Do I need to stop ordering delivery?
The Drift's advice column #6
Welcome to the June installment of Sophie Haigney’s advice column. Send your submissions to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.
Dear Sophie,
Recently my partner and I got in a fight about ordering food on apps like UberEats. I probably order delivery two to three times a week because I’m really busy at work and it’s especially helpful for lunch. Usually one meal goes a long way and I’ll have leftovers for a while. I feel guilty about it — I realize these companies are predators, and that it’s wasteful environmentally and from a spending POV. But I can afford it, I’m not a great cook, and it doesn’t seem that much worse than other consumption habits I have. (Like... eating meat in general….) If you scrutinize everything too much, I guess, it all starts to look pretty bad. But my boyfriend feels differently. He has what seems like an aesthetic objection to getting delivery. It’s a red line for him, which is partly ethical, but also... it seems more about how he thinks it’s lazy and unattractive. I definitely hide the amount of delivery I get from him (through omission, not lying). This is going to be a bigger point of contention because we’re moving in together soon, and sharing more meals, and he really doesn’t like my delivery habit. What do you think?
— Guilty on Grubhub
Dear Guilty on Grubhub,
Unfortunately, I side with your boyfriend. But then, it seems like you actually do too: you feel bad about your delivery habit, even as you justify it. You take some steps to hide it from one of the people you’re closest to. You know something is wrong, but you don’t want to make a change — a good sign that you should make one.
But the good news is that I don’t think it will be as hard to make this change as you think it will be. People in the Silicon Valley-adjacent echelons of the self-help world have been fond, lately, of saying “you can just do things.” Often what they mean is: go forth and smash stuff. Vibe-code, start a company, crush the systems, spin your wheels of action in all directions. But in our present environment, I actually think that a more radical and interesting stance might be: you can just not do things. You can abstain from using every single quick-fix technology that promises to maximize time and convenience and increase productivity. You can just not use ChatGPT to write your emails. You can just not order books on Amazon. You can just not get delivery.
This message allows us to shift from asking which behaviors are permissible or impermissible to inquiring into what kinds of practices are good for us, in a holistic sense. As you say, nearly every consumption habit has some associated harm, so when we try to draw a line between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” we can feel paralyzed. This is why people are fond of concluding that there’s “no ethical consumption under capitalism”; from there it seems to follow that all choices are equally valid or invalid. But this is both a way out of doing any kind of ethical accounting — some modes of consumption have more significant impact than others! — and it elides the fact that different choices can still bring you closer to or further away from the kind of life you want for yourself. It sounds like you know which direction your delivery habit is pushing you.
I think this is what your boyfriend’s “aesthetic objection” to UberEats may be pointing to. When a lover calls a behavior “unattractive,” they are often expressing that what we are doing makes us in some sense less fully ourselves — that it obscures the beautiful person they know us to be at our best. Feeding ourselves, to the extent we can, helps us to thrive. Once you can figure out how to do it in satisfying, cost-effective, and self-sufficient ways, you will feel happier, and more connected to yourself. I speak from some experience, having muddled through my share of bad homemade lentil dishes and eaten my share of delivery in my twenties. I never believed early in my learning process that I would be a “great cook,” and I’m still only a decent one, but the good news is that you have so many chances to practice, because you simply must eat food every day. It doesn’t have to be restaurant-quality, or Instagram-worthy. For lunch, you can simply have a few hardboiled eggs and some fruit and toast. Or you can have last night’s dinner again. I do that all the time. A meal can mean a lot of things and it certainly doesn’t have to mean “sushi.”
You can also always call up a local restaurant and pick up the food. From the perspective of the quest to determine which actions are or aren’t against the moral rules it may be hard to see the distinction with delivery here. Restaurant labor practices are not known to be especially great; you’re still outsourcing the making of food to someone else and taking it home in a plastic container. But I think there is something important — if you’re physically able to, of course — about going out into the world and doing something in order to procure food for yourself. It is an exercise of freedom, unlike the passive modes of consumption that these apps are selling. You might be very busy with work — who isn’t? — but that’s all the more reason to claw away whatever free time you can, in order to nourish yourself.
So it’s time to make a change, and maybe a gradual one, because I am a believer in slow and gradual changes, especially when it comes to consumption habits. Reduce your delivery orders from three times a week to one, and then to special occasions only. Maybe you’ll get to the point where you delete the apps altogether. If you slip up, it happens; recommit. It might be easier than you think, especially when you begin this next chapter of living with your boyfriend and the work of cooking and eating becomes more of a shared project. I think it will be gratifying in ways you don’t expect. This is often true of restraint. We sometimes think we will be happier, or our lives will be made easier, when we indulge in what we think of as our worst impulses, when we lean into so-called guilty pleasures, be they delivery apps or endless scrolling or mind-numbing substances or too much Netflix. And yet I think there is a higher order of pleasure and ease that can be accessed in modulating these impulses, and cultivating a sense of self-sufficiency and discipline. You can just not do things, and you may be amazed by the freedom you feel.
If you enjoyed this installment, send Sophie your own question by writing to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.
I thought this was going to be a Sally Rooney type thing about plastic packaging and environmentalism. But this was really interesting: How convenience-consumption eventually becomes unattractive even among wealthy people.
I enjoyed reading this while having my takeaway leftovers from last night. To restraint!