The 12 Absolute Worst Foods to Order Via DoorDash

Look, I’m not going to sit here and act like I don’t still order them. Gun to my head, though, if I truly had to say whether they’ve ever scratched the itch that demanded them, I would have to say no. You end up chewing soggy potatoes and imagining the fries you dreamed of, like a Great Depression tramp gnawing on boot leather and picturing steak as hard as he can.

The problem with delivery nachos could be easily illustrated by a graphic showing the lifespan of a tortilla chip exposed to moisture. As soon as those toppings are laid on and fired up, the chip immediately begins to die, like a low-stakes organ transplant. 

Unless your preferred nacho vendor lives downstairs from you, by the time you get it, your tortilla chips will have regressed to soft, small tortillas. If you try to mix it up to distribute the toppings? Enjoy your bowl of expensive Tex-Mex dog food.

Another delivery food gasping at the feet of the dynamic that is something hot and melted. A cheeseburger, in its ideal, is an incredible, perfect globule of different fats and oils. All of which will, over the course of a delivery man’s journey, change states of matter back to solid. Leaving you not with a hot, tasty burger, but instead a sort of food pellet a very fat owl would cough up.

Some people, thanks to years of Maruchan’s stranglehold over the American idea of ramen, are already reticent to cough up top dollar for something that, in their head, is still made in a microwave. Real ramen, of course, is leaps and bounds past oodles of noodles and requires extended prep that makes the price very reasonable. Unless you then have that expensive ramen biked through cold air in a backpack, upending the entire value proposition and paying too much for a bowl of food that the chef would dump in the trash if they could still reach it.

By making the decision to eat pancakes, you already may as well be agreeing to pack your gut with quick-set epoxy. Even in the best-case scenario, you’re going to feel like you snuck into a construction site and housed a bucket of brick mortar. Having pancakes delivered, especially of the buttermilk variety? You’re now eating the evil version of them for the get-go, making them much less worth feeling like you’ve been poisoned by your enemies.

There might be no other order that requires less magical thinking than the idea that you will receive a potable milkshake. Put it this way: If you ordered a milkshake, live and in person, would you leave it on the counter for 20 minutes and then tuck in? 

No, because you wouldn’t be able to pretend you were drinking anything other than sweet cream, studded with Oreo bits that will get stuck on the back of your throat.

At least the expired form of milkshakes is still a sweet, milky treat. A smoothie that time’s demoted from its fully-blended status? Well, that’s not a smoothie so much as a roughie. Enjoy your cold soup of banana-y milk and the fuzz off a strawberry.

Look, they’ll travel fine, but this is just a horrible thing to make someone deliver. This isn’t a drive-in movie theater, okay? They’re not zipping across slick pavement on roller skates with drinks safely secured under their sternum. If you expect someone to Peter Parker their way through city streets with anything other than a two-liter, you better be ready to tip in blood.

We just, as a collective, need to have a little more capacity to see the suffering our actions can cause. If you order multiple hot coffees for delivery, I think you’re probably one of the people who would have cheered at public hangings.

For one simple reason: There’s probably a Popeyes you could have ordered from instead, and we all need to stop keeping this pretender of a franchise afloat. Oh, I guess you like it when the entire skin of a drumstick slides off like a snake’s fresh molt?

What the hell, man. This is some low-rent Joker behavior. Are you going to toss the shrimp to yourself? Get help.

I speak from experience when I say that, looking back, this is going to be a valley in your life’s journey.