#Airline food

[shoku-and-awe]

JAL meals! Happy to get so many vegetables. There was also ice cream, which I couldn't eat and that's fine (though the stewardess looked like she might cry when I told her that).

Lunch was steamed pork with sesame sauce and ginger rice (very ginger) and wine. Sides were roast squash with broccoli and seeds, yummy fried tofu with shibazuke pickle and enoki mushroom slaw, and potato salad with dill (rare spice!!!) and shrimp.

Breakfast was curry rice with a side of some kind of bell pepper escabeche—weirdly great combo—and green tea. And the orange glob was a blood orange jelly, also delicious!

[copperbadge]

You know, I had thought that the old jokes about bad airline food, which were very common in the 1990s, had stopped mainly because airline food had gotten better. It had to have, right? As food technology and chemistry improved, we must have fixed that. I just couldn't know, because mostly I fly Southwest and rarely take a flight longer than about four hours, and Southwest just doesn't do meals.

But now I think probably it's just that airline food is much rarer. Even flights that would have had food twenty-five years ago (pre-9/11) now mostly don't. So it's not that the food is better, it's just rarer. The comedy is less relatable.

I will say that the mushroom tortellini I got in my "lunch" on this flight home was pretty edible, but when the tray was set in front of me I looked at the hardtack bread roll, the very basic salad with its little pot of bland yogurt dressing, and the tortellini in very scant tomato sauce, and I thought, I bet I can hack this. (It's kind of a conference trick of mine -- I have startled many a stranger at a conference breakfast buffet by producing from seeming nowhere a breakfast sandwich, and then informing them that they, too, can take a croissant from the pastry rack, eggs and sausage from the chafing dishes, and jam from the condiments, and make a breakfast sandwich fit for a king.)

Then I decided to write some fanfic of my own damn novels because Eddie Rambler has definitely done this, and if anyone can fix airline food it's him, and if anyone's going to be a willing accomplice, it's Noah "self-propelled trouble magnet and food garbage disposal" Deimos.

"Hey there, friends and fans and everyone keeping it new out there!" Eddie Rambler said, but unlike his usual Photogram openings, his voice was hushed -- not subdued, but much quieter than usual. "I'm coming to you from somewhere over the arctic, and pretty much everyone else is asleep, so I'm trying to keep quiet, which as everyone knows is for me quite an effort. And if you're wondering why I'm not my normal golden well-lit self, it's because I'm filming this in the first-class cabin of an airplane using ambient light and a phone flashlight for a spot." 

He leaned back, so that his face wasn't filling the camera anymore, and the rest of the room came into view: a tiny nook with a reclining airline seat. The arm was lifted, and Eddie was sitting sideways on the cushion; on the reclined back of the seat, next to him, Noah was perched, grinning impishly.

"Now, I couldn't sleep so Gregory kicked me out of our two-person cabin, and Noah here had a cabin to himself because his folks are sharing one and he's the odd man out, so he let me come in here to film. Friend of the gram Noah Deimos of course, NoahTheTerror -- " Eddie and Noah both pointed at the same empty space, where a link would later go to Noah's Photogram, "and I are both flying first-class for only the second time in our lives. When I traveled with Truly Tasty I was always on the bus because we had a lot of equipment, and Noah used to be a peasant -- "

"I'm still a peasant," Noah said. 

"You're a prince, kiddo."

"I'm a peasant prince," Noah insisted.

"I could kick you back to Economy," Eddie said, grinning at him. 

"Well, princehood has perks," Noah allowed. 

"Anyway," Eddie said, slinging an arm around Noah and ruffling his hair, "the two of us decided to stay up and get into mischief, which is why we're filming at thirty five thousand feet. We were just going to play cards, but we got to comparing notes about airline food, and about five minutes in I said, whoa, this is content, let's not waste it. So, young prince, tell me what you were saying about airline food before we started filming."

