Is Food Delivery “Short-Life Labour”?
Riders shuttle ceaselessly along the “last mile” of the food supply chain, at the cost of their own health. Few realise that the very people racing to deliver customers’ meals are often the least able to sit down to a healthy one themselves.
“Riders often eat just twice a day, and many suffer from stomach problems.” Transitional Labour Author Sun Ping made this remark on the Random Fluctuations podcast, and it unsettled me greatly. Not because I was surprised, but because I felt the weight of it. As a nutritionist, that contradiction struck me: what deserves attention is not only what is on the plate and its impact on health, but whether the people delivering those plates can eat well themselves.
I. Regular Meals Sacrificed to Work
The nature of delivery work makes riders’ daily rhythms erratic. The timing and quality of their meals tend to be dictated by order volume, shift length, and even the accessibility of pickup points—not by whether they “know how to look after themselves”. The reality is that their work pace leaves them no time to prepare a nutritionally balanced meal. Riders’ health predicament is not a matter of not wanting to eat well; it is that their working conditions deny them the ability to make better choices.
So when it comes to understanding riders’ stomach problems, prescribing “three regular meals a day” is both arrogant and futile—it is incompatible with a pay-per-order survival logic. The kind of expert advice commonly shared on social media—”drink fewer fizzy drinks”, “eat more vegetables and fruit”, “exercise more”—may sound practical, yet in the real world it stumbles over a dozen social obstacles and rarely comes to pass.
Xiaomin: a female rider weathering a painful divorce who “works ten hours a day and barely eats lunch to fit in more deliveries. She packs biscuits and flatbread snacks bought from Pinduoduo”.
Wu Zhifeng: chose to sleep rough and keep delivering in order to circumvent the “out but not in” lockdown policy, cooking himself two meals a day on a portable butane stove with a single small pot—”boiling noodles or rice noodles for himself, sometimes tossing cooked noodles with chilli sauce to eat”.
Brother Hong: “He opened his breakfast bag, and inside were two roujiamo, their crusts golden and crisp, still steaming. He gnawed away at the roujiamo while sipping a Pepsi.”
For some riders, “eating” barely registers at all in daily life. In a post on the official account “Riders Have Something to Say“, a team leader reported that weight gain among riders is extremely common, and that any drop in weight is more likely a warning sign of conditions such as hyperthyroidism. Xiao Bai, a crowdsourced delivery rider who took part in a dietary survey, put it bluntly: he does not think about “meal planning” at all:
“There’s no thinking involved, no fussy living or weighing things up. If there’s an order surge today, you just keep going and forget about eating—you only want to earn money. A lot of riders won’t stop until the orders dry up; they never log off on their own. As long as there are orders, you stay pumped and the hunger disappears.”
Eating well should not be a privilege, yet for riders who believe “as long as you’re alive, keep delivering”, two meals a day has become almost a prerequisite of a “successful” rider. Day after day, the pressure to earn strips them of any real autonomy over what they eat and how they stay healthy.
“Sometimes—say when my child’s eating, or coming home from school—it just happens to be peak delivery hours, and I have no time to attend to them. At most I order takeaway for them.”
The clash between the roles of “rider” and “mother” keeps Fangli awake at night, making it plain how gender and labour together shape the health of individuals and families. When the boundary between work and life dissolves further with every day, when constant flux becomes routine and the pressure to put food on the table turns “eating well” into an exhausting trade-off, health—what should be the most basic floor—is the first thing to go.
II. Does Casual Labour Make People “Short-Lived”? What Medical Studies Say
Medical research shows that in the gig economy, the way people work has itself become a significant determinant of health—”a person’s employment status is a better predictor of their risk of dying from coronary heart disease than any of the traditional coronary heart disease risk factors.”
An article published in JAMA Cardiology states:
“The working environment of the gig economy should be regarded as a new social determinant of health, and possibly even an actionable cardiovascular risk factor. Researchers, policymakers and employers should systematically assess the health of gig workers and develop targeted health interventions.”
(1) Studies from the 1950s showed that low physical-activity occupations (such as bus driving) carried a coronary heart disease mortality rate roughly twice that of high physical-activity occupations (such as manual labour).
(2) A survey of 130 taxi drivers in San Francisco found that 35% had four or more cardiovascular risk factors (including physical inactivity, smoking, an unhealthy diet and chronic stress); 36% of the drivers smoked, and 33% did no regular exercise.
Yet systematic research into the health of gig workers remains limited. The health challenges faced by China’s 200 million gig workers are a gap the public health system urgently needs to fill. Future health policy and labour legislation must confront this group’s health predicament head-on and adopt systematic safeguards, so that the widening gulf of health inequality is not allowed to grow any further.
III. “Digital Resilience” and “Health Resilience”
Across such jobs, irregular meals have become a shared predicament for millions of workers. The riders’ situation compels us to ask: why have food security and economic development not made it any easier to eat well?
Beneath the convenience of the digital economy often lies a health cost borne by the workers. I greatly admire the bottom-up approach Sun Ping takes in Transitional Labour; the various labour strategies that digital workers deploy to resist algorithmic management left a particular impression on me—Sun Ping calls them “digital resilience”. It also makes me wonder: beyond “digital resilience”, should we be paying still closer attention to workers’ “health resilience“?
From a dietitian’s perspective, I also hope that riders can eat properly and enjoy the same health equity as people in any other profession. Going forward, alongside discussions of riders’ labour protections and fair pay, can “health resilience” also be brought into the conversation? It is a question that anyone concerned with workers’ wellbeing should grapple with.
Fanzhou Yiheyuan. “The Taste of the Streets: Health Challenges Facing Delivery Riders.” Accessed 22 February 2025. https://www.wyzxwk.com/Article/gongnong/2024/01/485889.html.
Random Fluctuations. “Feeding the Algorithm with Our Bodies: Delivery Riders and the Rest of Us Are All ‘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