What’s the deal with aeroplane food? I can tell you with scientific imprecision: the cabin pressure makes everything taste bland, the dry air mangles your olfactory capacity, which also makes everything taste bland, and the air conditioning wreaks havoc with the thermodynamics. Considering food is, more than anything, an exercise in nailing the thermodynamics, this is a critical barrier to good execution. There you go – that’s the deal with aeroplane food. You can thank me later.
Today, then, a dispatch from the skies! What with all the aforementioned baloney, aeroplane food gets a bad rap. But this is a question of psychology as much as it is of physics. You see, not only does transatlantic altitude ruin your lunch, it also screws with your brain. Again, something about that cabin pressure, the enforced sedentariness, the tedium of long-haul travel all conspires to make the passenger much less stoic than they might otherwise be. Don’t just take it from me, but from the bores down at NPR: “Science explains weird and emotional airplane behaviour.” Good enough for me.
In fact, you will find several so-called experts claiming that one is more likely to cry upon watching a film at 35,000 feet than at sea level. (Unconfirmed reports find “Zootopia 2” remarkably “stirring” and “mournful”.) Flying makes us plaintive(!), self-reflective, prone to getting a little weepy. No matter, because Silver Spoon is entirely resistant to introspection and so none of the above applies. What you have here is an impartial, dispassionate, balanced, fair and enlightened correspondent. So you can trust my critical judgement when I say this (hold my hand): aeroplane food? Pretty great, actually.
As with many things in life, we have the French to thank for this. It is 1973, and you are the CEO of the airline Union de Transports Aériens. Of course, you understand that it would be unbecoming of a gastronomic superpower to serve rubbish to its customers, so you contact Raymond Oliver – the Gascon chef to Winston Churchill, Albert Camus and Grace Kelly. He worked out one thing: the atmosphere all the way up there towards the ozone layer makes food dry. And so he whipped up a turbo-Gallic menu: coq au vin, boeuf bourguignon, veal in cream. Sauce is the silver bullet.
This is why, when presented with two options from an officious air steward, you must simply choose the dampest thing. Curry does well; “roast chicken” does not.
On a recent flight to JFK, I go for the tomato calamarata (pasta formed into calamari-shaped rings). It arrives in that tightly wrapped foil, somehow hotter than the surface of the sun. With it? A small pot of very wet salad, the wettest salad I’ve ever had – were it any wetter I would be forced to call it a chilled minestrone (ew!). There is one cracker and a tiny cube of cheddar that I can’t open with my hands – wrapped in an industrially impenetrable plastic – so I am forced to deploy my incisors, like a Neanderthal.
My highest regards to Monsieur Oliver, but of course, technically speaking, all of it is disgusting. The bread is spongy; there is far too much on the tray. Were you used to drinking Château Lafite Rothschild out of Riedel glassware, you’d better get used to Casillero del Diablo out of a plastic cup. But to think of it along these lines is to get it totally wrong. Because – and forgive me for being glib – this is not a restaurant. It is the closest thing we humans have to time travel. And frankly, from your sub-£100 economy seat en route to Istanbul, you really ought to be a little more grateful. (I’m in 30A, no window, thanks for checking.)
No, you must think of aeroplane lunch as a novel enrichment activity – something to pick your way through as you cruise over the Alps, much like a toddler would be entertained by a mobile, or a horse by a hay net. It is too obvious – and might I say decadent – to hate it, to dismiss it as the mere dreck, mush or slurry it is. What’s the deal with aeroplane food? Well, to start: it isn’t even really food.
[Further reading: New York: do Americans cook better than Italians?]
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This article appears in the 17 Jun 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Race