As I approached my assigned seat on my flight from Portland to D.C., I looked at the two guys sitting in my row. At first glance, they looked like twins; both wore black t-shirts with what looked like Dungeons and Dragons logos on the front. Both smelled slightly acrid.
I was unhappy to be stuck next to smelly teenage boys on a cross-country plane ride, but I stuffed my newspaper, book and Discman into the seat pocket and sat down. An hour into the flight, the food cart came around. I chose chicken. The boys declined the offered food and, after the flight attendant left, the older one pulled his backpack out from beneath the seat in front of him. He whipped out two Tupperware containers and two plastic forks and presented one to his brother, opening one himself. The smell became more acute.
The elder Dungeon/Dragon boy reached into the backpack again, this time pulling out a bottle of wine. He whisked out the halfway-in cork and took a swig. He promptly smacked his lips. He then swilled from the bottle after every bite until the flight attendant yelled at him for drinking non-airline alcohol.
They ate with their mouths open. Their food stunk. Their wine nearly spilled when we hit turbulence. The day I flew with those greasy-haired airline-food-snobs was the day I understood why airlines served only two choices of meals: smell travels quickly in enclosed airspace.
The cheaper, Expedia-friendly airlines have done away with serving anything but peanuts. It seems that the olfactory airplane hell I envision, replete with Tupperwares creaking open to reveal smelly ethnic foods on all sides, may quickly become a reality. What will the recycled air smell like after four rounds through a plane filled with diversely-spiced food?
I get hungry on five-hour flights but refuse to bring Tupperware, so scarred am I by my previous flight experience. Then again, what are my choices?
Apparently, paying an arm and a leg for airport food seems to be the best of the bad options. My mother likes to fly through O’Hare in Chicago and get a chicken Caesar salad. My roommate stops at Starbucks and stocks up before a flight. I love flying through anywhere with a California Pizza Kitchen so I can pay $8 for a barbecue chicken salad. Ridiculous, but I refuse to either pack a lunchbox, with or without wine, or rely on peanuts.
A few airlines (or, rather, their caterers) are attempting to improve on airline food. Song, Delta’s new division, now serves food whipped up by the former chef of New York’s W hotel, and Northwest Airlines has teamed up with an Italian restaurant to offer gourmet salads and pizzas in-flight. Both carry price tags-around $7-$10 per meal-but provide an option for those travelers with neither time nor foresight.
As much as I complained about rubbery chicken, weathered bread rolls and wilting iceberg lettuce, I miss the olden days of airport travel; The days when I’d wake up, neck creaking out of its sitting-sleeping position, to hear myself say ‘lasagna please’ and reach for a hot tray. Now all that exists of those meals is the nostalgia I’ll feel when I pick up my bistro bag on flights that still serve them for free or purchase my ‘gourmet’ airplane food, which may never hit the real gourmet mark. It’s just not the same anymore.
