What to eat and drink on a long-haul flight - and what to avoid
Inflight meals have a dubious reputation, but some ingredients taste better than others at 9,000 metres, the experts tell Sunory Dutt
If you think airline food tastes a bit "off", you're not the only one. The 10,000 taste buds in our mouth are able to differentiate between sweet, salty, bitter and sour on terra firma. But when we're up in the air, our sense of taste loses its bearings a bit.
German researchers at Fraunhofer Institute found that the aircraft's cabin atmosphere - pressurised at 2,400 metres - combined with cool, dry cabin air - numbs about a third of our taste buds.
The stagnant cabin tends to dry out the mucus membranes in the nose, thus dulling the olfactory sensors that affect taste. The researchers also found that the perception of saltiness and sweetness dropped by about 30 per cent at high altitude.
Also, airline food is prepared, chilled and stored until it is loaded onto the flight, which could be a few hours from when it was cooked. According to Harold McGee, scientist and author of , when food is warmed up to room temperature or higher, it starts to deteriorate, and once it crosses a threshold - 160 degrees Celsius for meat, 140 degrees for fish - it tends to be dry and tough, no matter what you do.
Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, says the freezing, drying and storage of airline food are hard on flavour at any altitude, let alone 9,000 metres. She says ice cream is the only thing that tastes good on a plane.
