Consuming takeaway food: Convenience,waste and Chinese young people’s urban lifestyle

Abstract

Considering food consumption as an important daily practice, this article explores how and why Chinese young people consume takeaway food – a typical type of convenience food – and whether this food practice creates a wasteful urban lifestyle, drawing on a qualitative analysis. The key finding of this research suggests that Chinese young people have normalised takeaway food consumption and have their own strategies to reduce food/food-related waste after consumption. Such a dynamic process of takeaway food consumption reflects young people’s lifestyle in urban China: an individualised or self-centred, technology-dependent and fast-paced lifestyle. Moreover, this research suggests that social studies on household food practices should take household sizes and patterns into more considerations. This research can be read as a contribution to the existing body of literature on convenience food and its environmental consequences within and beyond the family space from a non-Western perspective.

Keywords

Food consumption convenience food waste young people China

Introduction

With the emergence of the smartphone, the development of food services applications and online payment system, ordering food online becomes popular and normative for Chinese consumers, in particular, the millennials. According to an online survey¹ on takeaway food consumption, people who are aged between 20 and 35 are the key users of online takeaway food services in China, who have spent more than 150 billion RMB on takeaway food in 2016. Most of the young people who like to consume takeaway food enjoy the convenience and pleasure of deliveries to their homes, in order to achieve their ideal ‘staying home’ lifestyle – a lifestyle prefers staying at home with comforts such as the internet and video games.²

In this research, we view online takeaway food ordering as a social practice. There can be seen a ‘practice approach’ in social studies of consumption and consumer cultures. According to Reckwitz’ (2002: 250) definition, practice is ‘a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood’ and a social type of ‘behaving and understanding that appears at different locales and at different points of time and is carried out by different body/minds’. Building on this definition, the ‘practice approach’ of consumption is an approach that ‘stresses the routine, ordinary, collective, conventional nature’ of consumption and views practices to be ‘internally differentiated such that persons in different situations do the same activity differently’ (Warde, 2005: 146). This practice approach, which emphasises on convention, habit and routine, can provide us with a better understanding of the embeddedness of food in consumers’ expressed intentions and actual behaviours (Jackson and Viehoff, 2016).

This research aims to understand the practice of online takeaway food ordering based on a keyword: convenience. Convenience is widely considered to be a key discourse of takeaway food consumption and is often mentioned by our participants as a major reason for their food choice. Our main research questions include how and why young people order takeaway food online routinely and regularly, how they engage such practice in their everyday life temporally and spatially, and how they understand and deal with the waste produced by takeaway food consumption. Based on a qualitative analysis, we want to develop current studies of convenience food from two aspects. First, we explore the importance of convenience in takeaway food consumption within different types of households. Previous works on convenience food consumption (see, for example, Carrigan et al., 2006; Szabo, 2011; Warde, 1999) overwhelmingly concern everyday practices within family homes, while ignoring other household patterns. In this way, this research can be read as a contribution to the existing body of literature on convenience food and its environmental consequences beyond the family space from a non-Western perspective. And second, we understand the environmental consequences of convenience food consumption based on an analysis of the daily management of food and food-related waste. Although many studies have been done in exploring the process of how food becomes waste and people’s daily tactics of food waste reduction (see, for example, Evans, 2012, 2014; Meah and Watson, 2011; Watson and Meah, 2012), these works seldom pay attention to non-food wastes produced by household-based food practices, which will be discussed in this research.

This article is divided into seven sections. After this introducing section which explains the key aims and research questions of this research, a critical review of the previous studies on convenience and food consumption will be provided. In the ‘Research context and methods’ section, we will provide an overview of Chinese young people’s consumer culture and their lifestyle in urban China, in order to contextualise our empirical analysis. Also, how we recruit participants and how we collect and analyse the data collected from the fieldwork will be explained in this section. The sections ‘Household-based takeaway food consumption’ and ‘A wasteful lifestyle?’ make up the empirical analysis of our data. Throughout these two empirical sections, how Chinese young people normalise takeaway food consumption in their everyday life, how they understand and practice the concept of convenience in takeaway food consumption and how they handle with the waste produced by their consumption will be discussed. At the end of this article, key concluding remarks will be listed.

