Article begins<\/h2>\n
Editor\u2019s Note: This piece is the third in SAFN\u2019s 2026\u00a0<\/em>Anthropology News\u00a0series on Temporality in Food Anthropology. If you haven\u2019t already, check out the previous installments by\u00a0<\/em>Janita Van Dyk<\/em><\/a>, and by\u00a0<\/em>Janet Chrzan<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Nico and I have been standing awkwardly in the kitchen for what feels like an eternity. This is the first time I\u2019m joining him for a day of work at Pseudoughnym, a mom-and-pop pizzeria slinging New-York-style pizzas out of a warehouse tucked between an auto body shop and a furniture outlet. If we were actually in New York, those details might make good bait for a feature on Eater about the city\u2019s best pies hidden in plain sight. (Maybe not. New Yorkers, don\u2019t come for me.) The reality, though, is that Nico and I are in a ghost kitchen complex in Los Angeles and there is no business-boosting fanfare for Pseudoughnym to be found on the foodie forums or guides online. After all, Pseudoughnym is a ghost kitchen. Unlike a traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant, it operates out of a corporate-owned warehouse alongside 30 other delivery-only restaurant brands that otherwise exist entirely online. It is decidedly not a dining destination. In fact, Pseudoughnym is not a destination anyone can dine in at all.<\/p>\n There are a couple of reasons for the awkwardness: Nico and I don\u2019t know each other well yet, and he\u2019s still not totally sure why I\u2019m here with him today. After all, he normally works alone. His boss has told him I\u2019m interested in studying how digital technologies are shaping his experiences of work as a ghost kitchen line cook, as did I when I met up with him at the start of his shift, but he seems confused why I\u2019d be going to school to end up spending time with him. He\u2019s game, yes, but confused nonetheless.<\/p>\n Perhaps the biggest cause of the awkwardness, though, is our lack of activity. The small talk that filled our first twenty minutes while Nico set up his\u00a0mise en place<\/em> was pleasant enough, but we\u2019ve now been in the 200-square-foot kitchen for nearly an hour and a half, and not a single order has come in. In that time, I\u2019ve asked Nico several questions about what brought him to Pseudoughnym and how he feels about working there. He\u2019s answered them all politely, if briefly. The long silences punctuating our bursts of conversation have made the compactness of the kitchen more palpable. Mirroring this, the cramped space rendered time unusually thick and viscous.<\/p>\n All of a sudden, a ticket ejects from the thermal receipt printer. I grab it and tell him, \u201cOrder in\u2014one 14-inch pepperoni pizza, Uber Eats.\u201d Nico replies, \u201cHeard,\u201d and grabs a ball of proofed dough, which he starts to stretch into that classic thin disk. As he ladles on sauce, I hear three more tickets print in quick succession. \u201cFire three more pepperoni, one cheese! Four pepperoni pizzas all day,\u201d I relay. After a slow start, the kitchen starts to heat up, literally and figuratively, all at once.<\/p>\n Once Nico boxes up the pizzas, he asks me to run them to the pick-up area of the ghost kitchen complex, where I place the four orders into separate lockers that gig-working delivery drivers will open from the other end. I return, expecting to find Nico working on new orders, but I find him standing idly instead. By the time I leave Pseudoughnym five hours later, only six more orders have come in. As we clean up for the night, I ask Nico if today was a typical workday. \u201cYep. If anything, we had a couple more orders than usual. Today went by a little more quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span> \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe pickup area in a local ghost kitchen, showing the tablets and lockers that delivery drivers will interact with to pick up their designated orders.\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Throughout the day, on the other end of those lockers, delivery drivers have been picking up the pizzas Nico made. This process is entirely contactless. Drivers pull up to the ghost kitchen, fiddle around with a tablet to determine and open whichever locker has the order they\u2019re responsible for, then grab the contents inside before dashing back to their car.\u00a0<\/p>\n That first 14-inch pepperoni pizza was picked up by Pedro on its outbound journey. While I wasn\u2019t able to follow along with him for that specific pie, I know from interviewing drivers who deliver through Uber Eats and DoorDash that the flow of time felt very different than it did in the kitchen. For Pedro, the clock began ticking as soon as he accepted the delivery, initiating a race against time. The customer has been given an ETA through the app, of course, but the condition of a customer\u2019s food often starts to deteriorate at the moment of its completion. Despite whatever innovations the food delivery packaging industry has made, food in transit can only stay crisp or fresh for so long when suffocated in its own steam.\u00a0<\/p>\n The most pressing question for Pedro, then, is how quickly he can get that Pseudoughnym pizza to its final destination. From that question, other questions follow: \u201cWill the customer tip more if I can drop off the order quickly? Will I be able to bump up my rating from 4.89 back to 4.90?\u201d Speedy deliveries translate to happy customers; conversely, orders that have been delayed run the risk of netting low tips and dropping his rating. And while low tips are disappointing and frustrating, a lower rating often translates to being offered less gigs on the app, which affects his bottom line.\u00a0<\/p>\n From there, the questions get more granular. \u201cIt\u2019s only 1:30 PM, but the 101 is already slammed between Western Ave and Downton LA. Was there an accident? Construction, again? Or perhaps\u00a0more anti-ICE protests<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0burning Waymos downtown<\/a>? Should I ignore DoorDash\u2019s directions and take the local roads? But there are so many stoplights, and the surface street traffic might not be any better\u2014is the gamble worth it?\u201d All of these micro-decisions matter for Pedro when the wrong choices can cut into his tips, ratings, and time that could otherwise have been spent on fulfilling subsequent orders.\u00a0<\/p>\n There is a complex calculus undergirding a workday in this sector of the gig economy, one which deals in shifting flows of traffic, distance across urban space, time per order, a day\u2019s earnings\u2026 Under these conditions, the clock seems to tick in double time as minutes slip through fingers like sand. And as Pedro approaches the customer\u2019s address with that 14-inch pepperoni pizza, his phone will ping with a new order, asking Pedro if he\u2019d like to accept the gig and start the race all over again.\u00a0<\/p>\n Both the line cook and the delivery driver are integral to the corporate ghost kitchen business model; without their respective labor, it simply would not be feasible as an economic formation at scale. And yet their temporal experiences of the workday can be distorted in such markedly different ways. Line cooks, when working in a struggling ghost kitchen, can experience time as stretched and abstracted. Long lulls during a solitary service in a windowless kitchen the size of a one-car garage\u2026 Time flows slowly under such conditions. Meanwhile, delivery drivers are caught in a series of fragmented races against the clock. For them, minutes become compressed, flying by as drivers attempt to minimize time per order and maximize deliveries in a day.\u00a0<\/p>\n Algorithms have become a salient object of\u00a0academic<\/a>\u00a0and popular theorizing as computational technologies continue to increasingly mediate social life. Certainly, the temporal experiences I\u2019ve described thus far illustrate how current algorithmic regimes shape the experiences of both labor and time itself. For the purposes of this piece, however, I want to forego a focus on the algorithmic in favor of reflecting on what these divergent yet interconnected experiences of time might reveal about the relationship between time, labor, and food in a landscape mediated by techno-capital.\u00a0<\/p>\nOrders-In<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tD.H. We<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.anthropology-news.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/We-AN-Photo-856x1108.jpg\")
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\nOrders-Out<\/h2>\n
On [Stretched\/Compressed\/Frictionless] Time<\/h2>\n