Grub Up!

Feeling peckish? There's nothing like the experience of airline travel to make you feel hungry (sometimes through sheer boredom) and nothing like the sight and smell of much airline food to quickly extinguish your appetite. The logistical challenge of simply delivering 400 meals to tray tables throughout a 747, never mind heating them up in the first place, is pretty stiff.

Once they're in front of the passengers the food is struggling to impress not only with the ambience (plastic cutlery, tin pots and a neighbour's elbow in your nosh aren't usually high on a restaurant's list of desired attributes) but also with the fact that a person's ability to taste reduces by around 30% in the dry, air-conditioned, pressurised cabin. So the chef has to really ladle on the seasoning if their offering isn't to be flavourless.

The biggest in-flight catering company is Gate Gourmet which delivers, wait for it, 548,000 meals daily to 250 airlines in 25 countries (now you know why it all tastes the same whichever airline you fly!). That's 200 million meals a year. They tailor make the menu for each airline's requirements and produce food reflecting wide variety of cuisine traditions from British Airways to Thai Airways.

Despite the often patchy offerings, many airlines try hard to come up with good fare and some well known chefs have taken up the challenge of mile high catering. Aldo Zilli has worked with Thomsonfly, Michel Roux has advised BA, Peter Gordon (Providores) has helped Air New Zealand's menu, Gordon Ramsay has given advice to Singapore Airlines and Mark Hix (The Ivy) is on Virgin's catering panel. Hmmm, time for lunch...

A Menu of Menus

Those of you with a spare hour or two and those of you who are keen on airline memorabilia (we're know you're out there) should take a trip over to the Northwestern University Library - don't worry you can do it online HERE. For they have a huge collection of airline menus for your delectation.

This Continental Airlines menu is from 1979, six years before I first worled for them, but I remember it well as I often flew from Houston to LAX with CO at this time.

Food For Thought

Airline food has gained legendary status among travellers; from the dire to the very good the variety of food served on board aircraft is astonishing. The logistical challenge of preparing, transporting, heating and serving a tasty meal within the weight and space restrictions of an aeroplane has taxed generations of airlines. Despite some operators now cutting out all food service to keep prices down, most still provide meals and do strive to produce food which does the carrier credit.

If you are curious about what’s being served on, say, Ariana Afghan Airlines, what breakfast looks like on Druk Air or whether Ukraine International’s grub is up to scratch then www.airlinemeals.net is the website for you. The site contains an extensive archive of photographs showing meals from thousands of flights from last week to the 1960’s.
They welcome new material, so next time you’re flying why not take a snap of the food on your tray table and send it in. It all goes to prove that you really can find anything on the internet.

Coffee, Tea or.....?

Now I expect that many of you if asked would say if asked about 'in-flight service' would say - surely that’s an oxymoron. Others will be thinking those were the days. As airlines attempt to compete on price, ways of cutting costs usually centre around what you are given onboard the aircraft, or more accurately on a lot of flights these days, what you are not given.

However, from the silver service and linen napkins up at the sharp end of the aircraft, to the plastic boxes and bendy forks way back in steerage, the main event of a flight is usually the mouth-watering ordeal of the food and drink service. The technique for opening the silver foil top of a carton of orange juice while holding your elbows tightly into your sides, bracing your knees against the seat in front (which is still reclined) and not having the drink explode over you and your neighbour is something often practiced but seldom perfected.

The provision of refreshment is a hot topic in the airline industry; some airlines don’t, some do it brilliantly, others do it appallingly. But among those which continue with the ritual of handing out the trays of, at best, edible treats, it continues to be one of the main ways in which passengers judge the operator. We’re accustomed to expecting to be flown efficiently and quietly to where we’re going, more or less on schedule, and with good levels of safety and competence. The great excitement of the trip comes in cling film, is reheated in the aircraft galley and is delivered to us by a flight attendant. It’s costly (for the airline), heavy (so, again, costly in terms of fuel consumption), is difficult to handle for the staff and often ghastly to eat, but how else are they supposed to amuse the punters?

To give you an example of the kind of thought that goes into airline catering, especially in first class, let me tell you what happened when I joined Continental Airlines. We were to compete on the Houston to London route with British Caledonian, who had arguably the best service of any airline flying across the Atlantic; it was going to be tough. When I went to Houston, not long after I joined the American carrier, for a presentation on the food service I had one of those moments at which you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. After seeing what they had proposed for the meal service, which didn’t look at all bad, we got around to discussing the wine. When I say discussing the President of the company TOLD me what wine we were to be serving in first class; it was to be Texan wine – white wine if you really want to know. Never heard of it? Neither had I. Having lived in Texas for several years I assumed he was either joking or referring to Lone Star beer. It was not either of those two options; he really meant it. It took me a while but in the end persuaded him that we should perhaps not buck tradition and it would be more conducive to selling seats if we stuck to a Meursault or a Zinfandel.