Socio-economic status has been indicated, as in a recent study on food delivery preferences in England, to be a key determinant in revealing how digital on-demand technology is fuelling new dietary practices and possibly contributing to increased health disparities.
The study published in BMJ Public Health formed its basis by analyzing the data acquired from more than 1,500 residents’ households in London and the north of England in February 2019. There has been an indication of the fact that the rich are most likely to use online shopping forums for their grocery shopping two times more than their less rich counterparts. Contrary to that, the low social grade of households is one to two times more likely to use food delivery apps for takeaway meals—behavior patronized by a higher obesity rate.
“These delivery technologies spread, have transformed the provision of food with striking and increasing convenience and access impacts on grocery and prepared meals sectors.” But if online grocery shopping is associated with better dietary decision-making, the same cannot be said for using meal delivery service apps, and that too, is worthy of further study.
The social standing classification was based on the income of the household and the employment position of the chief food shopper, thereby categorizing them as high, middle-high, middle-low, and low social grades. The annual household income was also put under three bands, which were £0–19,999, £20,000–49,999, and £50,000 or above. Weight information (BMI) was also analyzed, which showed that users of apps with food deliveries were about 84% more likely to be found obese and 45% more likely to be found overweight than the nonusers.
“Potentially, grocery purchasing may be largely based on financials, whereas take-away purchasing may be related to culture and social group.”. They also add that the uneven use of online food delivery services possibly worsens dietary inequalities and needs to be studied more.
Commenting on the findings, Professor Jason Halford, head of the psychology school at the University of Leeds, said the links to ‘overall income’ could be down to ‘affluent households not needing to look for bargains or depending on what foods they buy online compared to in-store’. He further averred: “The relationship between our measure of occupational social grade, obesity, and frequency of takeaways does nothing more than bring home the so-far theoretical home deliveries of fast foods”.
Weaknesses of the study are that it is observational, based on self-reporting, and that the distribution of households in terms of social grade and income is uneven. Besides, urban households dominated the sample, which makes it difficult to generalize for the entire country.
This study underlines complex interplays between social status, food delivery preferences, and health outcomes and provides a call for more research dealing with dietary inequalities in the digital age.