What’s the deal with airline food?
No seriously, what is the deal with airline food.
Hi there airborne gourmands, Julian here for DNews.
Airplane food is infamous.
While it’s usually not causing pilots to get food poisoning and leading to wacky hijinks,
it’s been regarded for years as being just kind of... meh.
Surely the airlines would have done something about that by now.
They have, and don’t call me Shirley.
Lufthansa commissioned a study in 2010 at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics,
and in it they created a room that was depressurized to cabin pressure at cruising altitude.
They dehumidified the air to less than 12% relative humidity, which is less than most
deserts.
And for good measure they made the seats vibrate and simulated engine noise.
No word on whether they had a flight attendant who was polite but secretly hates you.
Their findings showed that in these conditions, people are less sensitive to sweet and salty
flavors, but their taste for bland, bitter, or spicy remained mostly unchanged.
The dry air also deals a whammy to your sense of smell.
You just don’t pick up odors as well, and that’s a big part of what makes food taste
so good.
Have you ever noticed nothing tastes as good when you’re congested?
Then there’s the noise.
Weirdly, a study found that people who eat with loud background noise rated food as less
salty and sweet than others in a quiet environment.
So it sounds like the solution is to salt and spice food within an inch of it’s life.
And that’s the game plan, except the food has to be prepared on the ground, so the recipes
have to be tweaked somewhere where they can’t really be tested.
Then to compound the problem, the food is blast chilled and reheated in the sky hours
later by convection ovens, which work by circulating hot air over the packaging.
That process would do the food no favors on the ground.
Airlines have gotten creative with tackling the problem.
They’ve started cooking meals in a way that takes the reheating into account to avoid
overheating.
They’re taste testing new recipes in flight simulation chambers like Lufthansa’s.
They’re making meals with more umami ingredients to capitalize on the fact your taste for savory
is in tact.
They’re using heavier cutlery because that actually has an effect on how much you like
food.
British airways even tried distributing nasal sprays to improve people’s sense of smell,
but it didn’t catch on.
Now they offer an in-flight music channel to complement the meals, like scottish music
when they serve scottish fish.
I think that’s genius, because I can’t taste anything over the sound of bagpipes.
Even if the mass produced airline food hits the spot for you in can still be unappealing
to the guy next to you.
Anthony explains why people taste things differently over here.
Do you have any travel hacks?
Like after learning this I might bring my own salt aboard if I can get it through security.
Let us know in the comments and I’ll see you next time on DNews.