Airline food: flights of fancy

If all efforts to radically improve airline food are doomed to failure, should we just accept what we get in all its compromised glory?
Airline food: Cyprus Airways hot meal
A Cyprus Airways hot meal: smoked salmon with marinated Italian mushrooms, charcoal grilled chicken with a tomato and basil sauce, stir-fried vegetables and saffron pillau rice, raspberry mirror, and cheese and crackers. Apparently. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer

British Airways has turned to the great British public to design an in-flight menu in honour of the 2012 Olympics. Coming hard on the heels of Heston's efforts to improve the airline's food, you have to admire their persistence. But are they, if not quite flogging a dead horse, at least prodding a catatonic one?

In his Channel 4 show, the great bald one noted that this was "a Herculean challenge, because if it wasn't someone would have done it already." Ah, the ego of the TV chef. Just as it's barking to suggest that Saint Jamie was the first person to clock that school dinners were rotten, so too is it deeply self-entitled for him to think that he's the first person to attempt to zhoosh up airline food. As 21st-century consumers we are so demanding that pretty much all airlines – from Estonian to Dutch to Singaporean – are having to pull their fingers out.

But how much can airline food really be improved? The greatest problems that these airlines face are unchanging. First of all, they have to crank out a quite extraordinary number of meals every day. Gate Gourmet, the largest independent airline caterer, produces a boggling 685,000 meals a day, while Emirates churns out around 90,000 at their factory in Dubai. Then, once all these meals have been cooked, cooled, divvied up, stuck on trays, and sent up to 35,000 feet, you have to eat what's left. Or, as John Candy says in this deleted scene from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: "about 7 hours ago that was lasagne. But with all the delays, they heat it, reheat it, heat it again until, well, it looks like that."

"What shocks me about airline food is that there's a lot flown around the world to be put on other planes," says Lawrence Keogh, head cook at Roast. "I've seen a freezer the size of a football pitch with pallets piled high with chilli con carne and curry that were made in Frankfurt and flown into London to be put on another plane to go to San Francisco. Now that's not correct is it? Your gut's telling you that's not right."

Keogh has been designing meals for BA's "Canary Wharf to Wall Street" flight – a 32-seat, business class service from London City to JFK, since 2009. Menus are British, change monthly with the seasons, and do sound truly delicious (a 4oz grilled steak with bloody mary mix, chateau potatoes and mushroom and cream of corn mixture sounds pretty good, for example). But they're only catering for two flights a day – that's 64 people. Try multiplying that by 10,000. "I've only scratched the surface," concedes Keogh. "Obviously rolling it out across club class worldwide is a different picture, but it's all achievable."

It's all very well to talk about club class worldwide, but what about the rest of us in steerage? As well as the two immovable obstacles of passenger volume and reheating, there are other annoyances: the fact that you have to eat with your elbows tucked in, like some awkward T-rex in a high chair; the fact that your food is in a plastic tray; the fact that the kid behind you is kicking the seat; the bizarre notion that feeding you a croissant at midnight will help you acclimatise because it's breakfast where you're going.

Perhaps we should just give up waiting for someone to come up with a formula for high-grade airline food and accept it in all its compromised glory. After all, there's something fun about the break in monotony that the airline meal provides – the odd waft as you peel the lid from your dinner (how does it always manage to smell the same?), the hot, moist flannel, the orange juice with its foil lid, the diddy cutlery … these quirks make the experience somehow special and unique. It's not necessarily what you'd want on terra firma, but then few things on a plane are.
