Making a meal of it - typical in-flight fare. Photograph: Getty.
White truffle at thirty thousand feet, root vegetable reductions at the push of a call button, and artichoke hearts over Antarctica - Jay Rayner's been making a full depth investigation into airline food. Mainly airline food in the first class cabin, obviously (although business class gets a couple of desultory mentions), and when he describes it, it sounds not only palatable, attractive and interesting, but mostly like no food experience I have ever had, nor am ever likely to have on an aeroplane.
Where the names of first class menu planners are thrown about willy-nilly like towlettes in a sudden onset of turbulence, the names of in-flight economy-fodder creators are rather more mumbled through sub-standard headphones than shouted over tannoys.
Because, I'd guess, relatively few people want to ally themselves publicly with the three colours of puree you usually get handed in cattle class.
And yet - I've no idea why it is, but there's always something exciting about the moment the food trolley appears on a flight. I don't want there to be, and I try hard to dispel the misplaced expectation by remembering the last thing I ate on a plane, but somehow, I never quite remember it well enough to manage.
Perhaps it's related to that whole theory about the body having no physical memory for pain; just as a woman approaching the idea of having a second baby is able to do so by dint of there being a blank space in her physical memory where the pain of the first birth should be, so it is with in-flight food. Maybe. It seems unlikely, but whatever. No law against theories.
I can't deny it; on some childish level, aeroplane food excites me. Maybe it's that - forgetting that I've paid already - I get all British and excited at the idea of a 'Free Lunch'.
Maybe it's the fact that I never know quite what we're going to be getting - dinner as a magical mystery tour, lunch a neatly packaged surprise gift; breakfast a - no, I can't deny it, breakfast's always a disappointment, and I know exactly what I'm getting - a stale roll, a small tub of wet red sugar with 'conserve' written in cheap script on the top, and in a foil-topped coffin, something that is certainly scrambled but has only a passing familiarity with the concept of 'egg'.
But the others? Dinner, lunch, whatever-the-hell-time-it-is-teasies, until the moment the tiny tray meets the tiny table that fills the tiny gap between me and the snoring sod in front who slammed their seat into my knees four minutes after take-off and hasn't shifted since, I remain naively optimistic that this time, this time, it's going to be different. And then I glance down. It isn't.
The next twenty minutes before the trolley comes back and whips the trays away again are spent unwrapping, poking, eating whatever I can identify and rationalise, and spending the remainder (usually about 17 minutes) trying to find the neatest way of packaging up the remnants so they sit as neatly as possible on the tray. But that's OCD for you.
I fluked myself into Business Class, once. And decided, as an experiment, to find out how different the treatment was there to back, behind the curtain. As a test, I decided to say yes. To everything offered to me. I would not call upon the Cabin Crew voluntarily - after all, it's important to remember that they're primarily there for safety of the passengers, rather than drinks service - but if any of them came up to me and offered anything, I would accept.
By the time I got off the flight I had been offered - and of course accepted - a glass of champagne, two vodka and tonics, bœuf bourgignon with roast potatoes, fresh salad, and four bread rolls, an accompanying glass of red wine (with three refills), some cheesecake, one coffees (plus two top-ups), one brandy and six individually wrapped posh chocolates. The flight was 53 minutes long.
It was at this point I realised the true meaning of the separation of the classes, and that economy and her food would never be enjoyable again. Or would be even less enjoyable than they already were.
And yet, the next time I get on a plane - it'll be a while, I've given them up for a bit - but the very next time, I know exactly what will happen. As soon as the trolley appears there'll be a rumble in my nerve endings and a fluttering in my tummy, and I'll on some level convince myself that this time, This Time it will be different.
And unless I'm on the one economy flight that has every been an exception to this rule - Sri Lankan Airlines, with fish curry for breakfast (as Rayner says, curry works, though I bet his was still better than mine) - I'm bound to be disappointed.
Unless you know something different. If anyone has ever had a truly delicious airline meal (in Economy, I mean, anything else is just a pipe dream) do say, just to keep the flame of my unrealistic in-flight appetite flickering that little bit longer ...
