Is Food Delivery a “Life-Shortening” Job?
Riders push their physical health to the limit, navigating the ‘last mile’ of the food supply chain without pause. Few realise that those rushing to deliver meals to customers are often the very people within this system who struggle most to put a healthy meal on the table.
‘Riders often eat just twice a day, and many suffer from stomach ailments.’ *Transitional Labour*author Sun Ping shared this observation on the *Random Amplitude* podcast, and it left me deeply unsettled. Not from surprise, but from empathy. As a nutritionist, this contradiction highlighted for me that the issue extends far beyond the food and nutrition on our own dinner tables; it encompasses whether those delivering the meals can themselves eat properly.
I. Regular Meals Sacrificed to Work
The nature of delivery work inherently disrupts regular routines. Riders’ meal times and dietary quality are typically dictated by order volume, shift length, or even the accessibility of food pickup locations, rather than any personal commitment to “healthy eating”. The truth is that their relentless pace leaves little to no time for preparing balanced, nutritious meals. The health challenges riders face are not born out of a desire to eat poorly, but stem directly from working conditions that strip them of the ability to make healthier choices.
Therefore, offering a nutritional prescription of “three regular meals a day” to address their stomach ailments is both patronising and futile, as it fundamentally clashes with the “pay-per-order” reality that dictates their livelihood. While standard expert advice found on social media—“cut down on carbonated drinks,” “eat more vegetables and fruit,” “get more exercise”—may seem straightforward, such guidance frequently grinds to a halt against real-world structural barriers, rendering it largely unattainable.
Xiaomin: A female rider navigating the pain of divorce. “She works ten hours a day. To maximise her deliveries, she rarely eats lunch, opting instead for biscuits and toasted bun slices bought on Pinduoduo.”
Wu Zhifeng: To navigate the strict “exit-only” pandemic restrictions, he opted to sleep on the streets while working, preparing two meals a day with a portable gas stove and a small pot. “He boils noodles and vermicelli, sometimes tossing them with chilli sauce to eat.”
Brother Hong: “He opens his breakfast bag to reveal two steaming *roujiamo* (stuffed flatbreads) with a golden, crispy crust. He gnaws on one while downing a Pepsi.”
For some riders, “having a meal” holds virtually no importance in their daily lives. In a post on the WeChat Official Account “Riders Have a Say”, a delivery team leader noted that weight gain is extremely common among riders once they start the job, whereas unexpected weight loss might actually signal conditions such as hyperthyroidism. Another independent gig rider, Xiao Bai, who took part in a dietary survey, bluntly admitted that he gives no thought to “meal balancing”:
“There’s no room for consideration, no time for a refined lifestyle or careful planning. If orders surge, you just keep riding. You don’t think about eating; you just want to make money. Most riders only stop when the queue runs dry; they don’t go offline voluntarily. As long as the orders keep rolling in, you stay pumped and the hunger just fades into the background.”
Eating healthily should not be a privilege, but for riders who “keep pushing out deliveries as long as they’re breathing”, managing on just two meals a day has virtually become a prerequisite for a “successful” rider. The relentless pressure to make a living gradually erodes their autonomy over food and health, day in, day out on the streets.
“Sometimes—say, when the kids are having dinner or coming home from school—it just happens to be peak delivery time. You simply don’t have the time to be with them; at best, you can order takeaways for them.”
The tension between the roles of “rider” and “mother” keeps Fang Li awake at night, offering a stark illustration of how gender and labour intersect to shape individual and family well-being. As the boundaries between work and home life grow ever more blurred, and constant unpredictability becomes the norm, the pressure to make ends meet turns “eating healthily” into an exhausting trade-off. Health, which ought to be the most fundamental baseline, instead becomes the first thing sacrificed.
II. Does gig work shorten life? What medical research says
Medical research indicates that within the gig economy, the nature of the work itself has become a significant health determinant—“A person’s employment status is a stronger predictor of their risk of dying from coronary heart disease than any traditional risk factor.”
An article published in the *Journal of the American College of Cardiology* notes:
“The working environment of the gig economy should be regarded as a new social determinant of health, and potentially even a modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Researchers, policymakers and employers need to systematically assess the health of gig workers and develop targeted health interventions.”
(1) Research from the 1950s found that occupations involving low physical activity (such as bus drivers) had roughly twice the coronary heart disease mortality rate compared to highly active roles (such as manual labourers).
(2) A survey of 130 taxi drivers in San Francisco, US, revealed that 35% had four or more cardiovascular risk factors (including physical inactivity, smoking, unhealthy diets and chronic stress). Of these, 36% were smokers and 33% did not exercise regularly.
However, systematic research into the health of gig workers remains limited. The precise health challenges faced by China’s 200 million gig workers represent a pressing void that the public health framework must urgently fill. Future health policies and labour regulations must directly confront this group’s health predicaments and enact systematic safeguards to prevent the health inequality gap from widening further.
III.“Digital Resilience” and “Health Resilience”
Across these roles, irregular meal times have become a shared plight for millions of workers. The riders’ plight prompts a sobering question: why have advances in food security and economic development not made it any easier simply to eat a proper meal?
Behind the seamless convenience of the digital economy often lies a steep toll on workers’ health. I am particularly struck by the bottom-up approach taken in *Transitional Labour*. The myriad strategies digital workers deploy to navigate algorithmic oversight are especially compelling; Sun Ping terms this “digital resilience”. This leads me to wonder: beyond “digital resilience”, ought we to place greater emphasis on workers’ “health resilience”?
From a nutritionist’s perspective, I genuinely hope that every rider can eat properly and enjoy health equity (health equity) on par with any other profession. Moving forward, alongside discussions on labour protections and fair remuneration for riders, might we also bring “health resilience” into the conversation? This is a question that all those who care about workers’ conditions ought to reflect upon.
Pan Zhou Yi He Yuan. “Street Flavours: The Health Challenges Facing Delivery Riders”. Accessed 22 February 2025. https://www.wyzxwk.com/Article/gongnong/2024/01/485889.html.
Random Fluctuations. “Feeding Algorithms with Flesh and Blood: Delivery Riders and You Are All ‘Human Batteries’”. Accessed 23 February 2025. https://www.stovol.club/143.
Sun Ping. Precarious 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 labour a 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, no. 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, no. 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, no. 1 (27 March 2018): 92–99. https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoy009.
Editor: Wang Hao