Convenience and food consumption

Nowadays, ‘convenience’ is often considered to be one of the most important reasons for consumer choices in daily life. According to Elizabeth Shove’s (2003) theorization of ‘convenience’ in her socio-technical studies of the domestic space, the increasing significance of convenience relates to a contemporary sense of always being short of free time (time people can arrange themselves and spend as they like). The demand for convenience, in the West, arises as individuals’ struggle to cope with the challenge of allocating activities and co-ordinating them and other people in time and space in a ‘do-it-yourself’ society. Also, in Shove and Southerton’s (2000) earlier study, they indicated that scholars should pay attention to the relationship between micro-level developments in domestic technologies and wider transformations in the ordering and scheduling of domestic life and consumer cultures. Therefore, the valuing of convenience in the contemporary world relates to both a reliance on individualised modes of co-ordination and a promise to restructure the use of time and pace of life in the West.

The term of ‘convenience’ also encompasses wider social and environmental debates. According to previous empirical works on domestic convenience devices, consumers tend to only consider how these devices save their time and labour, rather than thinking over the environmental consequences of using these devices (Meah and Jackson, 2013; Organo et al., 2013; Quitzau and Røpke, 2009; Shove, 2010; Watkins, 2006). Moreover, although the convenient solution provided by domestic technologies has created valuable time, it always destroys other key concepts, such as care and proper performance, in the domestic (Shove, 2003; Warde, 1999).

Such environmental and social considerations of the purchase of convenience in the contemporary society are widely concerned in food studies as well. For food studies, the term of ‘convenience’ is conventionally related to ‘convenience food’ – commercially prepared food, designed for ease of consumption, and typically include (frozen or chilled) ready-meals; confectionery, snacks and beverages; processed meat and cheese; canned goods; and often include takeaway foods (Jackson, 2013). According to Jackson and Viehoff (2016), although convenience food is a chaotic conception, it could be understood as ‘food products bought and consumed with the objective of saving time and effort’ (Olsen et al., 2010: 766) and determines ‘when, where, what, how and with whom we eat’ (Costa et al., 2007: 77) in an everyday context. Taking a broader scope, such convenient way of food consumption can be viewed as an expression of a more hectic, consumption-oriented lifestyle, which may possibly produce more food waste after the immediate consumption. The consumption of convenience food is not only criticised for contributing to the alleged decline of the family meal, skill of cooking and proper/moral parenting, but also a least healthy and most unsustainable dietary option (Meah and Jackson, 2017). In addition, convenience food is always associated with excess packaging, and with excessive saturated fats, salt and sugar, which are harmful to both human bodies and the environment (Jackson, 2013). In both developed and developing countries, ‘convenience’ has become one of the key determinants of overconsumption and waste (Aschemann-Witzel et al., 2018) which are challenges to environmental sustainability.

However, some other works are arguing that convenience food consumption is not immoral, but rather beneficial to working mothers – the choice of convenience food can reduce the time-intensive household labour of food provisioning (Szabo, 2011). Also, family-based consumption of convenience food can be considered as an acceptable way to accomplish family responsibility and care. In their recent research, Meah and Jackson (2017) have discussed the social and cultural significance of convenience in food consumption. From their viewpoints, ‘convenience’ and ‘care’ can be combined in everyday food practices, as care can take place within the limitation of time, material resources, knowledge and skill. The consumption of convenience food at home, therefore, can offer a practical solution to the challenges of feeding different family members who have different tastes, preferences and who are used to eating at different times.

Although scholars from the West have suggested that the use and interpretation of ‘convenience’ should be examined in different contexts with distinct social norms (Shove, 2003), empirical works outside the Western societies are still scarce. In contemporary China, the discourse of convenience is deeply inscribed in people’s daily consumption. As discussed elsewhere, Chinese consumers would rather give up the convenience created by modern technologies, even though their purchase of convenience could cause environmental or social problems (Liu et al., 2018). It is still unclear how the role of takeaway food or other convenience food in Chinese consumers’ everyday life in the literature. Although some current Chinese-language works on convenience and food consumption have mentioned the anxieties of food safety and the considerable quantity of waste produced by takeaway food industry in China (see, for example, Jiang et al., 2018; Xie and Song, 2018; Zhang and Shi, 2017), these works generally ignored how ordinary people perceive the term of ‘convenience’ and how these consumers purchase convenience in their daily food practices. Therefore, in the following empirical analysis, we are attentive to explore how and why Chinese young people demand convenience in their daily practices of consuming takeaway food at the household scale, in order to understand the normalisation of takeaway food consumption and its environmental consequences in urban China.

Research context and methods

More than 10 years ago, scholars have indicated that Chinese kids are powerful consumers who have great influences on their family’s decisions of daily consumption (Jing, 2000; Langer, 2004). The One Child policy³ has created a large number of spoiled ‘little emperors’ in Chinese families. Nowadays, these singletons have grown up and become the key consumers in Chinese society. In the empirical sections of this research, we will analyse the actual food practices of these grown-up powerful consumers – the so-called One Child Generation.