Noah nodded. "First class food is okay. It helps that you're eating it in a really fancy seat and you know how much you paid for that fancy seat. But it's still kinda..." he stuck out his tongue, waggling his head. "It's just served in fancier dishes. And outside of first class...I mean, I'll eat it, but I won't like it."

"It's difficult to make good airline food. There are a lot of requirements," Eddie said. "It has to be mass-produced, it has to keep for reasonably long periods of time, some of it has to be reheatable on an airplane, and I don't know if you know this -- I don't know if YOU know this," he added, turning to Noah, "but our tastebuds literally change when we're on an airplane. Something to do with altitude and pressurized cabins. That's why bloody marys are such a popular cocktail. Tomato juice tastes better on an airplane."

"That's nuts," Noah said.

"So do nuts, actually," Eddie told him. "So you end up with some issues. Bread doesn't keep well or reheat well and the texture gets super weird, that's why you don't get good pastry and your bread roll is dry even in first class. Meat is hard to cook at scale or reheat. Sauces tend to separate -- cream sauce is the worst. Vegetables do okay because you can make a whole bunch of salad at once and it'll stay relatively crisp, and protein in sauce is still the most easily reheatable form of food, but stuff like eggs or breakfast meat has to be pretty greasy to reheat well. And then it's just, you know, greasy."

"So, chef, what's the solution?" Noah asked, clearly feeding Eddie a line, grinning as he did so.

"I am so glad you asked," Eddie replied, just as faux-rehearsed. "I managed to weasel two economy-class dinner meals out of the flight attendants -- don't worry, there were spares, nobody went hungry because of this -- and we're going to hack you an airline meal that's both edible and reasonably nutritious. Ready?" 

"Ready!" 

Eddie pulled up a tray table that had been folded flat against the wall, and reached in the other direction to bring two trays of food into the camera's view. "So we've got two meals that each have a salad, a little cup of dressing, a roll with butter, and chocolate bites for dessert. This one is a chicken curry noodle bowl with some mango chutney stir-in over here on the side -- I'm using 'curry' and 'chutney' both very loosely, as does the airline -- and this one is mushroom tortellini in pesto. That's actually pretty good, stuffed pasta does well in this kind of situation and I like a pesto, the bright notes really flare. What's the dressing that comes with the salads, Noah?"

Noah checked one of the little bottles, squinting. "Yogurt dill."

"Pretty good. Probably pretty bland. Oh, we also have salt and pepper. Okay, so what we're going to do is take the worst parts of the meal and add a little bit of the best part and basically make you a two-entree meal that's superior to a single entree with sides. Pop open that bread and give our friends a demo."

Noah tore open the plastic surrounding the bread roll, which was oblong, slightly smaller than a hoagie bun. He tapped it on the tray and it clattered stiffly. He broke off one end and crumbs went everywhere; the inside looked dry when he held it up to the camera.

"This is not a good bread roll," Eddie said. "Butter will make it edible, but we can make it better. We have the technology. We have...the dressing. We're going to just get this bread to a nicer texture by adding some of the dressing..." 

He split the roll with a knife carefully while Noah opened the dressing, then poured a generous dollop onto the bread, spreading it with the knife. "Let that sink in a minute, let's pick out the best lettuce and tomatoes for the sandwich, here we go...all right. You want a spicy chicken curry sandwich or a veggie sandwich?"

"Curry," Noah said. 

"Good call, the dill dressing's going to go nicely with that. All right, we are going to really stir up this chicken in sauce -- it's okay if the noodles get mixed in, that's what we in the biz call texture -- and make sure everything's blended. This mango chutney's going on the other half of the bread to moisten it, and this is -- this is going to get me yelled at by my culinary school teachers," he told Noah, "but we're going to throw that pepper right on the mangos there. It'll add kick to the curry and the hope is that you won't actually get much flavor other than spice. We'll see how it goes. So you got dill dressing with lettuce and tomato, mango chutney with pepper, all that is making the bread nice and soft, and we're going to take some of the chicken curry and slather that right on top." 

