As we have been going through our 2 week challenge, we have stopped using mobile food ordering applications such as Swiggy, Zomato, Fasoos, FoodPanda, and more. Over the last 2 years, we have been extremely active users of online food ordering services. Because of our busy schedule with full-time work of 9-10 hours, we would end up ordering food almost every second day. We knew we had to stop, but we couldn’t push ourselves, until now. Here is why we decided to stop living on ordering food:

1. Packaging – We are all aware of the amount of packaging, which goes into delivering food to our homes. We see it with every single order, and some of us our even picky about the quality of packaging. Most of the time, the food is packaged inside plastic containers, plastic wrappers, aluminium foils and sometimes, even plastic cutlery. And to top it all, the food gets delivered in a plastic bag.

2. Transportation – This one is simple! Thanks to mobile food ordering applications, we can now enjoy our favourite dishes from restaurants far away from our home. Because of our laziness to step into the kitchen, we were contributing even more to carbon emission and noise pollution. Without realizing, we were adding more to the food miles.

3. Cost – Food is relatively cheaper in India in comparison to the rest of the world. However, ordering food on once every second day was NOT cheap for us. We would spend on average of Rs 300 to 400 per order/meal. On a weekly basis, we would easily end-up spending Rs 1200-1600, only on ordering food. This was nowhere sustainable or even, efficient way of living and consuming.

4. Quality and hygiene – This really annoys us! And, we know it does to others as well. Over the last 2 years, we have often complained about the quality of food delivered. There are times, we have even gotten sick because of the food we ordered which looked and smelled delicious.

5. Going-back to the Kitchen – As mentioned at the beginning, we love experimenting in the kitchen. By stop ordering food online, we are again giving us an opportunity to play around with ingredients in the kitchen. By the way, don’t get us wrong, we still like eating food from outside. We still have a lot of our favourite restaurants and there are many new places we want to try out in Delhi. But, we will do this old-fashioned way by going on dates.

In our effort to STOP ordering food online, we have deleted applications such as Swiggy, Fasoos, Zomato and FoodPanda. Because, we love startups and we are always up for supporting new businesses, we even wrote to a few of these applications mentioning our reason for discontinuing their service with a hope that they might come up with a more sustainable and eco-friendly way of disrupting the food delivery market.

– Katja and Yash