It?s almost a cliche now to criticise airline food, and let?s admit it, most of it is rather terrible. Your home in the sky doesn?t come with home-cooked meals and if that isn?t enough of a let-down, the fact that they invariably manage to get vegetarian and non-vegetarian preferences mixed up, despite asking, sometimes repeatedly, is no new thing. Hell, it happened to me even when flying business class to faraway Vancouver, and one believed this was the wretched fate of those in economy. Imagine a nine-and-a-half-hour flight with no food. It happens. I don?t even know why I was vegetarian on that day, but I stubbornly remained so, most upset at being denied what I felt was my right. Sure, I get the semantics of it. There is a prefixed amount of food that is loaded on to the aircraft. If they run out, they simply run out. That?s just the way it is. The guy on another seat was possibly more stubborn than you and you are left with that familiar passive-aggressive rage that usually passes for being considerate.
In my early days of hospitality training, we were taken to the airline catering unit of our hotel. I was amazed at the state-of-the-art kitchen. If anything, it resembled a laboratory more than a kitchen. The chefs were in lab coats and wore shower caps and gloves as they handled the food. The buzz word was HACCOP. Everything was temperature-controlled. The liability of a lawsuit has airlines fumbling for protective gear, taste be damned. At 36,000 ft in the air, there is no a la carte cooking, but on the ground, there are enough lawsuits waiting to be initiated and fought. Here?s the good news, for the most part, barring a rare instance, like a bug in your plastic tray or even a shard of glass, yes, it has happened, all is well with your food, hygiene-wise. Taste is another matter. My own impression post these visits to the airline-catering kitchens was that, with an almost sterile focus on the temperature co-ordinates, taste was a distant second.
When it comes to domestic airlines, I think the no-frills Indigo wins hands down. It starts with the creative packaging in colourful colours and interesting designs with plastic windows to boot, allowing one a tantalising peek at the food. They take it up a notch with their signature cookie and nut boxes, cute little keepsakes. I know more than one person who buys the cookie boxes, not for the cookies but for the boxes. After all, we are speaking of airline food. But Indigo manages to circumvent that perception as well by keeping it simple. Because here is the truth: A Camembert souffle doesn?t work on a plane no matter what class you are travelling in?the plane?s kitchen isn?t equipped to handle it. So it makes sense to keep it simple and tasty like Indigo with its ?no-frills? credo does. This philosophy works to its advantage and there seems to be none of that pressure to go gourmet.
On the other hand, take, for example, the Mumbai Rajdhani Express, with its catered service, far superior to the food served on the mother ship Air India. It?s become too easy to dish on Air India and I don?t want to go down that path. But the evolvement of food and menus on trains has been far superior. Dare I say, Lalu Prasad Yadav did the finest job of it. I suspect he might be a foodie. In fact, Indian railways have inadvertently created their own signature dish?the ?cutlet??that comes with its unique and distinct taste, not easily reproduced elsewhere and cleverly carried across classes and trains that serve food. Of course, trains have more space. On the Mumbai Rajdhani, the bogey next to first-class is a fully functional kitchen that serves at least two meals. In fact, the dinner is made on the spot. It is not unusual to walk by in the evening hours prior to dinner and see chefs doing their mise, dicing and chopping vegetables. I remember once on the Palace of Wheels, where course-wise meals are served in a beautiful dining carriage, the food was strictly college canteen-style: Chinese, oily, greasy and not very tasty. So it?s not like the railways don?t need to swap recipes among themselves. But the Shatabdis and Rajdhanis have managed to achieve some sort of standardisation. There is no reason that travelling food need not be a gastronomical experience, but I only wish the menu planners were more realistic.
Advaita Kala is a writer, most recently of the film Kahaani. She is also a former hotelier having worked in restaurants in India and abroad
