Fasten your seat belts: Brave Reg hack spends a week eating airline food grounded by coronavirus crash
- Reference: 1593068233
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/06/25/airline_food_taste_test/
- Source link:
Reader, I was unable to quell my curiosity.
Which is how I found myself at Gategourmet's mega-kitchen in the industrial badlands near Sydney Airport. Perched next to Australia's most-polluted waterway, a location it shares with a nearby [2]Equinix data centre , the facility boasts a colossal car park that was largely empty and housed some of the massive trucks that roll up to planes to disgorge comestibles – a probable casualty of the massive drop in airline traffic.
This was part of the justification for my curiosity. Gategourmet may be a supercolossal multinational entity, but its kitchens are just 3km from my door and many of its workers and suppliers are local. Surely it was my duty to eat its stuff, just as I had studiously – no, heroically! – patronised local breweries, bakeries, patisseries and cafes that traded during lockdown.
[3]
Airline food dispensing trucks in the Gategourmet car park. Click to enlarge
[Does the one on the right say 'quarantine waste'? – ed.]
And because Register readers demand tests that use some sort of method in the same neighbourhood as science, I challenged myself to eat it every day for a week. I even roped in some second opinions among folks who saw the comic potential of this plan: fellow tenants in our Australian office and one of my kids said they'd sample the fare.
So after filing my final Reg copy for the day, I headed off to the kitchen and found staff remarkably chirpy under the circumstances and a small queue of my fellow culinary masochists. As we waited for our food to be retrieved, we cheerily discussed the irony of paying for meals that are usually consumed grudgingly.
A mysterious menu
The food arrived in an utterly nondescript plastic bag that spoke of haphazard assembly rather than Gategourmet having hatched a cunning plan.
[4]
10 frozen airline meals tucked into my freezer. Click to enlarge
Gategourmet didn't reply to multiple emails about its reason for the sale, but once I got the meals home, a likely rationale revealed itself: the trays in which they rested were marked with the insignia of Virgin Australia, the local outpost of Beardy Branson's aviation empire that has just gone into [5]administration .
I initially suspected that Gategourmet has freezers full of stuff that Virgin Australia can't or won't pay for, so went looking for anyone who would. But there appears to be real demand for meals at these prices because at the time of writing Gategourmet advised that "Due to a high volume of orders" it could take four or five days before the frozen goodies are available.
Those un-returned emails mean I remain in the dark about whether the company can make a profit at AU$2.50 a meal, if that price is anywhere near what it charges to airlines, or any other details.
What I do know is that I ended up with three types of meal:
Beef massaman curry
Mango chicken curry
Tom yam rice
The long haul
So how did I go across the week? Here's my diary.
Day One: Beef massaman curry For those unfamiliar with the dish, this is a slow-cooked affair that places big chunks of beef and potato in a spicy gravy. Gategourment's version was so sweet it almost tasted like satay sauce. However, the beef was nicely tender. The accompanying Chinese broccoli had soggy stems but decent leaves. The rice was odourless but was served in sufficient quantity to soak up the extra gravy. The long, long list of ingredients included sulphites and some thickening agents that triggered mucus-making parts of my anatomy and left me feeling in need of a good sweat to rid my body of things it doesn't appreciate.
I ate this one in the office, now that I'm allowed in, and the odour quickly killed off my co-tenants' enthusiasm for the project.
Verdict : Wouldn't leave you feeling horrible in the air, but wouldn't cut it groundside under any circumstances.
[6]
A Reg hack's life: recently microwaved airline food for lunch, at my desk. Click to enlarge
Day Two: Tom yam rice The name implied some sort of fancy Thai take on fried rice, yet this was, straight-up, just rather sweet fried rice. I quite liked this one and even ate a second meal, partly because the portion was small and partly because I enjoyed it. Sure, the peas went a little leathery after being microwaved to life. And I did have to negotiate a classic airline food mystery substance: was that odd yellowish porous lump a piece of egg or an unspeakably abused cauliflower fragment? Looking at the ingredients list just gave me another near-allergy experience.
Verdict : Would buy from supermarket as a work-from-home lunch option. Would also hide in far recesses of freezer to avoid criticism by family.
Day Three: Invited a guest to try the frozen fare: Gartner research veep Michael Warrilow. A fellow aviation enthusiast and frequent flyer who has attained membership tiers denoted by exotic metals, Warrilow offered us a personal view of the meal, to whit: "This brings back precious memories of untold long-haul economy travel, nestled between a 150kg snorer and a screaming baby. My colleagues and I will be availing ourselves of this service."