The One Child Generation was born after the post-Mao reform⁴ in the late 1970s. In this post-reform era, the growing middle-class population in urban China brings about a new class of super consumers who have a great purchasing power like the baby boomers in the post-war West (Chan and Zakkour, 2014). The rise of the individual and the consequential individualisation of Chinese society can be considered to be one of the most important characteristics of the consumer cultures in China (Yan, 2009, 2010). As Yu (2014) summarised, the young Chinese urban consumers, who are bold, individualistic, self-centred, lonely and materialistic, are crafting new lifestyles based on self-fulfilment, indulgence, experimentation and exploration. Unlike their thrifty parents who intend to sacrifice themselves to the nation or collective work unit, these young people are more materialistic and desire to have a more individualised lifestyle (Rofel, 2007).

In recent years, with the growth of e-commerce (including e-retail, e-wholesale, and digital information and entertainment products) and the regular access to the internet in China, the consumer cultures, especially those of young adults, have changed into an online one (Chan and Zakkour, 2014; Zhang, 2015b). In this context, the notion of ‘sharism’ becomes a key linkage between the digital communication and the individualised Chinese society. According to Danjing Zhang (2015a), both socialist and traditional Chinese cultures emphasise the privilege of collective interests over the individual ones. Although Chinese singletons prefer individualised and self-centred ways of life, they inherit collective values and like to build their own community through digital communication. These young people are addicted to spending time with friends, buying things that one desires, exhibiting creative coolness, and creating neo-tribes – social groups based on experimentations with fashion, brands, music and other forms of consumer cultures – online (such as QQ and WeChat⁵ groups), in order to express their tastes and create new social groups of belongingness. Therefore, Chinese young adults’ individualised lifestyle is combined with socialist and traditional legacies of sharism and collectivism in China.

In the following empirical sections, we aim to explore Chinese young people’s routinized practices of takeaway food consumption. To this end, we conducted a qualitative research with ordinary people from Guangzhou (the largest city in south China) who are aged between 18 and 35 and who order takeaway meals at least once per week. These young people are recruited in local colleges, universities, and communities randomly. All of them are the only child of their parents. Based on their own words, these young people see ordering takeaway food via online platforms as one of the most important and convenient ways of food consumption in their mundane lives.

Thirty-five in-depth interviews were conducted in either Mandarin or Cantonese. These young people’s attitudes towards takeaway food and its wider environmental impacts and their daily consumption of takeaway food were asked during the interviews. All of the interviews were recorded with permission. The recorded interviews were then transcribed literally and translated by the authors. In order to protect our interviewees’ personal information, all names used in this article are pseudonyms. Apart from the in-depth interviews, we also conducted participatory observation with 10 participants in their domestic spaces or dormitories. How these young people order takeaway food online, how they choose the proper food to eat and how they deal with food waste are observed. Such a combination of interviews and observations enables the researchers to understand both the actual doings and the sayings of these young consumers.

Household-based takeaway food consumption

In general, our participants all consider ordering takeaway meals via online platforms as a routinised household-based activity. Rather than expressing the anxieties of the decline of domestic cooking or expressing the guilt of delivering improper family meals through taking ‘short-cuts’, these ordinary people view this way of eating to be convenient. For them, consuming takeaway food can save them from the busy and exhausted modern life and which enables them to enjoy a variety of food at home. This section provides a discussion on how and why Chinese young people normalise takeaway food consumption based on their narratives of convenience.

Since food is central to the process of home- and family-making, which can determine ‘the configuration of members, status relations, and the longevity of the household’ (Julier, 2013: 343), many academic works have focused on domestic food practices and their engagements within wider social and environmental ethics (Evans, 2012, 2014; Jackson, 2009; Meah & Watson, 2011, 2013; Watson and Meah, 2012). These studies have indicated that understanding the ways in which ordinary people prepare and consume food at home and their own views on the responsibilities towards family members are crucial to creating a theory of food waste and sustainable consumption at the household scale. However, these works have paid overwhelming attention to family homes. Daily food practices in non-family households, such as the single-person household and institutional dormitories, are often ignored by these Western-oriented works. As indicated by Buzar et al. (2005), the social, economic, cultural and demographic characteristics of different types of households are important in understanding the urban lives. In this research, more than a half of the participants are living alone or with other non-family members in either commercial or institutional accommodations. Therefore, in the remainder of this empirical section, we will illustrate how household types matter in people’s practices of takeaway meal consumption.

