Recently I have started my own small home cooked food delivery service in Toulouse. As it is a service with sustainability woven into every part of the business model, I do get an amazing amount of positive feed-back. But at the same time, I notice people are very hesitant to sign-up. Which obviously needed to be explored by me, and what I found out is that many people struggle with pre-decision making in our modern lifestyle. The pre-ordering and pre-organisation can be a difficult step to make when we talk about our favourite subject, food. So, I have given this discovery some thought and want to just share it here with you. No judgements, just sharing thoughts 😉

Instant consumerism, meal planning, and the cost of wanting things ‘now’.

We talk about sustainability constantly. Fast fashion. Food waste. Animal welfare. Carbon footprints. These are all important conversations, and they are getting louder. But there is one habit that rarely gets named directly: the way we have come to expect things instantly, without pre-planning, without pause.

Think about a typical evening, maybe once a week or twice. It’s 6pm. You’re tired. You open an app, scroll through options, tap a few buttons, and thirty minutes later, someone knocks on your door with a warm bag of food. Many of us don’t pause, don’t question ourselves because honestly, It feels deserved. After a long day, the idea of cooking, of planning, shopping, chopping, it can feel simply, too much. Ordering in has become a small act of self-care, a little reward we give ourselves. I’ve earned this. And that feeling is completely recognisable and understandable.

But there is something worth examining in the way this reward has become our default mode , it is not an occasional treat anymore, but a part of our lifestyle. Convenience is no longer something we reach for in difficult moments, it has become a way of life. We think, we want, we buy. The gap between impulse and fulfillment has shrunk to almost nothing, and we have stopped noticing the cost.

Take food delivery as just one small example, but as a home cooked meal provider very personal to me. On-demand meals often travel in single-use packaging, from kitchens often optimised for speed, prepared in quantities that sadly often accounts for significant waste. And yet because the friction is so low, because we are tired from a long day, it rarely enters our thinking as a choice at all.

Contrast that with a different habit: planning your meals for the week ahead. Pre-ordering from producers who know exactly how much to prepare. Buying what you will actually use. The effects can be pretty profound. Food waste drops. The quality of what you eat tends to rise. Producers can work with certainty rather than guesswork. And somewhere in that act of pre-organisation you might reconnect with food as something to anticipate, not just consume.

This is the logic behind pre-ordering models. The idea that a small commitment made in advance creates better outcomes for everyone in the chain. Less waste, more intention and one tends to eat better when you’ve thought about it in advance. It creates a relationship between producer and consumer, which is about trust, not just transaction.

The most sustainable choices are often not the dramatic ones, the grand gestures. They are the small habits that reintroduce a moment of pause between wanting something and getting it. A pause in which we might ask: do I actually need this now? Could I have planned for this? What am I really choosing? And is this what I truly want?

Pause…