He also offered two analytical takes on the meals:
"The flavoursome massaman beef was expertly microwaved by El Reg 's reporter, making it a contender in this week's Magic Quadrant for Lunch-as-a-Service. Looking to 2023, it has a real shot of taking flight into the leader's category."
"In a recent survey, two out of three analyst respondents (hence frequent flyers) indicated a craving for what is otherwise now unattainable cuisine. This offering will fill that market need and is destined to take off."
Day Four: Mango chicken curry For years I've jokingly described bad airline food as "protein chunks in spiced slurry". This dish nailed the brief. While the sauce did taste of mango, the flavour surely came from the world's tiredest, oldest, lowest-quality mango that could only be bothered making a token effort to taste like mango for the briefest moment possible. Then it blanded out into a sludge of over-cooked and oddly sweet chicken. As a child of the 1970s, I have a fear of savoury dishes involving fruit, and this one invoked bad memories of apricot chicken casseroles and prunes put in places they should never have been allowed.
Verdict : Whatever happens to Virgin Australia, I won't fly it just to make sure I never encounter this dish again.
Day Five: A Saturday on which, as I reached into the freezer to pull out a frozen meal, my family all let me know that if I stunk out the house with that rubbish, I'd be sleeping outside.
Day Six: See Day Five, above, and replace "Saturday" with "Sunday".
Day Seven: Massaman curry and Tom yam rice With two meals left in the office freezer and one day left in the challenge, I took the plunge and ate both.
Neither had improved and even though the lunch cost me just $5 – 50 cents more than a large coffee – as I shovelled them in, I wondered if I could trash the remaining chicken curries left in my home freezer without being ridiculed or scoring bucketloads of bad karma for wasting food.
I finished the meals with admiration for the chefs who make such neat little nuggets of nosh, a desire not to eat any such food for quite some time, and guilt that I'd thrown away quite a lot of packaging.
But the experiment was in no way any sort of substitute for travel. And as an under-restrictions wheeze it was less fun than just one of the remarkable raspberry custard-filled almond croissants that have become part of my plague-time economic stimulus effort.
[7]
Australia's most-polluted waterway: Alexandra Canal in central Sydney. Click to enlarge
I was, however, pleased to have had a glimpse of a corner of my home city I'd not seen before, and a peek into some usually inaccessible slices of its life. That glimpse was sustaining because while international travel is currently not an option for Australians and even some of our internal borders are closed, I got a reminder that there are plenty of new sensations I can find on my doorstep, and plenty of old sensations I really should know to avoid. ®
Sponsored: [8]Security Features of Connect for Anthos
[1] https://www.gategourmetmeals.com.au/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/15/equinix_new_australian_data_centre/
[3] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/24/gategourmet_trucks.jpg
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/24/frozen_airline_meals.jpg
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/10/virgin-australia-administrators-warn-of-failure-without-urgent-taxpayer-support
[6] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/24/airline_massaman_curry.jpg
[7] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/24/alexandra_canal_sydney.jpg
[8] https://go.theregister.com/tl/1956/-8474/security-features-of-connect-for-anthos?td=wptl1956
Re: Lester would have been proud!
And, please note, this experiment could only have been done because no large groups are allowed in one's vicinity. I sincerely think that a mob would have gathered to end the experiment, just like the weekend was definitely out of the question, when a family mob put a stopper to the fun.
Anyhow, it is a brave experiment. I guess that we all can sympathise with your suffering. My guess is that your family suffered the most. At least they prevented a weekend disaster.
Have a beer with that to wash it all down and kill the spoiled memory neurons to forget (probably required for the next couple of weeks to get the taste working again).
Opportunity
Amusing article. Brave lad.
At the risk of being branded Off-Topic Eco-Warrior, I think it's disgraceful that governments are not taking this opportunity to thin the herd of planes. Instead they're squandering (our) billions on bailing out these polluting planet-killing monstrosities. We should retain only minimal flights; no 50-mile jollies for lazy CEOs, no unnecessary business world crossings just to use up the corporate travel budget. I worked for a large American financial corporation and occasionally took part in 5000-mile video conferences on triple HD screens with HD audio, and it was like having the other people in the room. There's 100 tonnes of CO2 saved right there.
This is an opportunity that shouldn't be squandered.