Takeaway food as acceptable family meals

Takeaway food is now accepted to be a proper type of family meals among our participants. Although most of the participants indicate that they prefer to eat takeaway meals at home alone, because they neither want to go out for dinner alone nor share less nutritious food with family members, some of them still keep on ordering takeaway food as family meals. The participants who consider takeaway food as acceptable family meals often talk about how food delivery services make them enjoy the comfort at home and how the practice of ordering takeaway meals can reduce their stressful burdens of domestic food provisioning. For example, our interviewee Zhong (late 20s) is now living with his wife in an apartment of a high-rise residential building. According to Zhong, he and his wife order takeaway meals together nearly every evening. They always consider each other’s tastes, in order to achieve their ideal living style without cooking:

Since we always wake up very late during weekends... probably [wake up] at noon... my wife doesn’t want to go shopping for food and groceries, and neither do I... we are that kind of lazy persons... so, the takeaway food is very convenient... we don’t even have a kitchen in a real sense... normally we will order takeaway food when we get off work.

Zhong described that he and his wife as lazy persons who do not want to purchase and prepare food. Such laziness is a not simply a way to overcome his busyness during working days for a valued life purpose (Shove, 2003), but also his understanding of a comfortable or ideal lifestyle. Thus, food delivery services are convenient because it enables Zhong and his wife to have meals at home without going out for regular food and grocery shopping. Such phenomenon reflects a wider trend of a ‘stay at home’ culture among Chinese young people, which is mentioned in the previous section.

Such a normalisation of takeaway food consumption in the domestic is widely discussed to be a way to destroy the proper motherhood. Nearly in every culture, ‘feeding the family’ is traditionally understood to be women’s or mothers’ responsibility (DeVault, 1991). Because of women’s participation in the labour market, and the decline of cooking skills in modern societies, many working mothers do not have time and skills to feed their families. Thus, it is not a surprise that the use of convenience food becomes an effective way to manage food preparation in the domestic (Szabo, 2011). Although the rise of convenience food is often associated with the decline of commensality (Jackson and Viehoff, 2016), it sometimes can be used as an expression of care (Meah and Jackson, 2017). As shown in our data, young mothers tend to make their choice of takeaway food carefully, in order to provide a safe and hygienic food environment for their children. For instance, Jin is a 35-year-old primary school teacher who is now living with her 8-year-old daughter. She likes to order takeaway meals for both her and her daughter not only because she always feels exhausted after her work and household chores, but also because of her lack of cooking skills. She expressed her avoidance of unsafe food when she orders takeaway food during the interview:

I am not good at cooking... So I often order takeaway meals... And since my daughter always eats with me, I tend to choose [food from] some cleaner restaurants... For example, I like famous chain restaurants, which I can find it nearby and I know the food they offer are safe... such as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut... They have better and cleaner kitchen, I think... And I won’t order [food] from a cheap and unknown restaurant...

As Meah and Watson (2011) suggest, it is inappropriate to assume that people with fewer cooking skills and knowledge are immoral because of their ignorance or laziness. In this example, we cannot make a judgement that ordering takeaway meals from fast-food restaurants is an improper or immoral way of mothering, as Jin is trying to use these safe and hygienic foods to feed her daughter rather than make her daughter starve due to her lack of cooking skills.

Therefore, the meaning of ‘convenience’ in family-based takeaway food consumption is in relation to people’s lazy lifestyle, the shortage of cooking skills and kitchen appliances and their considerations of other family members’ demands, tastes and health.

Independent lifestyle and individualised eating ways

For people who are not living with their family members, they have more considerations on how takeaway food serves to satisfy their personal demands and preferences on a daily basis. These young people tend to consume more takeaway meals than those who are living with family, because they think ‘convenient food is nothing harmful to adults’ (Yang, male, late 20s) and they ‘don’t have time to cook at home’ (Wing, female, early 30s; Yi, female, mid-20s), even though this way of consuming food costs more than cooking at home.

The number of single-person families in China has been increased during the past decade (Ma et al., 2013). About one-third of the participants in this research are living alone. Different from the family-based food consumption which is conducted through a process of caring for other family members’ tastes, demands and health, these young people have created a more individualised way of food consumption. Here, we use Mi’s narratives as an example. Mi is a 26-year-old designer who is now working in the city centre while living far away from her company. She gives up cooking and uses takeaway food as her proper dinner in order to re-schedule her timetable for more leisure activities after work:

I work here (the city centre ⁶ ), and I live in Panyu District (a suburban area)... It takes me almost an hour to get back... probably at seven, I can start to buy food... You see, if I cook by myself, if I buy ingredients, it would take me at least half an hour or an hour in the food market or supermarket... Then I have to queue and pay, walk back home, then start to prepare food... After dinner, I have to wash the plates... It takes me at least two hours for a meal!... I’ve tried to cook at home, but I gave up... After all these have been done, it’s time for bed. I want to watch some movies or read some books in the evening!

