Long flight? Pack a lunch
Oxford professor Charles Spence has conducted research into airline food and found that most of it is bad for you.
In a negative conclusion, he points out that the conditions of passenger flights are so bad – bad airline air, the noise of the flight, other factors – that ordinary meals don’t possess the taste they would have had on land.
Because the airlines are aware of this, he claims, they stuff their in-flight meals with more salt and sugar to regain the taste they normally would have. Airline meals contain of far more calories than the same meals would have had on land. And passengers are devouring far more calories than they would have ordinarily tolerated.
And it gets worse: because of the boredom of a flight, we all eat more than we normally would have. Fixated on a movie screen inserted into the back of the seat in front of us, we shove peanuts and pretzels into our mouth, boosting our calorie intake beyond any recommended limit.
One of his colleagues, Dr. Charles Platkin of Hunter College in New York, has concluded that Frontier Airlines is among the worst of the carriers in terms of the healthy qualities of the food it serves (by which I opine that it stuffs its meals with additional sugar and salt to make them more palatable).
Virgin America, according to him, is the best. Whether that rating will survive Virgin America’s recent sale to Alaska Airlines is something the good professor will need to carefully study.
My own reaction to these findings? I always bring tasty sandwiches that you’ve made at home with you on a long flight where food will be served.
Don’t permit yourself to become a victim of the airlines that believe their meals need additional sugar and salt because their taste is badly affected by the conditions of air travel.