Pyjamas
Cartoonist Hugh MacLeod once said freedom is blogging in your underwear. As someone who is writing this down in my house robe on a Monday afternoon, I can relate to what he meant. The way we rely on our personal devices to do our life’s legwork while we enjoy mundane pleasures such as a slow afternoon on a living room couch is nothing short of astonishing. Astonishing and fascinating. And, believe it or not, pertinent to the subject of food delivery.
As someone who spends a good portion of my day job making sense of statistics, I decided to look into the state of food delivery in the UK. Fun fact alert! Here we go. Did you know that 35% of people order food delivery to avoid having to getting dressed before going out? (Ah, if only our ‘freedom equals underwear’ theory applied to restaurants.) Here’s another one: 27% do it to avoid washing dishes afterwards, which makes sense to anyone who’s ever shared a flat with other young adults (top tip: rotas are like Communism; theoretically they sound great, until human nature, greed and laziness kick in).
We seem to want to have our cake and eat it too (well duh, why would you order cake otherwise?). We want quality food, but can’t be bothered to dress up for it or clean up after we’re done with it. Instagram has taught us our food should look beautiful; food delivery apps suggest we don’t necessarily have to. In the modern world, success is having a Michelin-star meal in your pyjamas.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to sound like a luddite here. I love the way technology has fundamentally transformed our lives and made things easier, more fun or at least more interesting. But big changes carry big consequences, especially when it comes to how much utility we want to let into our lives.
I’m not a foodie and I love ordering in as much as the next person, but very few things replace the experience of going to a nice place or spending time cooking nice things for my friends. While my couch has witnessed many pizza-and-Netflix binges over the last few years, getting dressed or doing the dishes seem like good enough trade-offs if I really want to eat something nice.
I feel like pride matters here as well: it’s one thing to say you enjoy nice food because it’s part of who you are (or something similar a urban, liberal-minded millennial like myself would say). Things, however, get muddy when our cultural identity statements happen while we’re wearing the clothes we slept in. Instagram might have helped start a movement where we all care more about what we eat and how that food looks in our feeds, but food delivery apps might be responsible for creating a brand new generation of Pyjama Foodies. Whatever the hell that means.
