I really can't stand the plane meal.
After eating the chicken with a waxy texture and the hard rice on the N+1st, I began to suspect that the big brother next to me who was enjoying it didn't actually have taste buds. plucked up the courage to ask the confusion in my heart - "Brother, you can eat it so unpalatable", the eldest brother smiled and said to me, "Sister, it's all about mustard."
But not everyone is as comfortable accepting fate as this big brother, and recently, a fitness expert who has never admitted defeat in his life said on social media that he has opened up a new idea for in-flight meals: "diabetic meal".
Source: Xiaohongshu @ Mumu King who loves coffee
The so-called "diabetic meal" is actually one of the "special meals" that major airlines have. There is no additional charge, but you need to book in advance of your flight through official channels. There are many types, and there are different solutions for different people with different needs.
Looking at the ingredients that are no longer greasy and have clear eyebrows, I suddenly feel that I have lost a lot.
Airplane meals are an existence that people love and hate.
Love is love every time you open the mood like opening a blind box, even if you are sleepy, or even if you have fallen asleep, you can force yourself to wake up when the flight attendant pushes the dining cart closer, stand up your ears to listen to what hot food is today, and then recite what you want in your mind repeatedly, the psychological pressure is similar to queuing in Master Bao.
And hate, hate is that the result is always unpalatable - the moment I opened the aluminum foil, although I was mentally prepared, I still smacked.
Source: Xiaohongshu @ Sleep Fairy
Chicken rice and pork noodles are twins, each meal has a high probability of appearing, and the taste is also like coming from the same mother's belly, and every bite must be rinsed with the orange juice at hand to continue. The only thing that can make people feel a little relieved is the mustard and fruit in the lunch box, those who have strong endurance can eat the rice with mustard, and those with sensitive taste buds can only rely on the yogurt in the lunch box to satisfy their hunger.
Sometimes I don't even have rice and noodles, so I just find two steamed bun slices and cucumbers to fool around; When I opened the round tin foil, I found that it was a "hamburger" that looked like a bun, but it was not as delicious as a bun. Sometimes I think I have met a conscientious airline, and when I see the tarts and cakes in the lunch box, I want to take the first bite with a fork, but I find that I can't dig it at all.
"How to put it, it just played the role of a model."
Source: Xiaohongshu comment area
Everyone commented that the plane meal was shockingly bad. This has forced everyone to start looking for a different way – some people are starting to discover that they can pre-order free "special meals" in advance, and there is an incredible variety of them.
Self-disciplined fitness people are the first to come up with the concept that you can't indulge in a meal, but you can't just go hungry. Simply book a low-fat meal with no fat, no frying, and low fat content; A few slices of chicken breast, a few broccoli, and sugar-free yogurt, although it is not a delicacy, at least it has a freshness, and it is not so difficult to swallow compared to a normal meal that you are tired of.
Source: Xiaohongshu @ Xiaoxue 4134
Order a picture of a children's meal can be cute and lovely. Although the taste is not much different from ordinary meals, compared to airplane-shaped rice, bear-shaped cakes, butterfly cakes and fruit cuts, it is visually a big win. The diabetic protein meal retains the taste, after all, most of the staple foods are pangasius and egg whites, which are difficult to make unpalatable, and with low-sugar fruit and vegetable juices, it is about equivalent to ordering a stall version of the light salad for no less than 30 yuan.
Source: Xiaohongshu @GIANNA
There is a high probability that the seafood meal is mainly shrimp, although I don't know what year and month it is a pre-made dish, but fortunately, the taste is Q bomb, and there is no smell of chicken rice that reduces appetite.
Hindu meals are all a matter of luck, from a "big mess" of broccoli and unknown vegetables to two chicken curry steaks and some chickpeas with rice, plus a small bowl of salad, a whole wheat bun, vinaigrette, black peppercorns, and a serving of fruit.
Source: Xiaohongshu @ Drink while the moonlight &@你脑袋里的水我的泪
Fruit meals, which do not require additional processing, appear as a role to save humanity. Watermelon, melon, cantaloupe, apple, pineapple, dragon fruit, eat it directly at one time. Although the watermelon is not so sandy and the dragon fruit is a bit raked, the overall is still refreshing and delicious.