Re: We should retain only minimal flights; no 50-mile jollie
and who will decide who is allowed on a 50-mile jollie (a really unfair case to prove your point, as it was probably in the 0.0001% journeys taken). Do YOU decide what is a "jollie", and what is "essential travel"? And, if not essential, "worthy cause"? Do we vote for the list democratically (those of use who traveled by plane for holiday would be, naturally, excluded from the ballot).
When you offer quick and easy solution for governments, perhaps you can offer a quick and easy solution on how they can replace profits from mass-air travel that go to state coffers? Last time I looked at my airplane ticket that was supposed to take me on a "jollie" across the Atlantic, of around 300 gbp I spent on it, about 50 gbp was airline profit, the rest was taxes, some local, most for central coffers of UK gov. And it was a return flight, by the way. I got it refunded, lucky me,, but every day those thousands of planes stay on the ground and give a break to to goode olde planet that we fuck left right and centre, there's "quite a lot" of money that fails to be collected by the state. Sure, quite o lot of it would be wasted (government motto could be: nobody knows better how to waste money), but a fair bit does go back towards making people's lives... better, I guess. What I mean is that "scrap those planes" is one of those great, simple and easy solutions that aren't.
Re: We should retain only minimal flights; no 50-mile jollie
>Do YOU decide what is a "jollie", and what is "essential travel"?
No, COVID-19 decides. And CO2 decides.
None of the shouty little kids like their nasty medicine, but sometimes they have to suck it up. Can't be much worse than "protein chunks in spiced slurry".
Re: We should retain only minimal flights; no 50-mile jollie
"who is allowed on a 50-mile jollie"
A jolly, actually.
I knew that my comment would draw responses like this - "What about the money?" No doubt you'd like to make the same argument about coal...?
We pay politicians to make these sorts of decisions, people who should(!) be taking advice from scientists and experts to make the best choices. The bottom line, however, is that plane travel is, in many/most cases, unnecessary, avoidable and vastly polluting. You appear to be boasting about your contribution to destroying my children's planet. Shameful.
Re: We should retain only minimal flights; no 50-mile jollie
It's not just planes.
Part of my current work is contributing to a team whose bulk of labor is in South Carolina. One of our current suppliers is in Metro Detroit ("local" to me), so they asked if I could drive across town and take some measurements of an already-built engine electrical harness because someone was worried it was too short and they'd have to change/add something else to make it work.
Like I said, "local" -- it's 50 miles one-way, but way better than flying from SC. I've made this drive before to said supplier (see the footnotes for more tales) when the project was new.
But instead of wasting gas for a one-person car trip and wasting my entire working day -- plus the supplier having to let in an outsider when their current safety rules say NO -- the supplier helpfully just sent a sample harness to SC for the Concerned Person to study themselves.
Although this surprised me greatly that they would release actual hardware to us early, there would probably already have been vehicles hauling all sorts of cargo/parcels between Detroit and Charleston, so a few pounds more is tuppence compared to me (250+) in my car (???).
Isn't unintentional environmentalism fun?
Wasted gas on trips I *have* taken for work -- all these trips involved getting hands-on with either a vehicle or facility equipment so tele/web-conferencing was not an option:
-- Multiple trips to Stryker's birthplace in London, ONT: 113 miles one-way, plus USA/CAN border crossing wasting time & gas idling. Most times I left early AM and went home same day, arriving usually just after normal dinnertime.
-- Three trips to a facility in Ohio in 2016 for testing: 186 miles one-way. The first time (early May: characterize the problem; test initial solutions) I stayed 3 days (with another 35 miles one-way to the hotel). The second time (August: verify final solution) I meant to stay, but the testing went so well that I cancelled the hotel and drove all the home the first day, we skipped a day, and I repeated the whole thing again the third day. I spent way more time in the car than on the testing grounds that month.
"This offering will fill that market need and is destined to take off."
Well, as he was from Gartner, that pretty much condemns it to death!
"use by date"
*me: zooms on package label in photo*
So, probably they got them so cheap also because the "use by" date was rapidly approaching and there was no chance of ever selling them otherwise.
The company would have to throw the expired food away if that date was reached.
Australia's most-polluted waterway: Alexandra Canal
Was that before or after this culinary experience?
Enqiuring minds need to.....err rr on second thoughts no we don't!
Icon - Going with beer "Of course, lager! The only thing that can kill a vindaloo!" - Lister.
Re: Australia's most-polluted waterway: Alexandra Canal
Two pints of beverage and a packet of comestibles, please.
