Plane truths about food on flights

Awful, suspect, not bad? People say different things about their culinary experiences when flying. Should you eat it, should you not? We get travelling foodies to weigh in

What’s the best thing about an airplane meal? It can’t be the germs on the plastic trays, surely! Kidding. Or the ill-designed plastic cutlery. Sometimes, nicer airlines have the steel ones and I wonder about their cleaning process. Like, what is the size of what-must-be a ginormous industrial dishwasher? How long does it take? How do they load dirty cutlery from 300 passengers (minus the ones who’ve filched a few, of course)?

For me, the best part (well... a good enough part) of an airplane meal is not so much the food itself, but the moment of suspense — inspecting the rectangular aluminum food pack landed in front of you, undoing the crinkly corners of the food pack. And there — surprise! Sometimes edible, often times not. You polish it off depending on hunger levels. If you’ve been sensible, you had a bite a good half hour before they rip the perforated bit of your boarding pass. If not, there it is, the gastronomic delight, in front of you.

Phonetically nitpicking, the corners don’t crinkle as much as they yield, but there’s a childhood joy to be derived in toying with something like aluminum foil. (Another childhood joy I was recently reminded of was dragging a stick along fences making that soothing rhythmic rattling sound. It came back to me watching Lucas Hedges in one scene of Manchester By The Sea). But, anyway. Back to airline food: is it fit or is it foul? What do people say? Bon Appétit mag once asked Anthony Bourdain this: “Do you eat the plane food? Never. No one has ever felt better after eating plane food... people only eat it because they’re bored. I don’t eat on planes. I like to arrive hungry. What if you’re on a super-long flight? You just don’t eat? For a super-long flight, I’d order cheese... I’d eat some cheese...”

Huzefa Khorakiwala, director of the agro chemical company Biostadt, travels over six times a month. He eats on the plane 70 per cent of the time, “unless it’s a night flight, then I avoid it”. He says, “I was on Qatar airways last week and their Thai curry was actually pretty good”. What about his worst meal? He names the offender. “Their salmon was quite distasteful and had a really foul smell”. But that was a one off, he says. His favourite airline is Etihad. Other unpleasant experiences with plane food? Any creepy crawlies emerged from the jasmine rice ever? No, but Khorakiwala once “found a broken piece of ceramic, probably from a salt shaker. Glad I did not swallow it. I’m usually quite distracted with the onboard entertainment while having my meals”.

The journalist and food writer, Vir Sanghvi, weighed in on airplane food some time back when he wrote, “Despite the multiplicity of flight kitchens, nearly every airline flying out of Delhi has terrible food. (An exception, oddly enough, is Turkish Airlines.) It is so bad that I try not to eat on planes if I can help it. On medium-haul flights, I pack my own food”. He goes on to say: “My guess is that as the volume of flights has increased, the flight kitchens have become factories, churning out thousands of meals a day with no real concern for quality. At the flight kitchens run by hotel chains, the chefs would be summarily dismissed if they served such rubbish at their own hotels”.

In other countries, the food can be better but the only airline that has surprised me with a) the quality of its food and b) the depth of knowledge of its staff about the cuisine on board is Qantas”.

“My general rule is never order the Western meal if you can help it. Order the Indian curry. Remember that the food was made over 20 hours ago and has been sloppily reheated. And Indian food reheats better than, say, a chunk of lamb or a rubbery chicken breast”.

We asked some chefs in town about how they deal with airline food. Savour what they said.