As long as passengers have been flying, they’ve been disappointed by the quality of in-flight meals. But why? After 90 years of commercial air flight, why haven’t airlines been able to design menus that can survive the scrutiny of diners at 30,000 feet? Is it because airline food really sucks, or is it because we just think it sucks? In truth, it’s a little of both. But airlines are making surprising strides to fix both.

Even before you take into account the other practicalities that come into play when you try to feed people in a pneumatic tube 30,000 feet in the air, a meal you serve on an airplane will always taste worse than a meal served on the ground. “When you travel at a high altitude, your sense of taste isn’t the same as it is in a restaurant,” says Peter Wilander, managing director of onboard services at Delta. The reasons for this primarily have to do with humidity … or, rather, a lack thereof.





The cabins of airplanes are pressurized with an extremely low humidity level of just 4%, largely to reduce the risk of internal corrosion; the only humidity in an airplane cabin comes from other people’s breath. The problem with low humidity, though, is it causes our sinuses to close. This is why you always feel as if you have a slight cold when you fly. Simultaneously, the low humidity dries your food out quicker than it happens on the ground. Since smell and moisture are such important aspects of the way we taste things–consider the way an apple tastes like a potato when you hold your nose, or how steaks are more flavorful when cooked rare than well-done–airplane food has a star subtracted from it from the Zephyr Zagat guide from the get-go just because of cabin air quality.

A big trend in airline menus is Indian food. It can blast right through a passenger’s walled-up sinuses.

But preparation is also a major issue. According to Wilander, Delta serves more than 9 million in-flight meals every year. None of these meals can be cooked on-board: there’s simply no room for a working kitchen, let alone a staff to man it. Instead, every meal served on an airplane is prepared ahead of time, chilled or frozen, and then warmed back up in on-board convection ovens. For economy passengers, this means mass-produced meals that are frozen and then reconstituted. Even in business class, the meals being served aren’t fresh. While each meal will have been individually prepared by a catering company at the airport instead of mass-produced and purchased in bulk, a business-class customer can still look forward to a meal that is at least several hours old before it has been served. Delta is hardly alone in this: in fact, this is the standard for the entire airline industry. Why? Because it’s the only practical solution to the problem of in-flight service.

But there are psychological issues at play that make airline food taste worse to us, too.

“In-flight meals have always been just as much about staving off boredom as hunger,” says Guillaume de Syon, a professor of history at Albright College. Ever since the days of airships, when zeppelins like the Hindenburg would slowly float across the Atlantic on long three-day trips, meals have been used to distract passengers from the crushing monotony of flight. When there’s nothing else to do but sit in a chair and look at the back of someone’s head, meals become something to look forward to. But their faults also become something to scrutinize. The result is that even the best airline meals have a hard time holding up to the critical eye of bored, stuffed-up passengers at 30,000 feet.

“It’s unfortunate, because the airlines are really between a rock and a hard place when it comes to food,” de Syon says. “Passengers look forward to meals on long flights, but they’re also more disappointed by what they are served than they would be on the ground.”