Industrial scale meal preparation like this at an airline catering facility at Charles de Gaulle ... [+]
AFP via Getty ImagesGo figure: At a time when air travel demand is down globally by about 70%, Singaporeans are booking reservations weeks in advance for the chance to pay $40 to $525 to dine inside a parked Singapore Airlines Airbus 380 super widebody.
In Pattaya, Thailand, business at Thai Airways headquarters’ café has exploded in the months since the company chopped up one of its narrow body planes and rebuilt it, with some slight modifications, inside the company’s former commissary.
And people have been flocking since 2013 to the world’s largest “aviation movie set” inside a warehouse in the blue-collar Los Angeles suburb of Pacoima. Once there, they pay $475 to $875 a person to enjoy everything from a conventional 1970s economy class inflight meal served on plastic trays to a lavish first class feast served on fine airline china and crystal. And what makes the meal, and an accompanying movie, so special is that it is served inside a giant Boeing 747 “set” by beautiful actors dressed in 1970s airline uniforms. The dinner theatre-style production is called the Pan Am Experience because it seeks to replicate what it was like to fly - and eat while doing so - in the 1970s.
In the real, Covid-19-infested world today, few airlines are serving their few passengers any food or drinks at all. And when they eventually begin doing so again, you can bet that travelers will complain loudly about the quality of the food.
Yet, to some airline and travel aficionados, the opportunity not only to eat airline food but to do it aboard a real or replica airliner has become almost a bucket list item, or else decadent pleasure they allow themselves every now and again.
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Over the last 80 years airline food has evolved from a novel idea and technology to:
- A high-status experience about which people bragged
- The brunt of endless jokes and complaints
- Almost non-existent.
But, if a Irish-British historian whose intriguing new book on the history of airline food hits the shelves today is right, airline food is likely to make a limited comeback over the next few years as passenger demand and the industry slowly recovers from near-collapse due to the pandemic.
“I don’t think we’ll ever get back to the point of there being cocktail lounges on 747s; to the Frank Sinatra Come Fly With Me marketing approach, to experiencing what it’s like to have white-gloved stewards working from silver service trolleys carving chateaubriand right at your seat and serving you fine wines,” says Bryce Evans, an associate professor of history at Liverpool Hope University in the United Kingdom.
“However, I can see - and I really think more international airlines are doing this already – carriers once again are concentrating on food service as a critical piece of their marketing, of their brand and service experience,” says Evans, author of Food and Aviation in the 20thCentury. Published by Bloomsbury, it goes on the shelves in North America and the U.K. today.
“Even now, with the pandemic still going on, several top international airlines like Emirates, Thai, Singapore and Turkish really take pride in their food. That’s something that U.S. carriers used to take great pride in, too. I wish I could say that British Airways, which always used to be quite good with their food service, was still good. It has fallen off some in recent years, but it’s still pretty good and I believe that as part of such airlines’ efforts to attract travelers, especially premium class travelers back to their planes they will once again begin trying to distinguish themselves by their food service in the premium classes.”
Alas, Evans says he does not expect airlines to focus a lot of attention and effort on improving what food they will be serving again to their economy class passengers. Such travelers’ overwhelming preference for low fares will preclude airlines from spending much more on coach class food than they were spending prior to the pandemic’s arrival.
Higher-quality airline food, he says, “is always something you’re going to have to pay more” to receive, whether that cost is embedded in a higher, premium class fare, charged as an extra fee, or presented as an a la carte/buy-on board offering.
Evans, an Irishman teaching at a British university, got interested in the subject of airline food via his research as a historian into how leading historical political leaders used food and sources of food to manipulate key political or historical developments. In particular, he studied how British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill tried to pressure an independent and neutral Ireland into supporting Britain’s World War II efforts through the constriction of the smaller island’s access to food supplies. And it was during that research that he happened upon the character William Maxson, a Minnesota engineer and inventor who at the end of the war essentially invented the process still used today for preparing airline meals many hours in advance and then heating them up in flight right before serving them.
“In 1946 Pan Am signed a contract with Maxson to introduce hot airline food,” Evans explained. “He had created a multi-compartment convection oven that could reheat meals made and frozen well in advance.
You read that right. Singapore Airlines has turned one of its Airbus A380s into a static restaurant ... [+]
AFP via Getty ImagesMaxson had teamed with Birds Eye, the American company that perfected the process for freezing vegetables for sale via modern grocery stores, to develop a way of thawing those vegetables, preparing inflight meals using them, and then freezing those meals for service hours later on planes.
The only problem, Evans, noted, was the “Pan Am’s people realized very quickly that Maxson’s meals were quite bad tasting. Others did, too. The New Yorker wrote that they were ‘meals prepared for doomsday.’”
