The Moment They Decided to Stop Ordering Takeaway | Have Something Nice for World Consumer Rights Day
Foodthink Speaks
As an editorial team that doesn’t order takeaway, these contributions struck a deep chord with us: for the platforms, takeaway is merely a business; but for ordinary people, it is so tightly woven into their daily lives that it gives rise to a wide range of observations and delicate feelings. Let’s see the moments and reasons these dozens of readers shared with us for not wanting takeaway – perhaps something in here will resonate with you too. Which reader puts your feelings into words the best? Which sentence hits closest to home? Leave a comment to let us know!
Today is 15 March, World Consumer Rights Day. Foodthink hopes all our readers eat properly – “Have Something Nice”. You’re also welcome to scan the QR code on the poster and join the conversation.
The Stronger the Work Vibe, the Easier Takeaway Becomes
@小张: I was working in Shenzhen in 2019. The business park canteen was dreadful, overpriced, and the queues were endless, so I had no choice but to order takeaway. But eating from the same few places every single day was enough to make you sick…
@面团晶晶：When work gets really busy, I just want to come home and do something relaxing instead – or I have to bring work home with me. So if I’m eating at home that evening, the first thing I do when I step onto the subway is place a takeaway order. By the time I get through the front door, the delivery rider is right there with my food. But the moment I untie the rider’s bag, open the container, and catch a whiff of the food, I just don’t want it anymore. I’ve since realised that the busier I am, the more often I order takeaway, and the less appetite I have. So I decided to leave the work environment that forced me to rely on takeaway so often. After I quit, I stopped ordering takeaway altogether!
@每周争取少吃外卖的打工人：The last time I didn’t want takeaway was when I was about to order some… I felt so helpless, and so furious – the fury of being completely powerless. Helpless because I’m chained to those long working hours every day. I leave work at half past seven, get home at eight, and it’s practically impossible to cook dinner the moment I walk through the door. On the one hand I know full well that switching jobs in the short term isn’t realistic; on the other, I feel like I’m putting so many unhealthy, unvaried meals into my body every single day, and the toll it’s taking on me over time is enormous.
@菊子: When I was employed, I was too busy and exhausted to cook. Every day it was either the company canteen or takeaway. Since I quit, I barely order takeaway any more – I cook all three meals myself.
@阿赞: Back when I was still working, I was eating takeaway every week. After I left and started cooking at home, it’s been three months since I’ve had any takeaway!
@樟一棵: Overall, when life moves too fast or the pressure gets too much, I just give up and start ordering takeaway constantly. But I haven’t placed a single order since the start of this year.
Not Tasty, Not Healthy
@菊子: More than once I’ve ordered takeaway and immediately regretted it. The food is loaded with oil and salt, and after steaming in its container for a while, it just tastes mediocre. I never feel as satisfied as I do after a simple home-cooked meal.
@面团晶晶：Sometimes the greens have gone yellow from being trapped under the lid; sometimes there’s a faint plastic taste. It’s not always bad, but most of the time I just think, well, I’ve paid for it, so I’ll pick at a couple of mouthfuls – only to find I can’t manage more. In the end, it goes in the bin.
@花园果子：After too much takeaway, I get that greasy, heavy feeling in my chest, my throat feels off, and I feel oily all over. And the quality of ready meals is a gamble: the awful ones are truly awful, the good ones make you suspect too many additives, and the middling ones have no flavour at all. I’m a picky eater, but I also have to think about my health.
@A Zan: The moment I open a takeaway app and glance at what’s on offer, my appetite vanishes. In the end, I’d rather go out and buy groceries than place an order.
@蔬果鉛: Even though I live in Shunde, the so-called Food Capital, I’ve never found a takeaway I truly loved.
@栗子: Back at university, takeaway was just getting popular. Once, a flatmate came home and flatly told us to stop ordering takeaway because the restaurant where she worked part-time was far from hygienic. Another time, during my postgraduate studies, a classmate said that one very late night she’d seen someone in the campus food court scooping oil out of a rubbish bin.
@Ni: Sometimes after scrolling through every takeaway option near me, I have absolutely zero interest. I start to feel that ordering takeaway is just going through the motions – it’ll never satisfy a real craving for good food.
@丽莎: Takeaway always tastes the same, one thing after another. Why is there no takeaway that’s both healthy and tasty?
@三木森: Takeaway is too greasy, and there are hardly any good places nearby. The daily headache of hunting for something tasty yet clean makes me just want Mum and Dad’s home cooking.
@LTL: Every single time I order takeaway, I regret it. Even dishes I’ve been reasonably happy with when dining in at the restaurant taste far worse once delivered to my door. I once saw an interview with Chen Xiaoqing where he “revealed” that he never orders takeaway. He’d been biting his tongue and refusing to say why – presumably not wanting to upset the restaurant trade – but in the end he did give one reason that, in his view, would offend the least: restaurants send their botched dishes to takeaway.