As Mi mentioned in the above quotation, cooking is a time-consuming work which makes her tired. According to Shove (2003), in practice, the value attached to convenience depends upon people’s perceptions of being ‘busy, hurried and harried’ (p. 173). A fast pace of life and a deficiency of disposable time in the evenings of working days make Mi less likely to cook her own meals. Mi’s daily commuting takes her a lot of time, she does not have adequate disposable time for cooking. Such shortage of time makes her dependent on takeaway food. In addition, Mi’s own tastes have a great impact on her food choice:

I often think about what I want to eat on that day, perhaps if I already have rice for lunch, then I would not eat it again at night... Then I would choose one restaurant which has some special offers. Then I would figure out which dishes I want to eat.

That is, for Mi, consuming takeaway food is not only a time-saving or time-shifting way of food practices, but also offering an alternative dinner style which enables her to taste a variety of foods at home.

Although some other early-career participants are not living alone, they also lead an independent and individualised way of life. These young people prefer to order takeaway meals alone and eat alone at home. They seldom take their flatmates’ demands or tastes into consideration and do not intend to share food with each other:

I prefer to order my own food... I can order whatever I want... I don’t have to accommodate myself to others... and sometimes my flatmates have already finished their meals when I want to order my dinner. (Fei, female, late 20s)

I never share food with my flatmates. It is strange. We live together, but I don’t want to interrupt or intervene in other people’s life. (Jingjing, female, early 20s)

According to these quotations, the key reasons for such an independent eating way include two aspects. First, the co-habited young people have different tastes and timetables. And second, these young people only like to eat with intimate others who are their family members or close friends. That is, when people live apart from their families, the ideal of commensality as a proper way of eating becomes less important.

Thus, for these young people who are living independently, an individualised way to manage time and daily schedule is important for them. As summarised by Jackson and Viehoff (2016), locating convenience food in the domestic can be recognised as a successful solution to reduce people’s stress of time and enables people to have a more relaxed lifestyle in the busy modern world. The data from this research also reveal that takeaway food is a solution to reduce food-preparing time for individuals. Also, such an independent and convenient way of food consumption sustains the individualised lifestyle of Chinese young people, which is an ideal for them.

Shared living spaces and shared food experiences

Among our participants, there are eight university/college students who are living in shared dorm rooms within their campuses. According to the rules of their universities or colleges, kitchen appliances are not allowed to use within student accommodations. Take our research experience with Xian, a 20-year-old undergraduate student, for example. We conducted an interview with Xian in his room within the student residence hall. His one-room apartment is occupied by four beds and four desks with wardrobes, a small bathroom and a tiny balcony. Apparently, there is no space for cooking. Also, Xian told us, kitchen appliances are prohibited to use within the rooms according to the dormitory regulations. Because cooking is impossible in the dormitory, daily meals are provided to students by university canteens. The building where Xian lives in is near one of the university canteens (there are three canteens within Xian’s university campus). However, he often orders takeaway food because this way of food consumption enables him to access affordable meals when the university canteens have been closed. As Xian told us, his mealtimes are quite different from the opening hours of the university canteens. He does not eat breakfast and likes to have his lunch around two o’clock in the afternoon, have dinner at about seven in the evening and have an extra meal after ten o’clock in the evening. However, the university canteens open three times per day: between 6 am and 9 am, between 11 am and 2 pm, and between 5 pm and 9 pm.

During our interview, Xian showed us a WeChat group which is organised for ordering fried noodles. Members of this group are students from the same student residence hall, including one of his roommates who invited him to join this group. He often uses this group to order fried noodles with other group members, in order to receive a discount on delivery fees:

We established a WeChat group to order fried noodles together... normally in evenings... If one of the group members wants to eat fried noodles, he/she would ask in the group whether or not other people want to eat as well... Once he/she gets replies, he/she would order for everyone via the app... When the food arrives, he/she would go downstairs and get the noodles for everyone who has ordered, and others would pay this person and collect their food from his/her room... We built this group for a lower delivery fee... If we can make four or five orders, the delivery fee will be extremely cheap.

