How ‘Deliveroo culture’ made Britain lazy and fat

With the UK set to become the most obese nation in Europe within a decade, when will our reliance on fast food and grocery delivery end, asks Ed Cumming

Food deliveries used to be simple. Milk, eggs, maybe some juice: the basics. The truly modern among us might stretch to a pizza or a Chinese, for special occasions.

No longer. In app-enabled 2022, there is hardly a comestible under the sun which cannot be brought directly to your front door, for a small fee. People can order whatever they want, and they do. When I polled my friends for the most embarrassing things they’d had delivered, they answered under pain of anonymity. “Clotted cream for a strudel for one”, “a baked potato”, “an espresso”, “a single Ben’s cookie”, “Starbucks”, and, most alarmingly, “toast”. A colleague, who ought to ask himself questions about his pocket money policy, reports being able to tell when his teenage son has woken up because the doorbell goes. Rather than trouble himself with looking in the fridge, the lad has simply ordered his breakfast.

Britain has taken food delivery to heart, but it is paying the price. According to a World Health Organisation report this week, Britain will become the fattest nation in Europe within a decade, overtaking Turkey and Malta. On current trends, by 2033, 37 per cent of British adults could be excessively overweight. Speaking at an obesity conference in the Netherlands this week, Dr Kremlin Wickramasinghe, the WHO’S lead for non-communicable diseases in Europe, said we are leading the continent in unhealthy lifestyle trends.

“You see the same things in other countries, but in the UK you see a greater proportion [of the population] having online food deliveries and being exposed to advertising,” he said. “The proportion of the population covered by these takeaways and online food deliveries is greater. It is very big in the UK compared to other countries.”

He added that some promotional deals encourage customers to order more than they need. According to the WHO report, people who do not prepare their own meals consume an average of 200 extra calories per day.

Having things brought to us makes us more sedentary, too, meaning we’re less likely to go out. The Active Lives Adult Survey, which tracked activity from November 2020 for a year, found that 27 per cent of the adult population was doing less than 30 minutes of activity per week. An earlier study found that Britain had become markedly more sedentary than other Western European countries since the arrival of the smartphone.

We might be powering towards the future, but sadly it is the future depicted in WALL.E, the 2008 Pixar film in which humanity has been reduced to pink blobs conveyed on floating chairs, our needs catered to by technology so efficiently that we have lost the use of our legs. The big question is – why?

The pandemic certainly accelerated the uptake of apps. Deliveroo’s orders rose 110 per cent in the first six months of last year. This year it reported a 60 per cent increase in revenues. Online food ordering and delivery platforms are estimated to take nearly £2.3billion in revenue this year, up from less than a billion in 2019. More recently, the restaurant services have been joined by a glut of grocery delivery apps, such as Getir and Gorillas, which promise to spare customers the walk to the shop.

“I think only one person came down to collect a meal from their building, and that’s because they were really anxious to get it,” says Jonathan Nunn, editor of the food magazine Vittles, who briefly worked as a Deliveroo driver in 2020.

Nunn believes our keenness for these apps is partly the result of our restaurant culture. “We don’t value hospitality in the same way Europe does,” he says. “A lot of the trappings of a restaurant, like interacting with waiters or making conversation, gets in the way of our enjoyment of a meal. Delivery bypasses all of that. But also maybe we just don’t like travelling for food.” A generous reading might be that we are cash-rich but time poor, with weaker family ties than in southern Europe. The most common British household is a single individual, while the family meal has been in precipitous decline for decades.

For Professor Jane Ogden, a professor in health psychology at the University of Surrey, Britain has suffered from an unhelpful loop of entertainment and domestic practices. “Compared to other cultures, the British tradition of preparing meals from scratch has changed over the last couple of decades. We’ve descended into eating ready meals and takeaways,” she says. “We had already started to lose the art of cooking. We compensated for that with endless TV chefs, who cooked increasingly elaborate meals. Much as people liked to watch it, they never ended up doing it in their own houses.

“What the app world did was tell people they could have that complicated food at home. Then it was compounded by lockdown. People lost the habit of cooking but also of going to supermarkets.”

But it isn’t only food. With a dense, well-connected population, Britain was quicker than its European neighbours to take up the possibilities of online shopping. The pandemic was an accelerator but the trends were already there. By 2021, nearly a third of Britain’s retail sales were made online, nearly double the figure for France and up from 19 per cent in 2019.

Looking ahead, the only silver lining, at least from a health point of view, is that few of these delivery businesses seem able to make money. Despite Deliveroo’s growth, it is not expected to break even until late 2023 at the earliest, and in fact reported increased losses due to higher rider costs. In 22 years, Ocado has been profitable just three times, most recently in 2016. There is no evidence that Getir and Gorillas and the new breed are here to stay. The cost of living crisis will not help. Costs for the delivery firms will go up, as they will for consumers, too. If ordering a single biscuit seems indulgent now, it will seem like wanton indulgence by 2025. But prices will not save us if we have forgotten how to cook.

Apart from that, it’s hard to see what will slow the march of the apps. From Uber to Google Maps to the TV remote control, convenience has always won. For every bit of tech that promises to encourage fitness and activity, like the Fitbit, which measures your exercise, or the Peloton stationary cycle, there are many more that promise everything you want, at the push of a button, without you having to get off the sofa.

Only one of my friends was moved to defend her Deliveroo habit. “Naysayers would like to believe that the single dessert-havers are Marie Antoinettes, who aren’t aware it’s ridiculous to spend £4 on a slice of cheesecake plus tip, and that is why I have to remain anonymous,” she says. “But the thing with sweet things is you don’t know you want it until the end of the meal. So why wouldn’t you order one if you’re in a position to? The decadence of it is part of the experience.”

With this kind of rationalisation afoot, the problem may be worse than we thought. If Britain is to haul itself away from app-enabled convenience and obesity, it must start now. The road back to health, and culinary selfsufficiency, is long and arduous. It starts with making your own toast.