Mon 21 Jan 2008
It’s a running joke — a metajoke, even, jabbing at hack comics using tired bits — but it’s also an interesting question:
Why is airline food bad? Or meh? Or good, even? Why does it vary? Who gets it right? How has any of that changed in the last ten years? The last thirty, or fifty?
And, to step back a level, what’s the deal with ‘what’s the deal with airline food’, anyway? What’s the history of this bit of cultural self-reflection? When, if ever, was it a fresh and funny standup bit, and who was doing it?
Posted by Josh Millard10 answers so far!
A) Airline food is terrible because it requires and industrial kitchen and ingredients, and needs to be reheated by non-cooks hundreds of miles and many minutes away from a kitchen.
B) It’s a style of observational humor from the late Alan King adopted by Jerry Seinfeld.
Yea, I would also vote for their “kitchen” just not being up to par for cooking food. On a plane of 100+ people, having real food and keep it cooled/hated properly and not going to junk is difficult. Plus, it is not a high priority for the airline companies to worry about and is an easy place to save money.
Hmm. If I recall correctly it also had something to do with the way we perceive tastes. I remember the bio teacher saying that our sense of smell makes up a large portion of our perception of the taste of a food, and something in the environment (the equalized air, the high altitude, etc.) screws with the sense of smell big time. So everything seems bland.
(So glad this isn’t AskMe. This answer sucks. :P)
(So glad this isn’t AskMe. This answer sucks. :P)
Heh. Big Big Question is all about the rampant speculation and the things you don’t remember and the friend of a friend.
Huh. I’m going to have to reject a few of those answers:
1) Limitations in the kitchen just don’t suffice to explain the offensive badness of airplane food. I’ve had precooked reheated food that wasn’t bad before. I’ve even flown on airlines with good food (rarely), and their on-plane facilities were no different than the crappy ones.
2) Airplane doesn’t taste bland. It tastes offensively bad (not always, but often). If the problem were something regarding high altitude, equalized air, etc., then when I bring my own sandwhiches onto the plane, they’d taste as bad as the food served by the airline. But they don’t. They taste delicious. The problem is the airline food itself.
Flying Icelandair the food is invariably better leaving Iceland than flying back which leads me to believe that smaller kitchens produce better food. This is supported by the pretty nigh on indisputable fact that the specialty meals are better than the regular meals. That is, the vegetarian, kosher, hindu, lactose-intolerant, low-in-sodium etc. meals are better than what normals get. Furthermore, the one time I flew first class (a series of completely unfunny and tedious mishaps meant we were at the check-in only half an hour before boarding… but since they had no room in coach got shunted into first) the food was actually quite good. At least the sole I had.
I once cooked in a big kitchen at a hospital. We’d get sent recipes prepared by nutritionists in tiny batches that then would be scaled up to the quantities needed to feed a hospital’s worth of people. Some recipes scaled well but some scaled abominably. It was usually pretty easy to tell. I think that chefs prepare pretty tasty foods in small batches that then go bland and horrific when scaled up for an industrial sized operation.
Ya know, I’m glad that most domestic flights have stopped serving hot meals in coach. The packaged foods they sell for $5 are generally better than the hot meals ever were, which isn’t saying much.
I’ve had a few okay meals in business/first class (sorry). But I really hate it when I’m trapped in my seat because I have a place setting on my tray. Not that I get up often, but it makes the claustrophobia much worse. I’d rather have the $5 sandwich-in-a-bag they serve back in coach that I can eat without the damn place setting. Love the hot nuts though.
It’s bad because they airlines don’t care. They’re losing money on you and your ticket and they don’t care. Serve up some slop with brown sauce over rice to the masses and they won’t revolt.
Business/first class proves that it is entirely possible to create decent meals in an airplane setting. (Dubai to Heathrow - yum. One of my best meals ever!) But for us plebes in coach - THE AIRLINES DON’T CARE.
It wasn’t so bad in Mexico. Eggs and beans are pretty good no matter what, you know?
I used to believe that old saw about dulling of your senses of taste and smell in an airplane, but then I actually had a pretty good meal on a flight once that tasted just fine. Oddly enough, I was served this meal in Siberia (though not on Aeroflot, who deserve every bit of their terrible reputation). That was less than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, so I am sure by now they have figured out how to be proper capitalists and serve proper airline food to shave those few kopecks off their cost.