What is it about airline food that just goes so wrong? Soggy lasagne, appetizers that look anything but and random plasticized shapes that could be anything… Sounds familiar? Marco ‘t Hart, who runs AirlineMeals.net (kind of like a TripAdvisor for tray food) has collected thousands of photos of airline meals from all around the world, snapped and sent in by disgruntled frequent flyers everywhere. From the bad to the truly barfing, here are five of the worst he’s seen…
And we don’t fare much better… Remember back in the day, that bacon roll you used to get free on the redeye to Gatwick? Ok, so it was just a slice of bacon and some flabby roll, but even in your bleary-eyed state, it made you feel just a bit special.
Times have changed, and onboard airline catering disintegrated into packets of pretzels to go with your vodka and coke and those mini bags of sawdusty triangles that didn’t really know whether they were a biscuit or a crisp. And now you don’t get anything free (except a streaming cold when the guy in the row behind sneezes over you). Now it’s all pay-per-chew and thanks to FlyBe we have their (rather hopefully-named) ‘Deli in the Sky’ which offers us the opportunity to buy packs of mini Pringles, muffins and sandwiches like the one they describe on their website as “everyone’s deli favourite – the classic BLT”. Well obviously not your favourite if you’re Jewish, Muslim or vegetarian.
So what are you to do if you want something a bit more special on your flight? You could pack your own lunch, but if you’re anything like us, fiddling around with single-serving sizes and remembering how much liquid, gels and pastes you’re allowed to take on board isn’t the first thing on our minds when we’re dashing to catch our flight. So just to liven up the boarding gate boardom, we drifted off and imagined we could design our own airline menu. And because this is Gallery, we decided we would. We even roped in a few chefs to help. Take a look across the page (post:Flight of Fancy) for Gallery’s first class flight food experience…
