Restaurant food meant to be cooked and eaten right away. Not anymore. Now the food sits, trapped, suffocating in microplastic containers from Costco. Steam condenses on the lids, dripping back onto once-crispy tempura, turning it to soggy, oil-saturated matter that no one would recognize as Japanese cuisine. The pad thai noodles congeal into a homogenous mass. The side salad wilts, dressing seeping into every leaf, creating a texture reminiscent of wet newspaper. It's objectively 40 percent worse than it would be in the restaurant. Maybe 50 percent.

The delivery apps know this. The restaurants know this. Everyone knows food degrades in transit, but it doesn’t matter, we accept that convenience outweighs quality, that time saved justifies the compromise. It just has to be good enough to eat while watching Netflix on a 85-inch Samsung QLED TV.

There are rumors of innovations. High-tech containers that preserve optimal temperature, dishes engineered specifically for transit, sauces designed to activate upon arrival. DoorDash has filed fourteen patents for “transit-reactive cuisine”, lasagna that completes its final bake en route, ramen noodles whose proteins continue developing mid-drive, desserts with enzyme-triggered sauces transforming molecularly between restaurant and residence. Now that food transit is the norm, expect weird shit coming soon.

Everyone with disposable income has quietly become a minor English lord, catered to by servants.