An Ode to Airplane Food

I found an old unpublished piece I wrote after having a lovely meal on an international flight a year ago. In honor of the dying art of in-flight culinary delight, here it is.

I love airplane food.

Sure, drop it in a field and cows could use it for a salt lick. And sure, I’d raise a stink if I had sat down in a restaurant, pulled out my wallet and paid for a starchy chicken cacciatore that may well never decompose. But there is an element of surprise with in-flight meals. When the crew fires up the small nuclear reactors in the galleys and the aroma of chemically enhanced goodness floods the cabin, my Pavlovian juices start flowing.

This is probably due to my inherent cheapness. I refuse to pay the inflated prices that airport food courts charge (exception: Dallas, where Wendy’s Dollar Menu still stands), where you shell out 50% more than street value for the privilege of shuffling through lines of menu-gazing, jet-lagged folks trying to get to their weddings, business meetings and tour buses on time. I try to stay away usually opting to read the paper in some corner near my gate. The cheek-to-jowl environs under pounding fluorescent lights do not make for a pleasant dining experience.

In flight is a different story. My favorite airline, which I choose not to give free publicity to but whose name could be a kind of light breakfast, offers stupendous meals. In fact, their CEO appears on-screen before the safety video, smiling stiffly as he announces that this airline still serves meals at mealtime. His speech already gets my brain working like a child shaking boxes under the Christmas tree: What will we have today? Will they have cranberry juice? Ranch or blue cheese dressing?

I get visibly excited when the flight attendants roll their food trolleys to the front. I try to appear distracted, looking out the window, fumbling with the Skymall catalog, but I’ve always got an eye on the crew as they hand out their nourishing trays of good cheer. As they make their way down the aisles, I can make out what they are saying: Turkey or beef? Oh, turkey or beef, what a delicious conundrum of a life of privilege. When they finally ask me I say, “Surprise me!” and then tear off the foil heat wrapper like a frenzied little boy hoping he made Santa’s list to find… a turkey sandwich! The Red Ryder of coach meals!

On a recent flight, this meal was enhanced by the view. I usually try to get a window seat, as it offers my fat head a place to rest while I try to ignore the rest of the cabin, but on this occasion we were over the U.S.’s Eastern seaboard. Manhattan lie below, blazing like a checked Christmas tree, yellow stripes full of moving red dots, speckled with clusters of glowing phallic ornaments. Visions of individually wrapped brownies and iceberg-lettuce salads danced through my head as I savored the last bites of beef tips in mushroom sauce. A full belly, the world underneath me. It doesn’t get much better than that.

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