Consuming takeaway food: Convenience, waste and Chinese young people’s urban lifestyle

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.