Paradox of Life #2: Bad airport food.
Through all my agonizing layovers at the airport and the subsequent and even more agonizing plane-rides, there is one question that has always bothered me and that I have never been able to understand: Why is airport food so bad?
Other than bad chefs, bad management, and incompetence in general, there are exactly two fundamental constraints on the quality of food at any restaurant: 1. the price the customers are willing to pay, and 2. the freshness and availability of the ingredients. And based on these two factors, airport restaurants should be the best in the world.
Firstly, price is absolutely irrelevant at an airport, where anyone coming off an inter-continental JetBlue flight with no meal service that got delayed on the runway for three hours would be willing to pay half his life savings for a decent meal. And anyways, the standard prices for food are already around $5 for a 2 oz. soda and $50 for a hot dog; and seeing as how all those airport diners are still in business, customers are clearly willing to cough up the dough.
And what about the freshness and availability of ingredients? IT'S AN AIRPORT. Airports are transportation hubs. Not only is an airport easily accessible from all the major highways in the area, an airport also has things like, oh, I don't know, AIRPLANES. So there's really no reason why my seafood udon should ever look more plastic than the plasticine display models when there's several tons of the finest spice and freshest seafood getting unloaded from the plane about two hundred feet away.
Plastic ranks high on my list of things that food should not look like.
And finally, there's the worst thing about it all - every airport restaurant has a cute name that makes it sound gourmet, like Sankaku Grill or Ancora Coffee or Songkran Express. And that's just false advertising. Because instead of always getting me so prematurely excited before I taste my food, they should just prevent my disappointment by calling themselves Grilled Plastic, Brewed Plastic, and Spicy Plastic.
Or maybe this is all just a result of some weird collaboration between the airlines and the airport - after all, the worse the airport food tastes, the better the in-flight meal will seem. Or perhaps the less we eat, the less we weigh, and the less money the airlines will have to spend on fuel. Or maybe it's because...actually let's stop hypothesizing now before my brain blows up and I turn into Spencer Pratt again.
Spencer Pratt was not accidentally dropped on his head as a baby. Instead, he was just accidentally lobotomized.
Through all my agonizing layovers at the airport and the subsequent and even more agonizing plane-rides, there is one question that has always bothered me and that I have never been able to understand: Why is airport food so bad?
Other than bad chefs, bad management, and incompetence in general, there are exactly two fundamental constraints on the quality of food at any restaurant: 1. the price the customers are willing to pay, and 2. the freshness and availability of the ingredients. And based on these two factors, airport restaurants should be the best in the world.
Firstly, price is absolutely irrelevant at an airport, where anyone coming off an inter-continental JetBlue flight with no meal service that got delayed on the runway for three hours would be willing to pay half his life savings for a decent meal. And anyways, the standard prices for food are already around $5 for a 2 oz. soda and $50 for a hot dog; and seeing as how all those airport diners are still in business, customers are clearly willing to cough up the dough.
And what about the freshness and availability of ingredients? IT'S AN AIRPORT. Airports are transportation hubs. Not only is an airport easily accessible from all the major highways in the area, an airport also has things like, oh, I don't know, AIRPLANES. So there's really no reason why my seafood udon should ever look more plastic than the plasticine display models when there's several tons of the finest spice and freshest seafood getting unloaded from the plane about two hundred feet away.
Plastic ranks high on my list of things that food should not look like.
And finally, there's the worst thing about it all - every airport restaurant has a cute name that makes it sound gourmet, like Sankaku Grill or Ancora Coffee or Songkran Express. And that's just false advertising. Because instead of always getting me so prematurely excited before I taste my food, they should just prevent my disappointment by calling themselves Grilled Plastic, Brewed Plastic, and Spicy Plastic.
Or maybe this is all just a result of some weird collaboration between the airlines and the airport - after all, the worse the airport food tastes, the better the in-flight meal will seem. Or perhaps the less we eat, the less we weigh, and the less money the airlines will have to spend on fuel. Or maybe it's because...actually let's stop hypothesizing now before my brain blows up and I turn into Spencer Pratt again.
Spencer Pratt was not accidentally dropped on his head as a baby. Instead, he was just accidentally lobotomized.
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