Although these students can afford for takeaway meals and their associated delivery fees, they keep on sharing online food ordering with their roommates in order to save money. For these price-conscious students, the convenience of takeaway food is not only about saving time, enabling individualised schedules and reducing cooking labours, but also combined with their consideration of saving money. That is, in practice, consuming takeaway meals can be recognised as a convenient way to save money. Such a shared way of ordering food created by a collective living pattern, thus, make the combination of convenience and money-saving strategies possible.

A wasteful lifestyle?

Turning to the environmental implications of takeaway food, this section explores whether the normalisation of takeaway food consumption is producing a wasteful lifestyle in urban China. Convenience food consumption, in many previous studies, is considered to be a socially and environmentally immoral way of food practice which reflects people’s failure of caring both for their family members and the wider environment (Jackson, 2013; Jackson and Viehoff, 2016; Warde, 1999). However, in this research, we find that the practice of takeaway food consumption has forged a contradiction between the concern of food/food-related waste reduction and overconsumption. It has been suggested that, social studies of domestic food practices should recognise both social (such as the domestic divisions of labour, time, tastes, conventions and family relations) and material (such as domestic technologies, infrastructures of provision and the materiality properties of food itself) contexts (Evans, 2012). We therefore draw both attention to the social and material contexts, in order to explore people’s understandings and practices of (not) wasting food and food-related things at the household scale through the case of takeaway food consumption.

As discussed above, Chinese young people regularly order takeaway food for both family and individual meals because this type of convenience food can save time, money, labour and enable them to live without cooking appliances and skills. However, such a convenient way of eating has generated a considerable quantity of food and food-related waste. As recent news reports show, takeaway food consumption can generate tonnes of food wastes and approximately 0.3 billion wasted meal boxes and plastic bags per day. Also, these news reports indicate that both the takeaway food industry and consumers should take the responsibility to reduce such food and food-related wastes.⁷ For ordinary consumers, although they know the environmental impacts of their daily food consumption and know how to reduce waste, they seldom care about how many food and food-related wastes they produced and do not intend to keep the leftovers in fridges for future meals or reuse the meal boxes, plastic bags or disposal chopsticks. As some of the participants told us,

Most of the takeaway meals are packed in environmental unfriendly bags and boxes. For example, the plastic bags are non-degradable, and the disposable chopsticks. Chopsticks are made of bamboos and trees, [they are] not good for the environment... but I just put all the wastes produced by my meals into bins. (Jingjing, female, early 20s)

Takeaway food creates a burden to our environment. I think the plastic bag is reusable. But the meal box... it is too oily! If I want to reuse the box, I have to wash it. It is not easy to clean! (Qingyuan, male, late teens)

I always waste food. When I order takeaway food, I always cannot finish it. Because I’m a light eater. I don’t know how to deal with the food waste other than throwing it away... Environment, everyone cares about the environment, but do nothing to protect it. It is common. (Shiqi, female, early 20s)

For these participants, such a throwaway habit is not wasteful, because of many reasons, such as ‘all types of waste are about wasting money’ (Eva, female, early 20s), ‘the size of meal is too big [for an individual] to consume’ (Ying, female, late teens) and ‘it is too inconvenient to reuse [the meal boxes]’ (Qingyuan, male, late teens). Thus, these young people think more about ‘waste’ in relation to their personal financial conditions and understand the ‘convenience’ of takeaway meals to be not only a reduction in food preparation time but also an elimination of household labour and time for after-meal cleaning and leftover disposal. For some of the participants who are living in institutional accommodations, they also mentioned their impossibility to save their leftovers for future meals, because they are not allowed to have fridges and other kitchen appliances within their rooms. That is, the only way to dispose of leftovers they produced is to throw them directly to the bin.

In addition, in order to gain the convenience brought about by food delivery, our participants tend to buy more to reach the threshold of delivery services. For most of the food delivery services, there is a ‘minimum price’ requirement. Our participants who are living alone and/or eating alone tend to enjoy the food delivery services at the costs of paying more for their meals. One of our participants, Qi, a 27-year-old male who is living alone, complained about the ‘minimum price’ when we conducted interview and observation in his apartment. It was at lunchtime on a Saturday, Qi took out his smartphone to order fried chicken and burgers for his lunch. He ordered a meal combo for two persons via an online platform. He told us that he does not like the ‘minimum price’ requirement of the provider. He must pay for more foods than he needs in order to reach the ‘minimum price’ for delivery services. This requirement not only makes him spend more on food, but also makes him waste more – once he cannot finish the set meal he ordered, he would throw it away as he does not like to eat leftovers.

