Plane food is, on the whole, pretty unappetising. When ordering their last meal, the condemned prisoner seldom requests the soggy stew they ate 35,000 feet above the Atlantic all those years ago. Few wedding planners tasked with satisfying 200 hungry guests look to the skies for inspiration.

That hilarious email sent by Oliver Beale, an advertising executive, to Virgin Atlantic (well, Sir Richard Branson, to be precise), way back in 2008, perhaps best illustrates how airline meals tend to disappoint.

He described – with accompanying stomach-churning images – a “culinary journey of hell” involving “yellow shafts of sponge”, “dessert with a tomato”, “sour gel with a clear oil on top”, a “cuboid of beige matter”, “more mustard than any man could consume in a month”, and a cookie that was like “biting into a piece of brass”. And all this on an award-winning premium airline.

So why can’t they get it right?

They’ve certainly tried. After Mr Beale’s cutting correspondence, Virgin employed the celebrity chef Luke Mangan to assist with food on the airline’s Australian arm.

Singapore Airlines once hired Gordon Ramsay as a consultant, Air France has used Joel Robuchon, and in 2011 British Airways sought help from Heston Blumenthal, of Fat Duck fame, for its in-flight offerings – a partnership that was recorded for the Channel 4 documentary Heston’s Mission Impossible.

Gordon Ramsay had a stint as a Singapore Airlines consultant Credit: Fox/Splash News

Such attention to detail has brought improvements. Unfortunately, premium passengers are often the only ones to benefit from such celebrity tie-ins. Robuchon’s advice was only sought for Air France’s “La Première” menu, for example, and while First Class passengers on Emirates – one airline that has been showered in praise for its in-flight cuisine – might be presented with lobster tail, wild Iranian caviar and glazed duck breast, its economy class guests get seasonal salad and chicken.

Perhaps the biggest issue – and the one which Blumenthal spent much of his time trying to overcome – is scientific. At high altitudes our taste buds simply don’t work properly. The low humidity dries out our nasal passages, and the air pressure desensitises our taste buds, which is why airline often opt for salty stews or spicy curries. Airlines planning a new menu will often taste food and wine on board a flight before clearing it for public consumption, because of the variation in taste. Some airlines install sealed rooms in their kitchens room to replicate the experience of eating in the sky.

Lobster? Only if you're flying first class Credit: JeanCazals2016

The other major problem is logistics and costs. A concise commentary was offered by Gordon Ramsay earlier this year. "There’s no f****** way I eat on planes," he told Refinery29, in typically forthright manner. "I worked for airlines for 10 years, so I know where this food’s been and where it goes, and how long it took before it got on board."

A more detailed explanation of these various barriers was given by Jay Wacker, a professor of physics at Stanford University. Responding to the question “Why is airplane food so terrible?” on the website Quora, he issued this eloquent and thorough response:

Because it is really hard, though not impossible.

I fly a lot and on a lot of airlines. I fly first and business class a lot (thanks to upgrades). So I've sampled a lot of food. Some of it is quite good. I know that the people designing the meals care and try, but it's immensely hard. Finally, the old restaurant rule: people are seven times more likely to tell a bad experience than a good experience. Add in that people are usually in a foul mood from the whole security and boarding procedure and there's little hope for unanimous praise.

The real issue though is that the constraints upon airplane food are pretty severe. Airplanes aren't kitchens and you have a lot of people to serve. Think about trying to do a 450 person wedding and remember that there's a lot of bad wedding food and then remember that the nearest kitchen was two hours' away at serving time.

So I'll just run through my observations on the travails of the different possible menu items.

For a hot meal right after take off, you have to make a meal that can take being heated for a long period of time in the serving container. The food is precooked or par-cooked and kept at temperature (they can't do on-the-spot cooking, and they don't have the energy budget to cook-then-refrigerate-then-reheat). The shortest hold times are usually about 60 to 90 minutes. So except for stews, say goodbye to any delicate proteins. Vegetables are even tough to do well. A lot of starches begin to break down. Nevertheless, if you notice, you get the best meal right after take-off (and why they serve dinner at 4pm) because it is easiest high quality meal to get to the passengers.

For meals served well after take-off (usually trans-oceanic flights only), they have to heat from scratch. The ovens are pretty terrible, totally packed with food (450 meals from a few galleys), not consistent heating, and operating on a tight energy budget. You can't afford to undercook anything or burn something, so you have to be super-careful about choices.