Extra flavourings
I seem to recall hearing that airline food has to be spiced up a lot to compensate for the reduced taste/smell sensation of being in a reduced pressure atmosphere. Not surprising then that consumption at sea level is a rather different experience. I wonder if they have a pressure chamber to test that on the ground? Excellent story though and glad at least some of the food is not wasted.
Re: Extra flavourings
> I wonder if they have a pressure chamber to test that on the ground?
Why would they do that when they can just hop on a plane and try out new recipes under actual conditions?
Give them a break
The pressure & humidity in aircraft cabins has been shown to reduce the perception of saltiness and sweetness by ~30%. To offset this affect most airline meals are overdone. This could also be why curries seem to be a popular option with airlines.
If only...
Now if only they needed to sell off those alcoholic beverages as well....oh, and those nice little bags of pretzels
Re: If only...
Those don't really spoil, so likely they can just flog em to other airlines. Looks like these meals were approaching their best-before date and had to be either sold or thrown away. I can understand (and applaud) the decision they made to just flog em off cheap and recoup their money.
Would I eat airline curry?
Maybe. Just maybe. If the plane crashed and I was stranded with no hope of rescue for weeks, then I might allow it to pass my lips. After I'd eaten the other passengers first, of course.
(With thanks to NTNOCN.)
Re: Would I eat airline curry?
Fortunately for me, I don't eat a great deal anyway but I stopped eating inflight meals and taking my own snacks decades ago.
On one trip on the outward bound leg I had a salad with unrequested wild life in it, a caterpillar which attested to the freshness but spoilt my appetite. On the return journey the caterpillar had been pushed out of its job by a tiny slug.
Home made sarnies and a couple in of apples have been my inflight grub ever since.
Oh the fresh food flights I am fairly sure were Laker a good airline in all other respects.
Re: Would I eat airline curry?
Discussions like this always remind me of the peach flan that I was once served on a domestic BA flight back in the day (at least a decade ago). Looking at the ingredients list started off something like:
Apple (30%), Peach (25%)...
Which always made me wonder why they called it a peach flan? Although to be fair when you ate it, that was what you actually tasted (due to low cabin pressure or whatever).
That said they did used to do a semi-acceptable breakfast on that flight (Gatwick to Edinburgh), set you up reasonably well for a days work once you got there.
Ah the good old days...
Way back at the turn of the century, I used to love my Thursday night BA flights between Heathrow and Edinburgh... It was curry night on the 'plane and I always had 2. God know what the plane smelt like the next morning. Then it all got changed and and we started getting lobbed a bag with "Enjoy" written on it. I stopped flying with BA after that.
I'm not a frequent flyer but I travel enough to know that it's always best to order a special meal, ideally asian vegetarian, even you are not asian or a vegetarian.
And I usually get to eat four of them because the wife and kids refuse to eat theirs.
Aer Lingus breakfast
Is the only airline meal I happily paid for - never quite as good as a real fry up but with juice, coffee and soda bread for under a tenner it saved me time at home.
Beef massaman curry is actually my now ex wife’s favourite dish. I have cooked it many a time, usually employing a sachet of some sort from the local Chinese food emporium but said sachets are much better than a western supermarket equivalent which as you noted tends to the far too sweet. BTW Massaman is the Thai equivalent of Mussulman or Moslem. IOW they got curry courtesy of Arab traders who brought it from India.
Just like we call our numbering system Arabic numerals but they are in fact Indian numerals. We just named them after the messenger not the originator.
I bet your butt hole and the toilet really appreciated the experiment.
Price...
The $2.50 a portion sounds about right.
My wife works at a local after school care centre and they get around $2 - $2.50 per child per day for lunch and "tea-time snack". The lunchtime meal is delivered by a local catering service. Sometimes it is good, but often bland, tasteless or downright repulsive - she gets to bring home leftovers now and then.
Tastes differ...
Especially between sea level and 25,000ft.
Didn't one of the airlines hire Heston Blumenthal to come up with a new menu that would taste reasonable but not cost a fortune to produce? IIRC, the biggest problem he had was that how food tastes when you're in the development kitchen (or at home) and how it tastes under the reduced air pressure at altitude is significantly different...
Valor deserves its reward
A Palatezer Prize, maybe?
Lester would have been proud!
Well done, Simon - taking one for the team and indirectly choosing a quid-a-day challenge that never occured to *any* of us!