Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

For hungry white-collar workers who want to order in, options have blossomed in the last couple of years. Foreigner-orientated delivery services have been running in the megalopolises for a while, but a boom in the number of delivery apps has made picking from dozens of local restaurants, and getting the food straight to your office or home, easy for ordinary Chinese.

Part of the demand for delivery comes from the traditionally very limited hours of Chinese restaurants. Compared to Westerners, Chinese eat early, at around 12 am for lunch and about 6 pm for dinner. Finding a restaurant that was still serving past 9 pm, or between 2 and 5 pm, save for a few hole-in-the-wall joints or kebab places, used to be tough.

As people's lifestyles changed, and more and more began to work odd or long office hours, or to have jobs that required night shifts, or to work largely from home and set their own hours, their dietary needs changed too.

The same went for party habits; for young people who wanted to go out, get drunk, dance, and come home late and hungry, the ability to conjure up a Big Mac at their doorstep at 4:30 am was a lifesaver. As the Wall Street Journal points out, part of the big initial advantage of KFC and McDonalds in China was their in-house delivery services. Now that other choices have appeared, their edge is declining.

Now, as food apps appear on the scene and fleets of delivery bikes bring meals straight from kitchen to consumer, ravenous office workers can have their appetites easily sated with a variety of dishes from virtually anywhere they like. Some restaurants are even opening their kitchens longer to cater to late-night diners, although in the small hours of the morning your choices are still basically limited to old standbys like the 24-hour McDonalds.

But with more options than mediocre hamburgers or Mexican wraps on the menu, the attraction of order-in dining is shooting up.

In part, this is a good thing. Variety is the spice of life, after all, or in this case the spice of food, especially if you're ordering in Sichuanese. As people's lifestyles become more flexible, businesses naturally adapt in turn. And for women, who were often forced to play a primary role in the kitchen, it's provided further liberation, just as the arrival of technologies such as dishwashers and vacuum cleaners helped flatten the demands of the domestic sphere.

But this goes both ways. Business patterns drive social behavior as well, and as a fragmented, individualistic model of obtaining food becomes the norm, so people's eating habits will change. When we move away from eating with colleagues or family in a group to eating alone at our desks or on our sofas with takeout, we also lose some of the social cohesion. 

That change was visible in the West as well. The shift from home cooking to delivery began in the US but had become the norm in Europe by the 1990s. In the US, it was one of the factors that drove Bowling Alone, as sociologist Robert Putnam called his famous book, based on a 1995 article. Once-social hobbies and outlets became individual pursuits.

Of course, many people still use their own kitchens on a daily basis. But the family dinner, a time to come together, has often disintegrated into separate meals.

In the office, too, it's rare for people to share lunch at a canteen or go out as they once did. Facing increasing work pressure, instead everyone gets their own food, at their own cubicles. But eating with coworkers offered a chance to take bonds beyond the office, to find a shared space and to exchange information or vent about work.

Nobody wants to return to the "communal dining halls" of the 1950s, where whole villages ate together. But it might be incumbent on both offices and families to try and maintain some sense of shared, communal space for food in the face of an increasingly atomistic culture.

The author is a commentator on current affairs based in Beijing. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn