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.
Aschemann-WitzelJGiménezAAresG (2018) Convenience or price orientation? Consumer characteristics influencing food waste behaviour in the context of an emerging country and the impact on future sustainability of the global food sector. Global Environmental Change49: 85–94.
2.
BuzarSOgdenPEHallR (2005) Households matter: The quiet demography of urban transformation. Progress in Human Geography29(4): 413–436.
3.
CarriganMSzmiginILeekS (2006) Managing routine food choices in UK families: The role of convenience consumption. Appetite47(3): 372–383.
4.
ChanSZakkourM (2014) China’s Super Consumers: What 1 Billion Customers Want and How to Sell It to Them, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
5.
Costa AIDeASchoolmeesterDDekkerM, et al.Costa AIDeA (2007) To cook or not to cook: A means-end study of motives for choice of meal solutions. Food Quality and Preference18: 77–88.
6.
DeVaultM (1991) Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
7.
EvansD (2012) Beyond the throwaway society: Ordinary domestic practice and a sociological approach to household food waste. Sociology46(1): 41–56.
8.
EvansD (2014) Food Waste: Home Consumption, Material Culture and Everyday Life, London: Bloomsbury.
9.
Jackson P (ed.) (2009) Changing Families, Changing Food. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
10.
Jackson P (2013) Convenience. In: Jackson P and the CONANX group (eds) Food Words: Essays in Culinary Culture. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 56–59.
JiangSMaoYLuZ (2018) The current situation of food safety and supervision of the network catering based on PEST. Food and Nutrition in China24(7): 29–33.
13.
Jing J (ed.) (2000) Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children and Social Change. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
14.
JulierAP (2013) Meals: ‘Eating in’ and ‘eating out’. In: MurcottABelascoWJacksonP (eds) The Handbook of Food Research, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 338–351.
15.
LangerB (2004) The business of branded enchantment: Ambivalence and disjuncture in the global children’s culture. Journal of Consumer Culture4(2): 251–277.
16.
LiuCValentineGVanderbeckRM, et al.(2018) Placing ‘sustainability’ in context: Narratives of sustainable consumption in Nanjing, China. Social & Cultural Geography. . Epub ahead of print 26 March. DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2018.1454978.
17.
MaCLiYTangC, et al.(2013) Family Change in Urban Areas of China during Social Transformation: Based on the Survey in Five Cities, Beijing, China: Social Sciences Academic Press(In Chinese).
18.
MeahAJacksonP (2013) Crowded kitchens: The ‘democratisation’ of domesticity?Gender, Place & Culture20(5): 578–596.
19.
MeahAJacksonP (2017) Convenience as care: Culinary antinomies in practice. Environment and Planning A49(9): 2065–2081.
20.
MeahAWatsonM (2011) Saints and slackers: Challenging discourses about the decline of domestic cooking. Sociological Research Online16(2): 1–13.
21.
MeahAWatsonM (2013) Cooking up consumer anxieties about ‘provenance’ and ‘ethics’: Why it sometimes matters where foods come from in domestic provisioning. Food, Culture & Society16(3): 495–512.
22.
OlsenNVSijtsemaSJHallG (2010) Predicting consumers’ intention to consume ready-to-eat meals. The role of moral attitude. Appetite55: 534–539.
23.
OrganoVLesleyHGordonW (2013) Who does the work in sustainable households? A time and gender analysis in New South Wales, Australia. Gender, Place & Culture20(5): 559–577.
24.
QuitzauM-BRøpkeI (2009) Bathroom transformation: From hygiene to well-being?Home Cultures6(3): 219–242.
25.
ReckwitzA (2002) Toward a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory5(2): 243–263.
26.
RofelL (2007) Desiring China: Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
27.
ShoveE (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness + Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality, Oxford: Berg.
28.
ShoveE (2010) Beyond the ABC: Climate change policy and theories of social change. Environment and Planning A42(6): 1273–1285.
29.
ShoveESouthertonD (2000) Defrosting the freezer: From novelty to convenience. Journal of Material Culture5(3): 301–319.
30.
SzaboM (2011) The challenges of ‘re-engaging with food’. Connecting employment, household patterns and gender relations to convenience food consumption in North America. Food, Culture & Society14(4): 547–566.
31.
WardeA (1999) Convenience food: Space and timing. British Food Journal101: 518–527.
32.
WardeA (2005) Consumption and theories of practice. Journal of Consumer Culture5(2): 131–153.
33.
WatkinsH (2006) Beauty queen, bulletin board and browser: Rescripting the refrigerator. Gender, Place & Culture13(2): 143–152.
34.
WatsonMMeahA (2012) Food, waste and safety: Negotiating conflicting social anxieties into the practices of domestic provisioning. The Sociological Review60(Suppl. 2): 102–120.
35.
XieBSongW (2018) Online catering takeout development, urban environmental negative externalities and waste regulation. Journal of Shaanxi Normal University2018: 79–88.
36.
YanY (2009) The Individualization of Chinese Society, Oxford: Berg.
37.
YanY (2010) The Chinese path to individualization. The British Journal of Sociology61(3): 489–512.
38.
YuL (2014) Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology is Shaping the Nation, Cambridge: Polity Press.
39.
ZhangD (2015) Sharism and Social Awareness of Chinese One Child Generation: Urban Youth and Digital Networks, Queensland: Queensland University of Technology.
40.
ZhangL (2015) Fashioning the feminine self in ‘prosumer capitalism’: Women’s work and the transnational reselling of Western luxury online. Journal of Consumer Culture17: 184–204.
41.
ZhangZShiK (2017) Research on the safety of takeaway on O2O platform. The Food Industry1: 218–221.
