Has travel food really improved?

When travelling for your holidays, there’s plenty to get excited about. Sadly, the food on the way there probably isn’t one of them. By air or by rail, the dinner offerings tend to be rather limp. But have we made no progress at all? What innovations are set to shake up this decidedly poor show for travel food? In this article, we’ll explore different methods of travel to see what treats are on offer.

Food on the railway

Any frequent train-traveller knows to pack their own lunch for long journeys. Unless you’re travelling in first class, crisps and biscuits and dry sandwiches are about all you can expect from train travel. And that’s if you’re lucky (or unlucky, depending on your view), as many services have axed their on-board trolley services.

Where many services cite a lack of sustainability for removing the on-board trolley, this is just another way of saying a lack of business. There’s simply no reason to pay so much for a sandwich or packet of crisps on-board the train when the same, if not better, food exists a throwing distance from the train at a slightly lower price. Train stations are filled to the brim with all kinds of outlets, and it’s not just Burger King and WHSmith on offer now. For many of us, it’s no trouble to pack our own food and bring that with us or grab something on the way to the platform.

If you have a first-class ticket, your ticket will entitle you to some drinks, snacks, and maybe even a small meal of sorts on some trips. But as the Telegraph posits, the array of food often doesn’t come to much, and when you consider the price difference between a standard and a first-class ticket, you’re technically paying for the food you’re eating and then some. In fact, The Tab’s Annie Lord tried to make a profit from her £49.00 first-class ticket via eating and drinking the complementary food. Two hot drinks, six gin and tonics, one apple juice, one Pepsi, one cake, one bag of nuts, a bag of crisps, a piece of fruit, a salad, and a few snacks later, Annie made a profit of £5.65. A victory?

Food on the seas

With sea travel far less popular than air travel, it’s possible that we just don’t hear as much about boat travel food. Or perhaps it is because space isn’t so much an issue on a ferry as it is on a plane or train — you tend to find a good array of restaurants and food services on a ferry. The quality isn’t so much an issue as the price, with many advocating taking your own food with you in order to avoid the ever-present expense of travel-based food.

Food in the air

Let’s look now at the real elephant in the room when it comes to travel food. Or, indeed, the questionable meat floating in a generic gravy waiting to be poked at with the disposable cutlery provided.

So, most of us have the technology in our pocket to talk to someone anywhere in the world, to find out answers to all kinds of questions online, and watch hilarious cat videos, but we can’t cook nice food on a plane? We’ve not only sent men to the moon, we presumably fed them on the way there and back. How hard can it really be?

There must be a certain level of difficulty in cooking so many meals in a cramped space to be sure. The largest independent airline food provider makes 685,000 meals every day, says The Guardian, giving a whole new meaning to ‘fast food’. It’s not that airlines don’t have the capacity to serve pomegranate-glazed lamb or chilled prawns with an aioli tarragon sauce. In fact, back in the 1950s, before the dawn of flight classes, meals were ridiculously flashy, with charcuteries featuring in the aisles of the then-smaller planes.

Then, it came about that airlines spotted a good opportunity to make money. They could split flight classes and offer this lovely grub to the first class flyers, and less-expensive food (or none at all) to economy class. Even with technology like sous-vide allowing for food to be vacuum-sealed and slow-cooked to keep it tasty even when cooked in the air, technological advancements in airline food don’t often filter down to economy class plates.

At the end of the day, it comes down to selling points. The huge variation between economy class food and first class is designed to encourage people to want to pay more and upgrade their seat. For those with frequent flyer points, many choose to spend their points on seat upgrades rather than a free ticket, and as Business Insider notes, a flight costs an airline more than fancy food does.

The reality is airline food technically isn’t awful. You just need to pay a lot more to get a ticket for a spacious seat and a larger drink than those tiny cans of single-mouthful Colas.