Why Airplane Food Is So Bad
In the early days of commercial flight, when a transatlantic plane trip could take you 20 hours, there wasn’t much to do but read, nap, and eat. There was no in-flight movie to stare at and try to lip read because you refused to purchase headphones. You could look at the clouds, I guess.
To keep passengers entertained, airlines copied other modes of transportation—trains, boats—and turned to food. It was not uncommon, in the post-World War II era, to be served a multi-course meal on a flight. A fancy one, too. We’re talking carved roast beef, lobster, prime rib. Real glassware, not those plastic cups filled with those ice cubes that have inexplicable holes that we get now. Airlines were falling all over each other trying to offer special dining experiences to passengers.
“The other entertainment was, of course, to drink,” says Guillaume de Syon, a professor of
