Last week, I sat at a bar in an airport in Paris and ate seven aeroplane meals in a row. The dishes arrived wrapped in tin foil, but this was not plane food as I have previously experienced it: there was caviar and yuzu sponge and a tiny French crêpe stuffed with whipped cream. The only real clue this was food designed to be eaten in the air was that it remained eerily still. At one point, a chef handed me a tomato and mozzarella salad and invited me to “shake the plate”. I shook, gently at first and then violently, but nothing moved. The chef looked delighted. Every meal was turbulence-proof.
I had travelled to Paris to try Air France’s new first class menu. As the airline industry lurches forward after successive Covid-19 lockdowns, food has become a kind of weapon. A month ago, Emirates launched a “bottomless caviar” service for premium passengers, part of a refurb which cost $2bn. Other carriers are struggling to keep up; working on this article I detected more than a whiff of desperation. Three separate airlines offered to fly me just to taste their new first class menus and one sent me a box of its new chinaware. The International Air Transport Association estimates that, from 2020 to 2022, airlines will have suffered cumulative losses of just over $200bn.
As these airlines fight harder to turn a profit, first class meals are getting more elaborate and more performative. Business and first class account for about one-third of all airline seats but generate up to 70 per cent of revenue. The promise of a better meal is part of what motivates passengers to buy a premium ticket. (One executive at a major airline catering company told me that the only real reason to serve food in first class is to “make economy passengers feel bad about themselves”). Now more than ever, airlines have a financial incentive to make you aware of your place in the hierarchy.