Ever look at the beverage cart on a plane
and see it piled high with tomato juice?
It's not a common juice, like orange or apple.
So why are so many people drinking it in flight?
Put simply?
Your taste changes while you're in the air.
And there's a biological reason for that.
If you grab a bite before your flight,
you probably have an idea
of what it will taste like.
But once you're in the air,
your sense of taste isn't the same
as it is on the ground.
A lot of factors on the plane are all coming together
to suppress your sense of smell,
which makes up a large portion of our sense of taste.
Think back to the last time you had a cold.
Remember how you couldn't taste anything
because your nose was clogged up?
When you have a weakened sense of smell,
your perception of taste is reduced.
So your in-flight nose is similar
to your nose when you have a cold,
but hopefully with less phlegm.
Let's start with the cabin,
which is extremely dry.
Drier-than-some-deserts dry.
The dry cabin dries out your nasal passages,
which means your taste buds become less perceptive.
But that's not the only part of the cabin
suppressing your sense of taste.
The low cabin pressure actually decreases
the levels of oxygen in your blood,
which means your olfactory receptors,
the part of your nervous system that responds to smells,
become less sensitive,
which actually weakens your sense of smell.
But it's not just the environment inside the cabin
that's affecting your senses.
The noise coming from the engine isn't helping either.
A 2010 study tested people's sense of taste
both inside and outside a simulated plane cabin.
The researchers found sensitivity to sweet and salty food
was reduced by 30% while in the cabin.
And that weakened sense of taste
can cause a lot of problems for airline caterers,
who have to modify every recipe
to account for it.
To top it off, not every flavor is affected equally.
Some ingredients, like curry and lemongrass,
actually become more intense in the sky,
while cinnamon, ginger, and garlic
tend to maintain their taste.
Some airlines will use naturally intense flavors,
like certain fruit and vegetable oils and concentrates,
which helps to lessen the amount of extra salt
a recipe might need.
So, what does tomato juice have to do with all of this?
Well, tomato juice tends to have a savory flavor
referred to as umami.
It's one of the five categories of taste,
along with sweet, sour, salt, and bitter.
A 2015 study found that, with umami,
the taste phenomenon is actually reversed.
Umami is actually enhanced in the air.
So the next time you're on a flight,
give the tomato juice a try.
And don't get too upset if your meal
doesn't taste as good as you hoped.
The chefs are just trying to accommodate
for something you didn't know was happening
right underneath your nose.