As I stare down yet another 23 hour foray into the stratosphere across the planet, I am faced with the daunting reality that not only am I sitting in an aluminium tube hurtling across the sky at 500 miles per hour with complete strangers, but a far more disconcerting fact: I’ll soon become a captive audience for the poorest excuse for food to ever cross my lips. Yes, I’m speaking today of “Airline Cuisine”.
Why is it that the food that we are served at such dizzying heights MUST be so routinely awful? I ponder this each and every flight. Thinking like a Chef, I wonder to myself what could be going so wrong behind those guarded curtains. It certainly isn’t the fault of the stewards/stewardesses. I’ve seen the space they are afforded and the equipment they are given to accomplish the challenge of serving hundreds of already unhappy patrons. Not an easy task on the ground and certainly not so when being bumped around at 30,000 feet in the air. So, all of my stewardess friends, let not my harsh words to follow be taken in any way as criticism of your personal cooking skills or expertise in serving piping hot tea. I count as friends many who attempt this task and many of them are foodies themselves that I am sure cringe every time they peel back the foil of these little over-microwaved nightmares. I think there are much more powerful factors at play here. Probably none more crucial than the very fact that we are trying to dine while speeding at superhero-like speeds through the air. Can you picture Superman, one fist forward in flight and the other hand shoving a turkey sandwich in his face? Doesn’t seem right does it? No, I think he waits until landing to grab a bite. Maybe he’s on to something there. Maybe we’re just not meant to be eating during air travel.
The boring logistics of “airline cuisine” are the beginning of where it starts to fall apart as far as I’m concerned. Airplane food is what it is and what it is, is mass produced, assembly-line food. There are two other cuisines that spring to mind as it’s counterparts, “prison food” and “public school lunches”, neither of which seem to be raking in the culinary awards. There is no real room for passion or care from a Chef when designing a menu that must be mass produced to the tune of up to 10,000 trays of glop per day. I believe these airline catering Chefs are painted into a corner and basically given the task of making the food as “un-awful” as possible, forget about creating an impressive dish or an edible entrée, we’re speaking more of damage control at this point. An almost impossible task has been handed them, give us an edible dish that can be cooked once, trayed and foiled, cooled and frozen, piled into a trolley car, driven across a runway, stacked and squished into bins, only to be reheated in a microwave mid-flight, then politely placed in front of our travel weary minds to be consumed. The odds are stacked against them from the outset to say the least. Poor guys.
To counter this with a real world example of someone, somewhere giving a s**t is one of my in-flight meal options on EVA, the carrier for my next flight home. Talk about rising to the challenge of mass produced food, check out this feat of ingenuity, “Braised Soft-Shell Wattleneck Turtle with Shiitake Mushrooms and Red Dates”. Yes you read right......they are offering me soft-shell TURTLE on my flight home! They definitely get a check in the box for originality and for pushing the envelope. SO, I suppose there’s an airline Chef out there somewhere trying something new and he works for EVA.
There are some that are now arguing with scientific facts as to why it is that airline food tastes so pitiful (most likely the airlines themselves are behind this as a semblance of an excuse). There are small studies that have shown background noise to be detrimental to your taste buds and that with the behemoth of a jet engine roaring in your ear, your sense of taste is hampered. To put it simply they are saying food tastes bland when your environs are loud. Not sure I’m buying this one, but they’re selling it. Almost to say “we give up” no matter how good we make our food it will still taste terrible because it’s loud up there.
For me almost more so than the logistics of the mass produced food is the reality of the dining experience itself. Already mentioned is the factor of shoving food down our throats while travelling at breakneck-speeds. There are even more subtle nuances however, such as the fact that we are grown adults being fed with our knees in our laps, elbows tucked in like caged animals, eating with plastic cutlery, off fold down trays in uneasy proximity to utter stangers........yes sir, isn’t the lamb lovely. It’s comical really.
I think I’ll take a page from Superman’s book on this next flight and eat when my feet are planted firmly on the ground. Really I think humans were meant to eat on terra firma and not while mid-air. Whether or not we should be “mid-air” to begin with is fodder for a different story. Pondering these thoughts I have concluded that on this next grueling long haul flight of mine I’m going to opt to catch a few more hours of sleep and my neighbour sitting next to me can have my extra microwaved tray of Soft-Shell Wattleneck Turtle. Bon Apetit!
