Airline meals used to be plentiful, luxurious. Here’s what happened
CNN
Whatever happened to airline food?
If you took an American Airlines flight in the 1960s, you’d be wined and dined from the Coach-class “Royal Coachman” menu. Your meal began with the beef consommé and proceeded to sautéed breast of chicken in wine. Care for a fruit tartlet for dessert? Today, if you’re flying coach, you’ll need to book a long-distance international flight or – maybe if you’re lucky – a coast-to-coast domestic one to receive a free meal. On shorter flights, you might get a choice of complementary Biscoff cookies or pretzels. Airplane meals have fallen a long way from the glory days of in-flight dining when airlines served white-tablecloth dinners and stewardesses scrambled eggs in the air. Disappearing meals have joined a long list of pain points, inconveniences and cutbacks travelers endure when they fly today. But industry cost-cutting isn’t the only reason your tartlet is gone. The end of in-flight dining for many passengers follows sweeping changes in government regulation, airplane design, in-flight entertainment, industry tax breaks, plus heightened health and safety concerns. Airline safety protocols and regulations since September 11 have changed what types of cooking knives crews can work with in the air. Airplane galleys are smaller to allow for more passenger seats on a plane. And airlines don’t serve some foods, like peanuts, to protect people with allergies. So meals are often smaller, more bland or non-existent. “Meal service was once a point of pride,” said Henry Harteveldt, who covers the travel industry for Atmosphere Research Group. Now, “the quality is so poor you have to wonder: Do airline executives actually have taste buds?” Airlines have long looked for ways to cut food production costs and reduce meal preparation times for flight attendants on board. In one famous example during the 1980s, Robert Crandall, then the head of American Airlines, bragged about how removing just one olive from every salad saved the airline $40,000 a year.
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