Another strategy to reach the threshold of food delivery services is ordering food with other people. Some participants see eating with family members or intimate others (such as friends and classmates) is a way to save both money and food. From their points of view, more people are able to consume more foods. However, such commensality can also boost overconsumption and produce more wastes in non-family households. As we mentioned before, young people who are living in institutional accommodations like to order takeaway food together. The key purpose for such a shared ordering and eating is saving money, rather than maintaining the priority of sharism. Such shared food experiences can therefore trigger excessive and unnecessary food consumption:

Sometimes I don’t want to order takeaway food, but my roommates ask me to, and it’s cheaper... So I will order [food] with them... even though I cannot eat more food. (Ping, female, early 20s)

However, in practice, takeaway food is not always in relation to a wasteful lifestyle. Since ‘saving food’ is widely considered as a social virtue by most of the participants. These young people have their own strategies to avoid food waste when they consume takeaway meals. As an interviewee told us,

If I were not hungry, I would not order a full meal with rice and other dishes. I would order some salad instead. (Qian, female, mid-20s)

Some participants believe that takeaway food consumption can reduce household waste created by family-based cooking. Previous works have indicated that there is a contradiction between the concern of food waste reduction and over-provisioning which might produce a huge amount of food waste (Evans, 2012, 2014). In our study, although our participants consider family-based commensality as a way to reduce food waste, they criticise household cooking, in particular cooking for one or two persons, as a wasteful way to prepare food. According to these participants,

Cooking is easy. For me, I live alone. If I cook, it is enough for me to have one dish, maybe just mix a piece of pork and some vegetables. However, I will waste more. It is difficult to cook for only one person. (Mi, female, mid-20s)

I don’t like to eat leftovers. But cooking can produce leftovers – you never know exactly about your own appetite! So, cooking at home is wasteful as well. (Qian, female, mid-20s)

These quotations suggest that, domestic cooking might routinely provision more food than people need, and thereafter create a vast majority of food surplus which ends up as waste (Evans, 2012). Comparing to the wasteful food preparation process, eating takeaway meals can produce fewer leftovers at home. Let’s use Ning’s story as an example. Ning is a 25-year-old female who is now working in an animation studio. The interview with Ning took place on a Sunday at her home. We arrived at around 1 pm, while she was planning what to eat for lunch. She opened the refrigerator and took out a plate of fried meat with green pepper. She told us, this was her last dinner and she was not going to eat it since she prefers fresh food rather than leftovers. As Ning indicated later during the interview, ordering takeaway meals can avoid the wasteful food behaviour:

I think it’s hard to manage how many vegetables and meat I buy... I may have to eat twice or three times until all the foods have been eaten up. I mean, I might eat the same thing for two to three days... I cannot accept that... And I don’t want to waste food, you know, just throw it away like that... So with takeaway food, I don’t have to worry about these.

During the interview, after her explanation of why she prefers to order meals via online platforms, Ning took out her smartphone to order some sushi for lunch. She complained the ‘minimum price’ requirement for food delivery and told us her own way to deal with this requirement:

If I eat out, I won’t choose these (the sushi sets she ordered)... But I just want to eat sushi and since I cannot prepare it myself... [It is] hard to get the ingredients... I must spend at least 50 RMB to get the order delivered, even though I don’t need so much sushi, so I order the more expensive one.

Rather than order more foods than she needs, Ning tends to reduce food waste at the costs of buying expensive sushi. That is, ordering takeaway food, for Ning, is engaged in her daily tactics of avoiding food waste. In order to satisfy her taste for variety and fresh food and at the same time reduce food waste, Ning decides to order takeaway food instead of cooking on her own. In this way, she is able to buy a single meal for her and generate less waste of ingredients and cooked food. That is, eating takeaway food can not only present a convenient way of food consumption which saves people time and money to prepare meals, but also a convenient way to reduce food waste.