Pan Am, though adjusted quickly by breaking its contract with Maxson and began working with famous chefs, a practice that airlines still engage in today, to come up with more appealing recipes. That, however, is easier said than done.
Noise and motion actually have a negative impact on a person’s ability to taste and enjoy food. So in the piston-engine era airline food departments and their big-name chef advisors had to find ways to overcome those taste challenges. Salt – lots of it – helped. Then the problem got worse with the coming of jets. High altitude, low humidity, and reduced air pressure all have a deleterious effect on the sense of taste. The answer? More salt. And sauces. Lots of them. The thicker the better.
Whether it was intentional or happenstance, carriers in the ‘50s and ‘60s worked with lots of famous French chefs, or others like the American Julia Child who were expert in the French style of cooking. The emphasis on sauces and ingredients with strong flavors, such as curry, helped overcome the degraded sense of taste issue related to eating at altitude. Carriers also switched away from “finer” wines to more full-bodied, fruity – and, lucky for them – usually less expensive wines. Their stronger taste could be more readily sensed by passengers, many of whom actually had been complaining that the very fine wines previously served by airlines didn’t seem to have much taste to them at all.
“Airline food in the ‘50s and ‘60s was actually quite good,” Evans says. “They actually changed Americans’ palettes in those days by popularizing French style cooking before the era of chefs having their own cooking shows on TV.”
The industry gets credit for actually inventing a what is – or at least used to be – a popular lunch menu item at upscale restaurants; the open-face steak sandwich. Airlines regularly engaged in “top this” competitions with their in-flight menus. At one point arguments about over-the-top offerings focused on several carriers that had begun serving steak for lunch on its planes. To calm things down, the International Air Transport Association, the industry’s global lobby organization, established a rule that airlines could not serve steak at lunch. But to get around the rule someone came up with the idea of placing a small steak on piece of toasted bread, with another piece of toast laying next to it. Walla; the open face steak sandwich.
It wasn’t until the early ‘70s, as the widebodies like the 747 had begun entering service and airline costs began rising very high that airline food began to get a reputation for not being very good.”
The famous story of American Airlines President Robert Crandall in the late ‘1970s ordering the removal of the single olive in the carrier’s in-flight dinner salads is the perfect example of why airline food service began to fall in quality. Crandall’s seemingly nit-picky olive order saved his airline an amazing $40,000 annually on the purchase of food at a time when it was in deep financial trouble and looking under the coach cushion for change to stay in business.
Evans said Crandall was right in that consumers didn’t notice or complain about the lack of an olive in their salads. But the lesson learned by the industry was that carriers could save lots of money by cutting back on lots of small items, including various aspects of food delivery and preparation. So, gradually, the quality of food – like the quality of other service features – declined as carriers cut further and further at a time when deregulation was forcing formerly regulated carriers to dramatically cut costs so they could, for the first time ever, compete for the first time on the basis of low fares and low costs.
Now, though, Evans expects at least some carriers, especially those heavily dependent on long-haul international flying, to make the quality of their food a more prominent aspect of their brand identities and they try to coax business travelers and the wealthy to buy more premium class fares.
“With Pan Am back in the day it was about the quality of the food, but also about making a statement about the entire cultural experience of the carrier and its home country, with food being the feature attraction,” Evans said. “Of course, back in those days food became a distraction from the fact that there wasn’t much to do but sit in a seat and read or sleep. There weren’t any movies to watch, at least not early on. The dining experience actually served as a form of entertainment and distraction. Now travelers have seat back videos, their phones and other devices and so much else to occupy their time in flight that maybe food isn’t quite as important.”
Additionally, after adjusting in the ‘90s, ‘00s and ‘10s to meet new market trends related to eating healthier – which included more emphasis on cold pastas, salads and generally less tasty (and cheaper) foods – Evans says that even before the pandemic began, a new trend was emerging to include some more flavorful menu items.
“I don’t think we’ll be going back to lots of heavily salted and sauced foods,” he added. “But I think we’ll be seeing more strongly flavored meats like beef and exotic poultry rather than rather blander meats like chicken being featured in airline meals. People’s tastes and attitudes change over time and that seems to be happening now, at least in the international [air travel] market.
“But in domestic markets, especially very large domestic markets like America’s, there may be a small comeback and improvement in airline meals,” Evans said. “But with the continued emphasis on low fares I’m afraid we won’t be seeing a lot change or improvement in airline food there.”
The Link LonkDecember 10, 2020 at 06:00PM
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Once A Fine Dining Experience, Then A Bad Joke, Could Airline Food Be Primed For A Comeback? - Forbes
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