Noah used a fork and spoon like tongs to scoop curry onto the roll, sitting open on the plate, and then Eddie closed it carefully. Noah reached for it, but Eddie held up a hand.

"Not yet. Finishing is important," he told the teenager. "You have to let the flavors and textures settle a little, and this is also going to ensure it isn't as messy as it could be to eat, because we're classy assholes."

"Nobody classier," Noah agreed.

"The bread needs time to absorb more liquid. So now we take this paper tray liner and just..." Eddie wrapped the sandwich up in the paper, ignoring where the curry stained it yellow, folded the ends under, and tucked them into a complicated pleat that kept the paper tightly wrapped around the sandwich. "Just let that sit for a second -- if we were actually hacking this meal in economy, now's when you'd eat the rest of the curry, while the sandwich settles. What we're going to do is make a veggie sandwich with this other one. Guess how."

Noah frowned. "Well, there's the other salad, and the dressing, and I guess the pesto..."

"Sure, but where's most of this meal's bulk?"

"The pasta -- are you gonna put tortellini on bread?" Noah asked. 

"Carb on carb can be delicious but we're going to be more delicate than that -- we're going to open up this tortellini and get that awesome mushroom filling out of it and use that like a pate spread," Eddie said.

"Can I change my order? I want the mushroom pesto sandwich," Noah said. Eddie laughed.

"All right, you're the kid, you get your pick. Let's get this tortellini unfolded," he said, and set to work. 

-----

Six hours into their ten hour flight, after Eddie used the first-class wifi to post the video, there was a knock on the door and Gregory put his head in. 

"Hey, you're up!" Eddie said, looking up from his book. Noah gave Gregory a wave from where he was playing video games opposite Eddie. "Am I unbanished from our suite?"

"You are in so much trouble," Gregory said affectionately.

"For what? Noah and I have been super duper quiet, we didn't wake you up or bug Michaelis and Jes or anything."

Gregory held up his phone. "Hacking Bad Airline Food With NoahTheTerror," he read from the screen. 

"That mushroom sandwich was choice," Noah said, without looking up from his game. 

"Curry wasn't bad. Pepper might have been a mistake. I'll workshop it," Eddie said. "Why?"

"Eddie. I love you, but we are literally on a plane owned by a company whose food you just called terrible and hacked so it would be better. Half the internet wants an encore when we get served breakfast, and meanwhile the airline seems torn between promising to upgrade their food offerings and suing you for slander."

"Libel, surely," Eddie said. "I did it in the public record."

"It's libel if it's written down, all you did was talk," Gregory said. "Technically slander."

"Oh, is that all I did?" Eddie asked innocently. 

"I blame you," Gregory said to Noah. "You were supervising."

"I'm an innocent child," Noah said, still not looking up from his game. "Easily led astray. Sounds to me like I came under the sway of a bad influence."

"Anyway it's not libel OR slander if it's true," Eddie said. "They won't sue me, if they do I'll bring one of their awful bread rolls to court and make the judge eat it. Nobody would rule against me after eating one of those."

"The dressing helped, but dressing can only do so much," Noah added loyally. Eddie held his hand out for a fistbump and Noah bumped it, finally setting his game aside.

"Seriously, are we busted?" Eddie asked. "Like, genuinely in trouble busted?"

"Probably not, it's mostly just evidence I can't leave you alone for a minute," Gregory said. 

"Well, the solution to that was to let me keep pestering you in our own two-seat suite and not banish me because you wanted to sleep," Eddie pointed out. 

Gregory opened his mouth to say something, then glanced at Noah and paused. 

"If you'd like to leave Noah to his video games and come back to the suite, we can discuss that where young princeling ears aren't listening," he said finally.

"You can just say Eddie wanted to make out," Noah said. "I'm sixteen, not six."

Gregory rubbed his eyes with one hand. "Eddie?"

Eddie leaned over and planted a kiss on Noah's forehead. "Behave yourself. Hydrate and have a snack before we land."

