After reading This, You May Never Complain About Eating Airline Food Again.

Sometimes, getting from A to B on a trip is often the downside of travel. The stress of getting to an airport when traffic is bad, long lines at check-in, immigration and then the tedious experience of passing through security. Of course, once the journey is underway there is the prospect of enduring a 14 - hour flight being sustained by the food that airlines provide.

At this point, here’s where I give a giant thumbs up to Singapore Airlines who seem to get the food part of the journey just right, time after time. Its no wonder this carrier consistently hauls in a ton of awards each year for being the best airline in the world and it's often the quality of its food and beverage that gets it over the winning line year in and year out.

Singapore was the first airline to introduce in-flight entertainment and offer a menu to its passengers, giving them a choice of different food options. On any given day they serve on average, over 50,000 meals in- flight and, on their mighty A380 aircraft, passengers have over 50 different meal choices. Each meal is never frozen and in most cases made from scratch.

It has always made me wonder how they do it, so I decided to find out.

Singapore Airlines contract’s Gate Gourmet, the world’s largest independent airline catering company which has its vast plant situated in the precinct of Zurich Airport in Switzerland. Inside the giant structure that houses the operation, there are 122 separate kitchens providing services to five continents and churning out a staggering 250 million meals a year!

For just one Singapore Airlines flight over 30 of Gate’s Catering staff are assigned to prepare, cook and pack 1,500 meals and have just a five-hour window in which to do it.

Now, this might seem easy if all the meals were the same but, we passengers have vastly different tastes and so offerings include Western as well as Asian dishes and then catering to those requiring ‘special’ meals such as gluten-free, halal and a host of other options.

The Airline is extremely culturally sensitive when it comes to ethnic tastes and therefore recipes have to adhere to precise measurements for spices and ingredients. One mistake in the preparation, such as including restricted ingredients due to religious requirements could mean that over 40 pounds of food is thrown away.

Providing food for passengers in the sky is a monumental task as the numbers attest. 

On average, just one of Gate’s kitchens will go through over1,300 pounds of beef tenderloin, 200 gallons of cream, a ton of vegetables and almost 100.000 bread rolls, all handmade to a precise formula, each and every week. All of the meals have to be fresh, served at a certain temperature and most importantly all must be delicious!

In the preparation kitchen, an airline convection oven is used to replicate the exact conditions on a plane but, even then, there is one thing the oven can’t replicate, the low air pressure inside the cabin. Pressure lowers the ability to differentiate the taste between salty and sweet foods and this is further compounded when food is re-heated on board, which further reduces the salt content. The kitchen has to compensate for these factors by adding extra ‘punch’ to the ingredients.

Each meal has to be reheatable but also hygienic and so, the food is not fully cooked when it leaves the kitchen and loaded onto the plane. When it is time to reheat the meals, because they are only semi-cooked, the ingredients will not dry out during the process. The balance of getting this part of the operation right is critical as food cannot be raw and certain foods are not good for reheating, such as very fine fish, to avoid this Gates uses fish with a more fatty texture.

Some ingredients are never used, such as raclette which may taste delicious but the smell is often overpowering. Cabbage too is a non-starter due to its odour when cooking which, in a confined space, can be rather unpleasant.

Once all the meals for a particular flight have been prepared over a period of just four hours all the containers will be chilled to just under 50 degrees Fahrenheit.  This process is to ensure food safety and has to be done rapidly as bacteria thrives in temperatures between 80 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

Next. How on earth do they cope with the eating utensils that are used on each flight? Singapore Airlines goes through a staggering, 70,000 pieces of real cutlery a day. Now, in order to clean all those knives, forks, and spoons, a custom designed cutlery cleaning machine was designed which uses a combination of minerals and water instead of soap to get them all sparkly clean. Employees on an assembly line separate used cups, plates, and cutlery and other debris while on another line teams package the clean cutlery for the next flight.

 Another section of the building houses the 'portion team', dedicated to making sure meal sizes are exactly the same for each passenger. This group of employees have only 45 minutes to portion over 1,500 servings all the while ensuring that the food is kept below 60 degrees Fahrenheit the entire time.

Airlines portion their food meticulously for a number of reasons. All have extremely strict weight requirements meaning that every ounce or gram counts. When you’re serving those 1,500 meals on just one flight an extra spoonful here and there can add up to a lot of weight as well as blowing the budget.

The three classes on an aeroplane have different meal packaging stipulations. In economy class, meals are packaged in foil, heated, arranged on a tray and served that way. Up in the pointy end of the plane, namely business and first class, meals are packaged with separations between sauces and other components. Here flight attendants heat the containers and then transfer the meal to a plate before serving, carefully following a strict plating guide.

Now, here’s one of those ‘mystery’ things that happen on a plane that no one seems to know about. For safety reasons, Singapore Airlines’ cabin crew have their own meal options, separate from passengers’ options. (Why? I can’t answer that) Pilots and copilots must also be provided with different meals from passengers, as well as different meals from one another. That I do understand as, if one pilot gets sick from eating a meal, presumably the other will not suffer the same discomfort! No shellfish is allowed in the cockpit either, meaning the pilots will have to wait until they are on terra firma before tucking into that lobster dinner.

As for all the drinks on board...well, that's another story altogether.

So, the next time you are on a 12 or 14-hour flight and that trolley passes you handing out meals, spare a thought for all the effort that went into it before landed on your tray table.

My thanks to Rachael Gillet for her assistance in writing this piece.

Paul v Walters is the best selling author of several novels and when he is not cocooned in sloth and procrastination in his house in Bali, he scribbles for several international and vox pop journals.