Source: Xiaohongshu @ Pipi Shrimp
But not all "special meals" are pleasantly surprised.
Some netizens described that the gluten-free meal they ordered was chicken cutlets and potatoes, although the type had not changed, but it looked like they had no appetite, and they had the illusion of becoming a Buddha, and finally "I couldn't stand it and asked for a normal meal"; Some people also heard that the breakfast of a certain airline is generally white porridge, so they made an appointment in advance on the app for a Western-style vegetarian meal in the special meal, and the picture is the egg. As a result, the usual breakfast of the day was a beef burger with yogurt, and when I got my hand, I had already softened tempura vegetables, and the peeled eggs had fallen off after I didn't know how long they had been left, and the texture was like gummy.
What's more, the diabetic meal is a spooky combination - a sandwich with blueberry jam and cucumber slices.
Source: Xiaohongshu @ Little Do
In fact, it is not new for airlines to set up "special meal menus".
Since most passengers are basically in a state of "resignation" to their in-flight meals, they have missed the poor information: it turns out that in-flight meals can be booked in advance.
Some questioned whether such behaviour would tie up resources and leave no places for those who really need it. But the crowd who was already driven crazy by the plane meal sent a slightly bitter reply - "The plane meal in the past two years has become more and more unpalatable", which also forced people to really have no choice, so they thought of ordering a "special meal".
Screenshot of the official website of Sichuan Airlines
This is strange, why is everyone scolding the plane meal for being unpalatable, and the airline still has to "pretend to be deaf and dumb"?
In fact, there is nothing wrong with airlines not providing meal service, after all, there is never any legal requirement for airlines to provide it.
In the "Quality of Public Air Transport Services" issued by the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine of the People's Republic of China and the Standardization Administration of the People's Republic of China, only the following three criteria are proposed:
Airlines must provide catering services to passengers in accordance with their service commitments to passengers;
The hygiene of meals and beverages should comply with the corresponding regulations;
The catering service of first class and business class should be different from that of ordinary class, and corresponding catering standards should be formulated.
When it comes to in-flight meals, airlines have the absolute initiative. You think that you have even been taken to the sky, and what you eat is just a sufficient and unnecessary condition.
And this service, which is in the hands of the airlines themselves, is not a good business at all.
In October last year, there was a well-known hot search, and netizens posted photos of their plane meals on Weibo, with the text: "Four steamed buns, a bag of mustard, and a piece of cabbage, it's really a piece of cabbage!" It's the first time I've seen such a strange airline meal in so many years. As soon as this incident came out, it sparked a lot of resonance among netizens.
Some airlines reluctantly explained that the emergence of this "steamed cabbage" meal may be due to the need for airlines to save costs or the uneven level of service at specific airports.
Source: Weibo @Fengge Outlaw World
Nowadays, everyone complains that "in-flight meals are getting more and more unpalatable", and it is not a stereotype, but that airlines are really trying to pull a sum of money out of passengers' mouths.
The financial reports of the three major airlines in 2019 show that the money spent on meals can only be counted as a fraction. Air China's in-flight catering expenses amounted to RMB4.026 billion, accounting for 3.56% of total operating costs. China Eastern Airlines expenses were 3.667 billion yuan, accounting for 3.42%; China Southern Airlines' expenses were 3.975 billion yuan, accounting for 2.93%.
In 2023, the catering expenses of the three major airlines have all dropped significantly, with Air China accounting for 2.24% of the total cost, China Eastern Airlines accounting for 2.66%, and China Southern Airlines even more ruthlessly, shrinking to only 1.74%.
For the civil aviation industry, where the long-term profit margin is maintained at 3%-5%, it is better to save and want to make more money.
The cost of in-flight meals accounts for about 3%-3.5% of the overall operating costs, taking the three major airlines as an example, the cost of each in-flight meal is expensive, at least twenty or thirty, if you can save one or two yuan from each serving, then for the airlines that can casually have hundreds of millions of passengers, you can save hundreds of millions of expenses every year.
The seniors have long given the standard answer. In 1987, American Airlines took one olive off its first-class salad, a move that helped them save $40,000 a year; Northwest Airlines' strategy of eliminating free pretzels also saved them a whopping $2 million a year.
