Fear of (Food) Flying, Part One

I survey my fellow passengers to rule out potential terrorists and am relieved it’s a fairly benign looking group. Asians tend to wear surgical masks when flying and the guy across the way has a really neat one on- it has a thick double ear loop and a sturdy, rather sleek looking breathing cup to match his streamlined, shiny laptop with which he is seriously engaged. I’m tempted to ask him where he got the mask but desist from doing so and am convinced in any case that he will be food-less during the flight because of the mess involved.

We are on our way to Food Police Central Command- California! - and I am dreading what I will find on the menu there, but for now we are at ground zero of that which is barely edible and will remain in this position for several hours as we cozily rub up against our strange new companions on even smaller, slimmer, more crowded, more energy efficient planes as the flight attendant explains when we comment on the coffin-like atmosphere; she rhapsodizes that they too miss the old 767s where next to these you could dance in the aisles. As soon as the seat belt signal goes off, people stealthily start whipping out their meager airport provisions trying not to bump elbows with their seat companions. The couple next to me quietly produces two cellophane wrapped sandwiches and when the guy chomps down on his it oozes a substance from all sides resembling vegetable cream cheese, even though I know it cannot possibly be vegetable cream cheese as he simply does not look like a vegetable cream cheese kind of guy but more of a pulled pork man. His pony-tailed companion carefully unwraps something tidier, a pile of closely packed thin slices in between two brownish squares of whole grain bread and a bit later she will discreetly place a banana peel on the tray carefully folded and then leave it there for the duration, during which time I will have to gaze upon it every time I incline my head to the right.  It’s ironic, air travel really does not inspire hunger  and yet the smell of those invisible plastic “snacks” they heat up in the back- rewarmed frozen pizza? Petrified chicken cacciatore? Sizzling Twinkie-like cakes?- creates a sort of sense memory of longing for a hot meal, perhaps like the old aromatic canned spaghetti and ketchupy sauce once served at the automat. I myself have stowed a low-fat double chocolate muffin from Zabar’s but since I had to purchase it two days before flying it implodes when touched.

Three and a half hours into the flight they’re coming around again with the rolling carts, this time with myriad little cups of feces water, a liquid which I refuse to drink having just learned from Yahoo that you should never partake of airline H2O for above reasons of gross contamination, and so I ask for a seltzer. An hour or so later I am sitting close enough to business to see the flight attendants deferentially deliver warm, damp facecloths to the One Percent comfortably ensconced in their big seats, then collect the towels as if in a sushi bar before delicately plopping them onto a tray with some sort of pincers; the action is a cross between a ritual that happens in the operating room and a fancy Japanese restaurant.

The clouds are starting to look like generous masses of white mousse with ice blue streaks flowing through and I wonder what flavor that concoction tastes like and if I will find it in the land of All Things Fresh and Good. As we start to deplane like a long, slow conga line at a 1960’s “Love In” I bid a fond farewell to the trail of chip and pretzel wrappers glutinously dotting the aisle like petals from a flower girl’s basket along with the random, defiant gatherings of crumbs here and there that seem to say they do not give a fig (or an olive or a pomegranate for that matter) about the land of nouvelle or novel cuisine- a place where I will encounter the foot soldiers of chocolate chip-soy-avocado shakes and worse- and I prepare to meet them bravely. . . .