Furthermore, some of our participants view eating out, whether in restaurants or institutional canteens, is more wasteful than consuming takeaway food at home. For them, eating in the public is always wasteful:

When I eat out, I mean I always eat with others. It is enough for me to order only one dish. However, my friends want to have one more dish. One dish is not enough for us, but two dishes are too many... For saving mianzi, I would order two dishes. This is a type of waste. (Zhong, male, late 20s)

Chinese people like to order too many dishes when they eat out. It is about a manner, mianzi... I think, if I pay the money for food, and I cannot eat it up, it is a type of waste. (Li, female, early 20s)

I think the food served in canteens is not tasteful. Canteen is also convenient and not expensive. I would not eat the food with bad tastes, I would throw the tasteless food away. Because the food is cheap, no one cares about the waste. (Eva, early 20s, female)

According to these quotations, the term of mianzi (can be translated directly as ‘face’ in English. It refers to a sense of favourable self-esteem, wealth and prestige) is centred to social hospitality norms in China, which results in a great amount of food wastes in restaurants (Liu et al., 2018). Although people tend to eat alone and therefore do not have to care about their mianzi in canteens, the tasteless but cheap food provided in these institutional eating spaces make them waste more. In contrast, eating takeaway meals at home can avoid such overconsumption and wasteful behaviours in the public:

Takeaway food tastes better than the foods provided by the canteens in my university, and cheaper! I can eat at comfortable places rather than the crowded canteen. I would waste less... There are different sizes of meals now, I can order the takeaway meal which I am able to eat up. (Haolin, male, early 20s)

You know, when we eat in restaurants, because everyone wants to save mianzi, we tend to order many dishes. If we cannot finish the meal, we seldom take the leftovers back home. Why? Because it is not convenient!... When I order takeaway food at home, I know how many I can eat, I would not order too many foods. (Qian, female, mid-20s)

Conclusion

Throughout this article, we have explored how and why young people normalise their consumption of takeaway food – a typical type of convenience food – and whether this food practice creates a wasteful urban lifestyle, drawing on a qualitative analysis. For our participants, consuming takeaway food is a dynamic practice to acquire the convenience of food services which can reduce the time and labour of food preparing and afterwards cleaning. Moreover, such a practice of convenience food consumption is associated with people’s emphasis on tastes and preferences, their understandings of ‘saving’ and ‘waste’, their care for themselves and others, the limitation of factors (such as the lack of cooking skills and equipment) and the wider material and social contexts (such as the popularity of mobile phone use and online food services, and the individualised urban lifestyle). Such a dynamic process of takeaway food consumption reflects young people’s lifestyle in urban China: an individualised or self-centred, technology-dependent and fast-paced lifestyle. As our data have illustrated, young people often get personal benefits from consuming takeaway meals. These urban consumers can enjoy a flexible daily schedule and a relaxed lifestyle, reduce household burdens, save money and taste a variety of food through takeaway food consumption.

The research reveals that, Chinese young people have their own strategies to reduce food waste during their consumption of takeaway meals at the household scale, which is widely identified as a wasteful way of consumption. The focus on the relationship between convenience food and unsustainable lifestyle at the household scale is nothing new. As we discussed in the ‘Convenience and food consumption’ section, the consumption of convenience food is often understood as an unhealthy and improper way of family-based food practice which has negative environmental and social implications. Instead of confirming the links between convenience food consumption and an unhealthy and unsustainable lifestyle, this research suggests that the consumption of convenience food can reduce the food waste generated by both over-provisioning within the household (in particular within the single-person household) and the wasteful eating conventions in public food spaces in Chinese context. Our finding supports Meah and Jackson’s (2017) argument that convenience food can be ‘reconceptualised as a vehicle through which care can be deployed in ways that sometimes challenge normative beliefs about individual health or environmental sustainability’ (p. 2078).

Also, we suggest that social studies on household food practices should take household patterns into more considerations. In this research, Chinese young people who are living in different types of household tend to use different strategies to consume takeaway food and thereafter generate/avoid food and food-related waste in different ways. To recap, for the participants who live with their family members, who are more emotionally related, care and responsibility play indispensable roles in their food choice. As people like to share food with family members, they seldom produce food surplus and food waste after takeaway meal consumption. For the participants who are living alone or living with non-family others in commercial residential buildings, they only care about their own tastes and the convenience of food delivery services. Due to the minimum price for delivery and the fixed size of takeaway meals, these people who always eat alone tend to enjoy the convenient delivery services at the cost of overconsuming and wasting food. For those who are living in institutional accommodations, although they like to share food and the payment for food services with their roommates or colleagues, they tend to overconsume, in order to receive more discounts.

Footnotes

Authors' Note

Jiaxi Chen is now affiliated with Department of Management, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: this research is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant No.: 41630635].

ORCID iD

Jiaxi Chen

Notes

Author Biographies

Chen Liu is an associate professor of Cultural Geography in the School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University. Her current studies focus on food consumption, everyday practices and their socio-environmental impacts in urban areas.

Jiaxi Chen is a PhD student in Management, University of Bristol. His current research focus on sustainable food consumption and provision.

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