However, in-flight meals are not so unpalatable from the start.
There is an objective reason that people's sense of taste will decline when they are flying. This conjecture was proven during a flight simulation experiment conducted by German scientists. When flying at high altitudes, the perception of sweetness and saltiness decreases by 30%, but the perception of acidity and bitterness changes relatively little. As the air in the cabin is dry, the sense of smell becomes dull and the perception of odors decreases.
Airlines have also come up with a lot of ways to do this. For example, in order to make everyone less irritable, the in-flight meal will be divided into multiple containers to be served, and the dishes will be mainly bright colors; At the same time, try not to spit out meat that needs to be spit out bones; In order to prevent passengers from eating flatulence (farting), the proportion of soy products will be kept to less than 10%.
And in the history of in-flight meals, there have also been "delicious dishes".
The first in-flight meal was born in 1919, when the British arms dealer Hendry Page Company had no business because of the end of World War I, and the inspiration was to convert a batch of bombers into planes that could carry more than a dozen passengers.
It didn't take long for United Airlines to launch its first fully functional airplane galley, with fried chicken and scrambled eggs as recommended.
At this time, I remembered that a netizen complained that when I was on the plane, a big brother asked the flight attendant if the plane meal was a pre-made meal, and the flight attendant was embarrassed, and the passenger next to me replied intimately - "No, the captain is turning the spoon in the cab."
But in the past, this was really not a joke, and the plane meal was really "freshly fried by a flight attendant". Richard Foss, writing A History of Airline Food, wrote, "Engineers mixed quicklime and water and used the heat energy from this chemical reaction to create kawaii furnaces. ”
Pan Am, known as the "early leader of high-end airlines", has set up a heating oven in the galley of the aircraft, and has widely promoted its 300-second rapid heating function, directly bringing in-flight meals into the ready-made era.
Source: Internet
Around the sixties and seventies, in-flight meals began to become more and more grand. The foreign first-class cabin not only has fresh-cut ham, lobster, caviar, but also red wine and champagne, and even the cutlery is silver; China is not far behind, and the plane meal is accompanied by Moutai wine, Chinese cigarettes, and White Rabbit toffee.
Source: Internet
The advent of low-cost airlines in 1967 officially made airlines discover that "in-flight meals can save a lot of money". The world's first low-cost airline was Southwest Airlines, nicknamed "Peanut Airlines", because the airline only provided simple peanuts as a meal for short-haul passengers, and later refused to give peanuts for fear of allergies.
But this "slamming the door" practice made them make a lot of money. According to the data, Southwest Airlines carries about 40 million fewer passengers a year than the No. 1 airline, but its net profit is $1 billion more.
The first low-cost airline in China was Spring Airlines, which was established in 2004, and although the overall income was not as good as that of China Southern Airlines, the profit brought by each aircraft could reach 18.54 million, which was much higher than the 3.551 million yuan of China Southern Airlines.
Airlines want to make money, and passengers are also helpless, and they can't eat a bite of in-flight meals, so they can only spontaneously study and study tips-
1. If there is rice, choose rice, because most of the noodles are not enough sauce, and they will lump together and become very raked after a long time;
2. Make full use of the chili sauce or mustard in the lunch box, and eat it with small bread when necessary.
3. There is chicken to choose chicken, and the taste of other meats will change greatly after secondary heating, but chicken will not;
4. Choose the seat in the first half or the second half to avoid that some meals have already shone and there are fewer choices when they are sent to you;
5. Book "special meals" in advance to reduce the probability of stepping on mines.
Of course, the most practical thing is - to go to first class. Emirates, for example, has launched an all-you-can-eat caviar service for first class at a cost of $2 billion, and economy class is as luxurious as first class, no matter how much it is reduced. In order to retain high-end customers, today's airlines have no loss in first class.
Hey, as for economy class, it's just a practical means of transportation. Even if you don't give you in-flight meals, the air ticket money will not be reduced, and everyone will have to take a plane.
Edit | Tachibana Chief Author | Plus design | Fat Rabbit opening picture source | Xiaohongshu @ Shenyang Afternoon Review Cover Image Source | Xiaohongshu @ actually doesn't want to go