women-study-finds.
Rodriguez, Fatima, Ashish Sarraju, and Mintu P. Turakhia. “The Gig Economy Worker: A New Social Determinant of Health?” JAMA Cardiology 7, Issue 2 (1 February 2022): 125–26. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamacardio.2021.5435.
Rose, G., and M. G. Marmot. “Social Class and Coronary Heart Disease”. British Heart Journal 45, Issue 1 (January 1981): 13–19. https://doi.org/10.1136/hrt.45.1.13.
Waynforth, David. “Unstable employment and health in middle age in the longitudinal 1970 British Birth Cohort Study”. Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health 2018, Issue 1 (27 March 2018): 92–99. https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoy009.
Editor: Wang Hao