"Don't do anything I wouldn't do," Noah called as Eddie left, snickering. 

"On a scale of one to ten, how much trouble am I in, honestly?" Eddie asked, following Gregory back into their cabin, which had one chair reclined (covered in blankets that Gregory had turned into some kind of napping nest) and one upright, with Eddie's stuff piled on it. 

"With me, a two. With the airline, probably a five. You might have to do a follow-up," Gregory said. 

"Like, the breakfast follow-up, or like an apology?"

Gregory shuffled aside so Eddie could shift his stuff off the chair and sit -- then settled in his lap comfortably, arms resting on his shoulders.

"Well, I say you double-down and make the breakfast post," he said. "But I am now prepared to distract you with making out, as Noah so charmingly put it, if you're interested."

"Oh, now you've seen my impressive sandwich-making skills you're ready to join the mile-high club?" Eddie asked. 

"That mushroom thing did look kind of good."

Eddie kissed him. "Tell you what, when they do breakfast service I'll use all the butter I saved from the rolls and make you an incredibly mediocre but edible egg sandwich. If I can get more dressing I could probably even make a decent mayo substitute." 

"You can't use my phone for extra lighting," Gregory told him, and Eddie was going to protest, but more interesting things were happening and by the time he remembered to be sullen about it, breakfast was being served. 

[cyber-corp]

Obsessed with the implication that in the event of an uncomfortable situation, Jerry Seinfeld starts talking about the deal with airline food as a defence mechanism

[mogai-headcanons]

Airy from ONE is an autistic unlabeled genderless lantern who has forgotten their gender, but feels vaguely feminine, and uses all pronouns!

Liam Plecak is a disabled polyamorous mspec gay trans man with PTSD and anxiety who uses he/him and it/its pronouns!

Bryce Hansen is a polyamorous demiromantic bisexual nonbinary soda bottle with anxiety, PTSD, an implied substance addiction, and depression who uses he/him and they/them pronouns!

Amelia Euler is a polyamorous bisexual demigirl who's also questioning if they're genderfae; has anxiety, depression, and PTSD; and uses she/her and they/them pronouns!

Liam, Bryce, and Amelia are in a polyamorous relationship with each other!

Charlotte Stern is a femme bisexual demigender bread with depression, BPD, NPD, and PTSD who uses she/her, it/its, and they/them pronouns!

Taylor Nolan is an autistic questioning bi lesbian sapphic trans girl with HPD and anxiety who uses she/her pronouns!

Stone is a canonically mute autistic agender stone who uses all pronouns!

Texty, who also goes by Blip, is a queer oddcoric internetgender typogender wirelessgender virtualperson who uses they/them and it/its pronouns!

Folder is a neurodivergent queer nonbinary transmasculine 90scoric webcoric lowpolygender interfaceiac wirelessgender gender.ZIP glitchdataic genderbyte popaen virtualperson folder who uses he/him, they/them, it/its, folder/folders, and error/errors pronouns!

Texty and Folder both use the virtualperson label to display their relationship!

Abstracty is a straight genderless surrealgender being who uses he/him and it/its pronouns!

Airline Food is an autistic pan aroace nonbinary foodgender object who uses he/him and they/them pronouns!

Tray is a vincian pan gay tranfeminine nonbinary boy who uses she/her and it/its pronouns!

Atom is a homoflexible bipan genderfree nonbinary atom who uses they/them pronouns!

Whippy Creamy is a bicurious object who uses he/him and they/them pronouns, and he has a crush on Subway Seat!

Subway Seat is a disabled gay trans man who uses any pronouns other than she/her and prefers it/its!

Bassy is transhet and uses she/her and it/its pronouns!

Circle and Contact Lens are both neurodivergent straight allies!