@Busy: Working late overtime at the office, already exhausted, the takeaway options at that hour are basically all chain restaurants or skewer stalls whose taste is… questionable. And I’m often left with an upset stomach afterwards. Just thinking about it kills my appetite.
@咔咔: Almost every week it’s takeaway, every day it’s ready meals – I’m so tired of looking at them.
A Waste to Eat, a Waste to Leave
@林林: I often can’t finish my takeaway. Even though I’m not wasting food on purpose, it still leaves me feeling guilty.
@little plum: The last time I felt like ordering takeaway, I realised I’d bought loads of veg and left them in the fridge – if I didn’t eat them soon, they’d end up in the bin again. I don’t want to keep throwing vegetables away! It’s spring – I should be eating spring veg!
Expensive, and Poor Value to Boot
@深木: Yesterday I had a cold and was feeling awful. I woke up from a nap hungry and fancied ordering a takeaway bowl of sweet soup to clear the heat. The shop is a sweet soup place about 1.5 km away; normally I walk there and eat in. But when I opened Meituan and saw the prices were clearly 3–5 yuan dearer than dining in, and pictured the mountain of plastic wrapping a single bowl would arrive in, I lost all appetite for it in an instant.
@K: Takeaway costs more than dining in – once you add the delivery fee, the price hits 1.5 times what you’d pay in the restaurant – and the wait means the food has long passed its peak by the time it arrives.
@线团: So often, takeaway feels genuinely expensive compared to cooking at home. The moment the food hits my mouth, a thought flashes through me: do I really need to pay for this?
@娜娜: A year ago I decided to lose weight, live healthily, and eat properly. Now I have breakfast and dinner at home and lunch in the workplace canteen. I did the sums, and whether I eat at the canteen or cook at home, it’s cheaper than takeaway – and healthier, too.
Had the Takeaway, Got the Blues
@林林: Order a truly awful takeaway and you feel cheated – swindled out of your money and your feelings both. I trudge home from work, wait eagerly at the door for my food, only to get… this! Crying!
@樟一棵: Work pressure was crushing at the end of 2024. One evening I ordered a takeaway before going in for overtime. The more I ate, the worse my stomach felt, the less it digested – and I was so aggrieved, so furious, I felt like one of the tail-carriage underclass, eating Snowpiercer‘s energy blocks.
@青然: My last takeaway was two and a half months ago. After that one, I never want to order takeaway again: the rice was cold and coarse, the vegetables cold too, swimming in thick, gloopy sauce. I felt like I was eating pig slop – as if I didn’t even respect myself. I was deeply dejected and disappointed.
@林林: Ordering takeaway, really, is just about surviving – it’s not living at all.
@冲冲: One time after a gruelling night of overtime I got home, ordered takeaway, then waited ages for it to arrive. The food wasn’t even warm anymore, the taste was mediocre, and then there was the mountain of plastic tubs and plastic bags – guilt at all that un-eco-friendly waste, I didn’t feel any better than I had before eating. No positive energy in my body or my mind.
Can’t Bear to Look at the Plastic Piled at the Door
When I can’t help but order takeaway, I always choose “no cutlery” and lean towards shops that package their food in paper, glass or other easily recyclable materials. I’ve tried urging everyone around me to do the same, but with very little success.
@栗子: The last time I really didn’t want takeaway was when I noticed just how they pack things – three layers in, three layers out: plastic bags, food containers, plus cutlery and extra wrapping that still turns up even after you tick “no cutlery needed”. When you think about how long it takes all that plastic to decompose – truly, truly too long – I worry. I can’t help feeling the Earth struggles a bit to digest it all.
@蔬果鉛: The last time I particularly didn’t want takeaway was after reading an article on the Break Free From Plastic official account and learning about the health risks in takeaway containers.
@泡泡熊: The moment I think about takeaway containers – and the wok hei that’s long since gone – I lose all desire to order takeaway.
@Nathalie: Too much waste produced, unhealthy, far too greasy – and plastic leaches harmful substances when it comes into contact with hot food.
Takeaway Saves Time? Not Necessarily
@二月: It’s been a month since I gave up takeaway. Last month I ordered in, and the rider delivered the wrong order to me. By the time the rider had taken that misplaced order to the right person, they’d already eaten it. The restaurant said it was the rider’s fault and I’d just have to make do with what I had. The rider said I could just eat it anyway and offered to send me a bottle of water. In the end, I spent money and time, only to be left with a meal I didn’t even like – or nothing at all.
@LTL: I suffer from decision paralysis, and I’ve noticed that every time I open the app, I spend ages scrolling through options and still can’t find takeaway I actually want (mostly because most of the choices either taste bad, look like they’ve got dodgy ingredients, or are terrible value for money). Once I realised, the same time spent scrolling and ordering on my phone would be enough to nip downstairs for a meal, or whip up a quick dish at home – and give myself a break from the screen.
