Platform economies, food delivery workers, and urban consumption behavior.
Miantuan Jingjing worked in insurance in Shenzhen, with overtime so relentless she spent even her birthday calculating payroll. Browsing the wet market, making chicken soup noodles, growing roses on her balcony – these small things gradually pulled her out of takeout and burnout until she finally quit.
JD recognises riders’ employment relationship and bears the full cost of social insurance and housing provident fund contributions, costing riders just 525 yuan a month; Meituan sidesteps employment status, subsidising only flexible-employment pension and medical at 1,500 yuan. “Losing 0.39 yuan per order” ignores commissions – food delivery is actually profitable.
Dozens of readers have shared their hands-on tips for breaking free from takeaway: One-Pan Fried Rice, weekend batch-cooking a week’s meals, slipping into community canteens, browsing the wet market after work… there’s bound to be a trick for you.
Qingming is a festival for ancestral worship and tomb-sweeping. This year, Qingming falls on 4 April, which happens to be 404. This brings to mind those articles that have been 404 not found. Last year, several Foodthink articles “disappeared” from our WeChat official account—the highest number in our history. Yet,…
Meituan-funded environmental organisations once named and shamed food delivery plastic pollution, but their voices have grown quieter over the past two years. From the 2004 APP deforestation boycott by grassroots organisations to today’s waning civil-society oversight, the balance of power between public-interest organisations and polluting companies has shifted dramatically.
The National Health Commission has launched a three-year “Weight Management Year” campaign, but obesity is a systemic problem shaped by food systems — ultra-processed foods, salty takeaway and pseudo-healthy foods are the real culprits. True weight loss relies on eating fresh, minimally processed foods.
Foodthink’s “Eat Something Good” column has received dozens of readers’ letters, each naming a different moment: the plastic smell of a takeaway box, a delivery rider’s bleeding hand on a snowy day, the phone set down after tallying the delivery fee.
From Shenyang to Hubei, several small merchants describe how the platform uses traffic as leverage to push prices down to the point of running at a loss. Behind the 10-yuan Pin Hao Fan, merchants cut back on ingredients while delivery riders see their per-order income shrink.
I. The Great Australian Egg Shortage For the first time in my life, I found myself unable to afford eggs. This past New Year, my family and I rented an Airbnb in Sydney, Australia, to ring in the new year. Being unfamiliar with the area, we did all our shopping…
Meituan, producer of food-delivery plastic waste, is now funding plastic-reduction environmental organisations. Shanshui Nature Conservation Centre co-founder Sun Shan and environmental advocate Ma Tianjie trace the complex funding relationships and strategic manoeuvres between public interest organisations and businesses, from Jinguang Paper to the Nestlé infant formula scandal.