Liam's old coworker Owen is a bisexual twink nail who uses he/him pronouns! He and Liam had crushes on each other before the events of ONE, but due to Liam's disappearance their feelings for each other dissolved.

dni link

[hfjone-headcanons]

I feel like airline food probably cheered once folder got eliminated.

whats the deal with. folder getting eliminated slash reference

[stone-cold-groove]

A United Air Lines in-flight menu circa 1951.

[a-random-warrior]

Day 16 of drawing ships I like for pride month

Airlinelens! Another cute request that I spent too much time on

[Requests are closed (sorry!)]

[hikkokeka]

airile food.

[aberranthought]

Every time there’s a lull in conversation I like to say “so, how about that airline food.” and while most people don’t get the reference weirdly enough it usually does get some form of conversation started again

[goodobjectshowscreenshots]

[shoku-and-awe]

In-flight meals! For lunch, beef bowl with green beans, salad, cold soba noodles, some kind of shrimp ceviche with fruit(????), and fruit salad. I am kind of wary of airplane shellfish under the best of circumstances, but the combination of watermelon and cilantro and shrimp was kind of nice?

For night breakfast, cheese omelet with mushrooms, potato, sausage, and a tomato, plus yogurt and a roll. Am I the only person who likes airplane eggs? Always happy to get airplane eggs.

[copperbadge]

not to add a downer, and without any sources, either! but airline food 'technology' still has a human element. few years back i purchased a PBS docu for my airplane bud, and they had a short but illuminating how-it's-made clip of the food makers. still a lot of TLC involved among the machines. so given the seismic changes of the pandemic, i fear there were people eliminated from the chain

Yeah, after you sent this ask (sorry for the delayed reply!) I did some googling and digging and while I couldn't find any reports on downstaffing, there were definitely articles about "well the airline could spend fifty cents more per meal and give you a really good one, but they won't" and also that supply chain interference was affecting it. I do think a lot has to do with the source -- flying out from America to London, with food supplied from an American caterer, was absolutely so much worse than flying back from Rome to America.

Part of it was that I think I chose more wisely -- on the flight out I got the "asian chicken and noodles" which, the chicken and noodles were fine but the sauce was so terrible I couldn't eat it. On the flight back I had the mushroom tortellini, which was quite good, and my seatmate got what was variously described (the flight attendant seemed a bit at a loss) as peri peri chicken, butter chicken, and curried chicken, which looked....less good. I think the same rule I have for sit-down catered events applies to airline food: always get the vegetarian option, because even if you aren't a big veggie fan (me) it's usually fresher and better because they make fewer of them.

The breakfast snack they served on the flight from the US to London was especially hilarious because it was literally just a chobani yogurt cup and a biscotti. Now, they did a hot beverage service too, but the chutzpah of making a biscotti, which you can't really eat unless you're dunking it in something, a full half of the food you serve to people who may or may not want coffee or tea, was breathtaking. Also I'm not sure how familiar people are with biscotti, like, it seems pretty common in the US, but my seatmate on that flight....just ate his biscotti straight, like it was a cookie or something. I know you CAN do that but it's so unpleasant. Did he not know? Or was he just desperate for food? I had granola bars so I wasn't hungry at any point but if I'd been depending on food service on the plane for my snacks I definitely would have been.

Anyway, the food quality may have been down to staffing or supply chain issues in part, and it's not like I'm going to never fly United again because of it. But definitely on my next long flight I will get the veggie option and also bring more and varied snacks.

[rosy-mocha]

i havent seen airline lens yet on this website ... (unless i missed it)

[encountersltd]

airline food: afternoon everybody!

amelia: where have you been all morning??

airline food: getting abstracty to say swear words!

abstracty as airline food: poppycock

[scpredcap]

the deal

me: I've made a deal with a powerful being

Friend: the devil?

Me: no... airline food.

Friend: what?

Me: I MADE A DEAL WITH AIRLINE FOOD!

Friend: okay so..... what's the deal with airline food

Laugh track plays.

Me: I sold my soul for a Mobile laugh track.

[stone-cold-groove]

A 50s era United Air Lines in-flight menu.