The ultimate reason that airline food is so tasteless
One of the major changes in the way airlines work over the last few years is that they hardly ever feed you on a flight any longer, although given the way airline food generally tastes, that’s probably a very good thing for most of us.
In fact, for me, it’s been a real bonus because I’ve now learned to arrange a home-made tasty package to take with me onto a plane every time I fly, and believe me, when I take out my take-away sushi package, I often end up being the envy of my seatmates.
But here’s the thing: why does airplane food taste so, well, “bland” is the nice term I’ll use, since this is a nice column for nice people, after all.
Well, this will probably surprise most of you but the reason airline food tastes so “bland”, according to a recent study is not that airlines use the lowest common denominator ingredients for those mass-produced meals or that they pre-cook the meals several weeks in advance (pre-wash them may be more like it) or that they use the blandest recipes to try not to aggravate too many passengers.
Nope, turns out, according to this study in the little-read journal, Food Quality and Preference, that it’s flying itself that makes food taste so tasteless.
Apparently, when study subjects were blind-folded and asked to taste some dishes, the foods they ate tasted less salty and less sweet to them – more bland in other words – than when they were not wearing blindfolds, although the food also tasted “crunchier” with blindfolds on.
Bottom line: if you want to enjoy your mama’s cooking to the max, don’t eat her meals while parked beside a highway playing the boom box machine but rather try to eat them when locked in a sound-proof room.
