Brainfood: High, dry and hungry

Food on an aeroplane is now a 'frill', something as unnecessary as service, comfort or convenience

There was a time, long, long ago, when you approached travel with some excitement as well as trepidation. Three centuries ago, you were hardly certain of arrival in one piece, or arrival at all. To stray from the beaten track was to court an encounter with brigands or pirates: you could wind up on the slave market in Algiers, where women fetched a good price, and boys, who would generally be castrated, a better one. Two centuries ago, the chances of being held up were still high and you might lose not only your purse but conceivably your dress of silk, your personal lace or your virtue. A century ago, the discomforts of the voyage still outweighed the joys. But one thing that all three centuries had in common was that at stated intervals you would eat. The fare was not grand; the accommodation was rude; the landlords were rapacious; but eat you did.

All that has changed. Travel remains something to be approached with a tremor of excitement and suffered with boredom, but it is now far from certain that you will be offered the opportunity to eat during your journey. Airlines have decided, citing passenger surveys - but also watching the accountants who loom over their shoulders - that there is to be a limit to their largesse. You, Sir or Madam, are not hungry. And should you be hungry, too bad.

It is my view that food is one of the few saving graces of long, cramped hours in an aeroplane; and there are few others. Even an airline meal may, with ingenuity, be stretched to a couple of hours in which you may do something besides contemplate the midget in the seat in front of you who has decided that the proper place for his balding head is in your lap. The drinks trolley comes up; you order enough to keep you reasonably oblivious while you put away the desiccated chicken or dehydrated beef, and voila: with any luck you'll wake up 500 or 1,000 miles nearer your destination.

There is certainly no gastronomical reason for putting away an airline meal: at least not in economy. But it is a comfort. Dry as the upper air is, a meal is a remembrance of what you would be doing were you at home.

But not so any more. You may not have noticed this with the same rue that I have, but between the perpetually buckled seat belt ("This is your Captain, we anticipate the possibility of a little turbulence, so...") and the ever narrower and shallower seat, nothing much happens on the shorter flights these days. If you leave home at 6.30am to catch an 8 o'clock flight due to arrive, weather and air controllers permitting, around 11, you'd better have had a good breakfast beforehand - unless, that is, you fancy a sample of raw stewardess or a gnaw on the airline magazine.

As one brought up on the stately progress of Continental trains with dining cars or, for longer voyages, liners that prided themselves on their cuisine, I shudder at the current airline regulations on food. They are all designed - and very artfully - to make it highly unlikely that you will eat at all between Timbuctoo and Tananarive or between Boston and San Francisco.

The first way this has been achieved in America, for instance, is by the "hub" system. To get from A to C, you have to stop at B, which is your airline's "hub": a home base no doubt very handy for the airline but of no use to you. What this means in terms of meals, since the average flying time during which the airlines have to serve you food - however unwillingly - is about two hours, is that by dividing the flight into two sections, or by flying at certain hours out of mealtimes, they have managed to eliminate food altogether.

As evidence, allow me to quote from Delta ("We just love to fly"): "No food on flights shorter than two hours. Flights longer than two hours must intersect with mealtimes in various degrees. To get breakfast, you must spend 50 per cent of the time between 7 and 8am in the air; for lunch, 70 per cent of the time between noon and 1pm; for dinner, 80 per cent of the time between 6.30 and 7.30pm." Nifty, if you understand it, and if the schedules make it possible. But if they don't, what you get - even in First Class on US Air, which for reasons which escape me is British Airways' American partner - is a bag of peanuts; the which, if you are continuing a BA flight in America to Chicago or beyond, leaves you high, dry and hungry.

The source of all this stringency is, of course, money. Food is now a "frill", something as unnecessary as service, comfort or convenience. Nor is any one carrier better than another: there is that small-print proviso, on United, for instance, which specifies that you may get a meal "with markets and competition taken into account".

It has therefore occurred to me that the market is wide open for a gastronomical entrepreneur to open up an airline food shop which will bag up a nice tray for you, complete with souvenir cutlery, for carrying on board, all nicely insulated and designed to keep you unbored and unstarving, say, for a three-to-four-hour flight. When I suggested this to my "flight-attendant" (peanut bag in hand, on a four-and-a-half-hour-long flight that included an hour's stop in the "hub") and added to my fantasy a choice of wines such an entrepreneur could offer, rather than splits of Gallo, she looked at me frostily and said, "Federal regulations forbid the bringing on board of alcoholic beverages."

Thank you, US Air, you've just given me another reason to long for a return to the days of pirates, brigands and thieving landlords. Even galley slaves, I think, got to eat