Healthy eating in the platform age: online food delivery and middle-class modernity in Surabaya

Online food delivery platforms (OFPs) are reshaping food consumption across Southeast Asia, with Indonesia at the forefront due in part to its rapidly expanding digital economy. Longstanding public health campaigns such as 4 Sehat 5 Sempurna (4 Healthy 5 Perfect) have historically shaped national understandings of nutrition in Indonesia. At the same time, a growing urban middle-class is increasingly adopting globalised lifestyle-oriented concerns around food hygiene, body weight and ‘wellness’. The growing use of OFPs by many middle-class households has introduced new tensions between traditional health ideals and convenience-driven digital food practices. Drawing on an ethnographic study of households in Surabaya, this article combines Social Practice Theory (SPT) with the concept of multiple modernities to examine how health, hygiene and food provisioning are negotiated across diverse temporalities, infrastructures, socio-economic contexts and cultural beliefs and practices. It examines how households navigate competing demands of time, taste, intergenerational preferences and trust, while engaging with a diverse provisioning landscape that includes wet markets, local warungs (small family-owned eateries), supermarkets and platform-based food options. By situating these dynamics within Surabaya’s layered urban modernities, the article contributes to broader debates about digital food consumption and shifting and emergent health practices in the Global South context.