I Don’t Want to Be an Accomplice
@李婷婷: The reason I ultimately stopped ordering takeaway is that a friend of mine once ordered on a heavy snow day. When the food arrived, the rider’s hands were covered in blood. She was horrified. It turned out that on the icy roads, the rider had slipped while turning a corner and slashed open a gash on his hand. My friend wanted to help him stop the bleeding, but he said he had another delivery to make – he thanked her and was off. After that, my friend stopped ordering takeaway. Hearing the whole story, I stopped too, and ever since, every time I catch sight of a takeaway platform’s logo, I can’t help but picture that vivid red blood on the rider’s hand.
@LTL: I can’t bear the thought that someone might end up in a car accident on their way to deliver my food, struggling to earn a few yuan, simply because I’m too lazy to step outside. I suppose this view is a little hypocritical, given that virtually all modern urban consumption is built on the exploitation of other people and of nature. But ordering takeaway is a concrete, one-to-one service – different from other forms of consumption.
I don’t mind challenging those who might mock me, either: if an accident really did happen, would you feel at peace? What gives us the right to assume that by paying a few yuan extra – if that, since most of us aren’t even really “paying extra” – we’ve earned the privilege of asking someone else to put their life on the line? Only someone who never sets foot outside would assume that delivering takeaway is an extremely safe job, surely.
“Can you take responsibility for riders losing their livelihoods?” My answer is this: my food budget goes towards supporting more dignified labour. If you did the same, more dignified jobs would be created, instead of so many people being forced into work that is neither safe nor secure.
Refusing to Be Dragged Into a Pathological System Chasing Efficiency
@田女士: I’ve always felt that the way delivery riders desperately race against time is a kind of pathology in our society, so I’ve always been quite resistant to takeaway.
If we didn’t starve without takeaway abroad, surely we can manage without it at home too
@YC: I studied in Europe for quite a long time. The takeaway industry there isn’t particularly developed, so I got into the habit of eating in at restaurants, and I’ve kept that habit up since coming back home.
@小张: When I was studying abroad, forget about takeaway – I couldn’t even afford to eat out at a restaurant – so I just cooked for myself every single day.
@loopy: I spent half a year working in New Haven, USA, in 2019. Eating out was expensive, so I cooked and packed my meals almost every day with my roommate from Hunan. I also often invited friends over for home-cooked Chinese food, or went to American friends’ houses for potluck dinners. Not many people around me ordered takeaway at the time, so it never even crossed my mind. In March 2020, I returned to China during the pandemic and spent two weeks in quarantine at a hotel in Zengcheng, Guangzhou. The area is renowned for its Gualü lychees and Simiao rice, yet I ate nothing but takeaway for a full fourteen days. That year, I never ordered takeaway again.
@李婷婷: When I was studying abroad, living in the city centre meant meals were really convenient. But there was this one Shanghai restaurant I absolutely loved, and it was a bit far from home. foodpanda had just launched around that time, so whenever I fancied their Shanghai food, I’d order takeaway. It was only after a few orders that I suddenly realised just how expensive it was! You have to tip the restaurant, pay a delivery fee, tip the rider on top of that, and then there’s tax as well – two or three dishes, and the bill comes to $70.
@LTL: When I was studying in New York, I would occasionally order takeaway. Delivery platforms hadn’t really taken off yet – you’d phone a restaurant to place an order, and they’d have a dedicated rider who’d deliver the food straight to your door; tips were given separately. Back then, New York was in the grip of a major debate and wave of protests over the fact that many Chinese restaurant delivery riders were being paid an hourly wage of just one dollar – even though their main income actually came from tips, and their monthly earnings were, in fact, higher than mine as a scholarship student scraping by on very little. Even so, I never skimped on tips; it felt like a kind of “laziness tax”, and a roundabout way of reminding myself to order takeaway less and save some money.
After coming home and starting work, one year I went to New York on a business trip, staying at a friend’s place. I fancied getting into the kitchen and showing off my skills, so feeling lazy, I thought about ordering groceries online from Whole Foods for home delivery – only to discover that once you added up all the various service charges, it really was no better than just making the trip yourself, so I didn’t place the order. And once again I marvelled, All the convenience of life at home is built on the exploitation of workers.
If You Don’t Order Takeaway, What Do You Eat?
Whether it’s heading to the canteen at set times, cooking at home, or meeting colleagues for a dine-in meal and a bit of fresh air – there are always more ways than difficulties. Busy city dwellers have also come up with plenty of quick, economical tips for eating well. What exactly are they? We’ll delve into that next time. Meanwhile, we welcome our readers – who are a goldmine of hidden talent – to click “Read Original” at the end of this article and continue joining our “100 Moments When I Didn’t Want Takeaway” call for submissions. You might just find your own story featured on Foodthink next time!
Planning: Kairui
Editing: Yuyang, Tianle