Plane Food: An in-flight food diary

The great thing about food and drink is there’s just so much choice, from hole-in-the-wall ramen joints to old man pubs with roaring log fires and dogs that smell of wet tweed. The bad thing about long-haul air travel is there’s very little choice – if you don’t like your dinner, what are you going to do, head to the shops? So when yours truly headed off on a series of long haul flights, there was really no option but to document the food on offer across the 21 hours spent in the air, and see just what constitutes a good meal for a trapped and strapped-in audience. 

We begin at lunchtime, with a nifty three-course meal to get into the swing of things. Straight away this seemed like decadence of the highest order, but then it became clear that the salmon starter contained actual, genuine salmon, and concerns moved to finding someone to act as a personal servant for this new life of foodie luxury. Hurtling along on a course for literally the other side of the world, this was a glimpse of what people can achieve if they just pull their fingers out once in a while.

Salmon was followed by chicken curry, complete with a slab of meat that looked deceptively, and disappointingly, similar to a naan bread. The sadly naan-less dish had a whiff of the ‘running through the pantry and seeing what ends up in your pockets’ to it, but it certainly banished your correspondent’s previous plane food memories by strongly resembling something you’d actually want to eat. Wouldn’t order it in a restaurant, but you’d give yourself six out of ten if you’d rustled it up at home. Same goes for the sticky toffee pudding, and that’s in spite of the fact it looked like it had been used to wipe up a spillage in the recent past.

Long-haul plane travel does strange things to people, with time and space falling out of whack and the very sanity of all involved starting to unravel. That said, try to serve a sandwich with chicken, pesto and aubergine on it and you’re asking for trouble no matter what time of day it is. For one thing, bread doesn’t do well at altitude. Now that sounds like the kind of mad nonsense that someone addled with jet lag would come out with, but it’s true – this sandwich was like a rubber stress reliever lined with ‘miscellaneous green catering substance A.’ Still, having left my bread bin and array of sandwich spreads back home there was no choice but to munch on. It’s a difficult gig, this one, but someone’s got to do it.

Things got somewhat trickier at breakfast. Remember around three hundred words ago, when there was all that gubbins about choice being the great thing about food? Well after 13 hours in a loud metal box, flanked by a man with no shoes and a snoozing couple who kept not quite spilling over into The Skinny’s seat, choice decided to have its revenge.

The options were simple – chicken congee, or a cheese and herb omelette. Just one problem – congee isn’t a big thing in Skinny-land, so the choice became ‘unknown dish that may be horrible but might be alright’ to ‘well-known dish that almost certainly won’t be great.’ Taking the coward’s way out, it was soon omelette time. The rubbery, eggy mass of mattter looked a little like a deflated football, and the cheese inside did that weird oozing thing normally associated with ghost encounters and oil spills, but at least it was clear what everything was. So, yeah, well done plane chefs!

By the next flight all concept of space and time was evaporating, so the idea of a three-course dinner at quarter to midnight seemed just excellent rather than the lunacy it clearly was. It felt like the most natural thing in the world, which was ironic given the weird slab of vaguely tubular meat served as an appetiser on a tiny, almost sarcastic bed of salad. Next, a takeaway-style sweet and sour chicken. Battered chicken, a viscous and disconcertingly sweet sauce – you’d swear it had been delivered to the plane by a guy on a motorbike if that wasn’t completely impossible and totally mad. A mango mousse sponge dealt the final blow to any pretensions of sanity. This cake was literally incredible – how do you make a sponge that’s thin and light but still firm enough to hold up the mousse? How do you do it while keeping all the various flavours in balance so each mouthful has a little bit of everything? More to the point, how do you do all this while soaring in a mighty steel eagle over the oceans? Is any of this really happening, what are we doing here, what am I etc etc.

By breakfast, the existential dread had gone and a new sense of calm had prevailed. Seems life inside planes is full of opposites – it’s very noisy, but everyone tries to be quiet. Passengers fear the effects of jet-lag but hit the drinks trolley like elephants trying to open a tin of beans. The croissants are hot, but the Danish pastries are cold.

Repeat, one piece of pastry is warmed and served, while another piece of pastry - with some stuff on it - comes out stone cold. They come from the same place, and are served at the same time – why is this happening? We’re in a giant metal box going at 600-odd miles per hour, and the bloke in the next seat is watching a live football match SIX MILES UP IN THE AIR, but there’s to be no satisfying crunch of buttery goodness or sweet embrace of a warm, gooey apricot filling? Lights flash on, seatbelts clip, the plane lands, the journey ends, and your correspondent steps onto solid ground, wondering where he can find a mini oven for the return journey.