n all my years in the travel business,
the airlines have taken it on the chin regarding the food they
serve while aloft.
There is good reason that "airline food" is often included on
fun lists of oxymorons.
Even my unsophisticated 17-year-old nephew, said this of his
first-ever airline meal in 1984: "You call that food?"
For a more current evaluation (of sorts) or, in reality, for my
entertainment, I have maintained a file of worst-ever airline
meals, just to see what I would collect. The file covers the months
since April 1999 and refers only to my own experiences.
And there is not much in the file because, first, the meals had
to be not just bad, but really bad, to qualify for inclusion, and I
often don't get fed. (I am not rating peanuts and pretzels, after
all.)
So the worst meals were:
A sandwich, sealed in plastic. The wet bun concealed wet cheese
and a wet unidentifiable lunch meat.The apple was good. The best thing was the Pepperidge Farm fish
crackers. You can't ruin that stuff.
Another sandwich served in an air-tight plastic wrap. It was
turkey with wet cheese on wet pita bread.An inedible pizza that was a piece of bread, one inch thick,
topped with tomato paste and cheese. It came in a small box and was
precisely the same size as the box. The salad, of iceberg lettuce
with shards of carrot and red cabbage, was none too good either.
The cookies were good.It is not always easy to say why these were so awful, especially
the pizza. But, believe me, I could not swallow that.
Then, for the traveler, there are other culinary oddities, like
ketchup on a tray with continental breakfast.
That was in a hotel, but I thought it amusing anyway.
Finally, one of the funniest airline food stories I have heard
was told at the recent Institute of Certified Travel Agents Forum
in New Orleans.
Barry Asmus, senior economist with the National Center for
Policy Analysis, was a guest speaker addressing all sorts of
economic issues and their potential impact on the travel
business.
But, in the end, he could not resist talking about real travel
experiences and, ultimately, that meant airline food.
He contends this is true: He recalled a flight where the meal
was a sandwich, with a bun that was a bit wet. (The wet-food
problem sounds familiar.)
In this case, Asmus' seatmate called the stewardess over. He
handed her his serving tray with the food and said, "This is a bad
sandwich."
In response, the stewardess slapped the sandwich, after the
fashion of a spanking, and said: "Bad sandwich!"