Once you take into account the immense variety of dietary restrictions that airplanes have to cater to: vegetarians, vegans, pescatarians, allergies of all different varieties, spice-haters, lactose intolerance, pregnant women, people with suppressed immune systems, etc and you start to realize just what type of situation these airlines are in: being something for everyone. Ultimately, you have to hit the lowest common denominator. Finally, if there is any food-borne illness, there is going to be a serious problem (can you imagine a run on the restrooms over the Pacific). So safety first and if compromises in taste are necessary, so be it.

Sandwiches and wraps can be done fairly well on short-haul flights, but it's really tough to be done well all of the time and you run into sogginess problems on long flights unless they're very dry. The delivery chain is very complicated and you're dealing with multiple temperatures. For instance, lettuce is very sensitive to temperature. On a blistering day, those aluminum carts can get hot if they get held up unexpectedly (wheel chair assist closes down the galley). You need to be perfect all the time, and it's just really hard to do that in such a complicated environment serving hundreds of people.

Airlines keep it simple for many reasons

Finally, you have very tight budgets for ingredients. Airlines really push to get the lowest fares. People make a decision based on $5. If the airlines can knock that off the fare, they'll do it, particularly in coach. A first cousin (once removed) worked for a major airline and described to me how they went through and decided to scrap the junky black olives in salads and it saved the airline $3M a year (a few cents for 80M passengers per year). They really do scrutinize budgets down to the last ingredient.

For me, the best meals usually are the ones on Asian airlines which serve curries over rice or various stews over rice. They can be done quite cheaply. They hold well. But they disagree with a lot of Western palates, so they aren't used on many European or American airlines.

I haven't singled out the for-sale in-flight food on American airlines. Never buy this food. It's usually terrible. I get given it due to frequent flyer status and I barely touch it. It's basically convenience store food at a premium. And it's prepared and stored under similar junky condition.

If an airline was totally dedicated to delivering high quality meals, they could re-engineer the entire process. But that is not going to pay for them. Passengers have spoken, and the vast majority of them want price over value over luxury (including myself). It would probably require $100 per meal to get something that a typical person would consider a good meal. This is not due to ingredients, but having to retrofit an entire fleet of planes and design completely new ovens. You might need to get new FAA approval for a lot of equipment and it would take five to 10 years before they were in planes.

So I eat what I can and try to figure out what challenges the food engineer struggled with when designing the meal before me.

Which is the best airline for food?

To answer that question, we spoke to frequent flier and plane food expert Nikos Loukas. He travels 180,000 km each year for his website inflightfeed.com, which he uses to showcase the best – and worst – airline dishes.

His most memorable, he says, was a Hello Kitty kids meal on a flight from Paris to Taipei with Eva Air. “I specifically ordered the meal knowing that I would get this special boxed kids’ version. When the crew came out to deliver it, they kept looking for the child sitting in my seat row. I had to own up to the meal sooner or later. My seat neighbours were quite amused.”

So what makes a good in-flight dish? “I like airlines that tell a story through their food. A bit like how Swiss or say Aegean Airlines try to give a taste of their respective home countries in their onboard offerings.”

Failing that, opt, if you can, for one of the top 10 airlines in the world according to the annual Skytrax Awards. Cathay Pacific, in particular, has been praised for its good food and wine.

Can you make plane food taste better?

Apparently so. “The lower cabin pressure, dry cabin air and loud engine noise all contribute to our inability to taste and smell food and drink,” Professor Charles Spence, author of Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating, told Telegraph Travel last month.

Cathay Pacific is known to serve up some tasty morsels

“Donning a pair of noise-cancelling headphones could actually be one of the simplest ways in which to make food and drink taste better at altitude,” he writes.

Spence also points to research that shows high-altitude wines, such a Malbec from Mendoza in Argentina, tend to be rated better in the air than on the ground.

Is Malbec the answer?

Finally, if you want to eke even more flavour out of your inflight meal, you’ll need to address your dry nasal passage, which is caused by dry cabin air. “Heston Blumenthal came up with his own idiosyncratic solution to this particular problem,” writes Professor Spence. “His recommendation was... a nasal douche.”

However, this could have unintended consequences, warns Professor Spence. “Should the nasal douche work as hoped, it would also increase your ability to smell the passengers sitting close by,” he explains. “Are you sure that is really what you want?”