02. In praise of premade and preordered
A look into the work that goes into making the food we eat in the sky or in hospital beds.
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Sorry this took a while. I spent the earlier part of the month malingering on the topic. I was thinking about writing love and food or WHATEVER, but I ended up pursuing a story about food that doesn’t always care about what we feel–which in my opinion, is food on airplanes and in hospitals. I learned a thing or two about the systems and the people that make such kitchens run, so I thought I’d share a few of those insights for this newsletter.
Hope your next meal is a great one!
Toni
In praise of premade and preordered
I’ve always enjoyed hospital and airplane food. I’m not a masochist, just terribly lazy. When it comes to hospital or airplane food, the choices are straightforward: chicken or beef, low sodium or regular. Caution: may contain hot contents. Consume immediately.
Hospital food isn’t exactly a gourmand’s dream. “I wanted to die after eating this,” says a friend after sending a photo of some sad-looking soup she had while recovering from an operation. Another friend sent a meal that went untouched post-appendectomy. Hospital food gets a bad rap for being bland and unappetizing, couple that with any negative associations to a prolonged stay at a hospital then you basically have the ingredients for a pretty terrible meal.
Airplane food on the other hand has seen a kind of renaissance. After crowdsourcing some airplane and hospital food photos on Twitter, 95% of them were airplane meals (NOT a representative or exact sample!!). Yogurt cups, indeterminate meats under a splotch of red sauce, and the occasional business class finery were more common than the dimly lit hospital tray. Maybe I don’t have enough friends who’ve had to stay at a hospital for long periods of time. Maybe people just don’t want to commemorate that kind of stuff on the internet.
In 2022, Asia Pacific airlines carried a combined total of 105.4 million international passengers, compared to the 17.4 million passengers recorded in 2021. The return of passengers meant the return of aggressive marketing efforts in a competitive market. Airline catering surged, growing by over a billion dollars from 2022 to 2023 ($15.68 billion to $16.93 billion), and is still expected to grow by over ten billion more by 2027. A delicious in-flight meal isn’t a requirement for every airline, but it directly correlates with higher levels of passenger satisfaction—a major consideration for choosing an airline again.
After living through a time when travel didn’t seem possible, I get how airplane food (or documenting it at least) can feel somewhat more significant. You only really ever get the option of airplane food when you’re traveling far, far away.
Dieticians vs. Chefs
Diego de Rivera, Executive Chef at Creative Dishes & Recipes Inc., works for a company that builds industrial kitchens. The kind of kitchen that needs to make food for hundreds of people, all at once, every single day.
For the past decade or so, Diego has built the kitchens of some of the country’s major hospitals. He also tells me how his company has just started developing passenger meals for a few airlines. The similarities between the two? Volume and efficiency. Both come in large quantities. They need to be easy to prepare or reheat in case of limited staff and, above all, they must be safe to eat.
“We were taken on by some hospitals to help with their JCI accreditation. Food is an important part of that, which is why they’ve turned to outsourcing their kitchen and dietaries to professionals,” Diego tells me over a call.
“You really need to learn how to bring out the best with what you have,” Diego says. He’s busiest when he’s working on menus for hospitals. Coming up with a six-week menu for a hospital, spanning breakfast, lunch, dinner, AM and PM snacks, NO REPEATS! requires creativity and resourcefulness. It’s the back-and-forth process with the hospital dieticians, training kitchen staff, knowing local suppliers, and making sure all of it fits within the budget.
“That’s just the regular diet. You still have the low salt modified and soft diet, which requires overcooking the vegetables so they can be digested easily,” he adds. In the Philippines, there are even things like a no-color diet, which is specific to dengue patients. It involves avoiding dark-colored food, lest it colors a patient’s stool or urine. “It could be confused for blood, which you don’t want when you’re sick.”
“Cooking for a hospital and an airplane is like cooking with your hands tied behind your back,” Diego says. “Sometimes a patient can only eat food that can be steamed or poached, low salt, which means there’s only so much you can do.”
“But I’ve learned it’s a change in mindset. Food is part of a patient’s treatment, so we need to do the best we can” he adds.
What it takes to have a meal in the sky
Airline food has its own unique challenges. “Cooking is the easy part, maybe like 1/4th of the challenge,” Diego says. “Three-fourths of it is logistics. Most of the time you’re chasing temperature.”
According to the World Food Safety Guidelines for Airline Catering, from dispatch, transportation, and aircraft loading, the temperature of cold food needs to be “as close to the point of dispatch time,” never exceeding 10°C while in transit to prevent spoilage. Have you ever wondered how a roux can stay thick after being frozen and then reheated?
It isn’t cornstarch your usual cornstarch slurry. “It just melts when you reheat it again. What works for airline food is flour,” he says.
Not to mention the phenomenon of in-flight taste suppression. Food tastes different when we’re in the air. Our sensitivity to sweet and salty drops with rising altitude, which is why some caterers add salt and sugar by 10 percent. Allegedly, the only taste that isn’t affected by altitude is umami. This is why certain uses of tomatoes, shellfish, and spinach are more popular in airline catering.
Preparing a menu for an airplane and a hospital room, while there are some similarities, requires different mindsets. “Every time we train new people for the hospitals, the usual comment is to make it less salty, which is the opposite when we’re making airline meals,” Diego explains.
The luxury of choice
A gulf exists between business and economy in terms of price, legroom, full recliners, and at times, service. Food is one of the biggest differentiators.
In economy, pre-packed meals are the standard fare. Nearly everyone will get the same little fruit cup or bag of nuts. Business and first-class fliers might have a wide variety of choices for their appetizers, main courses, desserts, and drinks. Most of the time, they ditch plastic packaging for porcelain and silverware.
The same stratification exists in major hospitals. Reserved for their most high-profile patients (celebrities, the ultra-wealthy, and crooked politicians), the VIP suite is a weird mix of hospital and luxury hotels. Take for instance this presidential suite of St. Luke’s (so far the only publicized local VIP hospital room on the internet): 157.44 sqm, a glass dining table, full-length mirrors, nondescript artwork, and an almost out-of-place hospital bed. It was, for quite a long time, the place where ex-president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and her husband hid to avoid arrest for charges of electoral sabotage.
“VIP floors usually have their own pantries and chefs,” Diego says. Patrons can either order the regular meal or the chef’s special for the day. If neither works, people can literally just order what they want. Rumor has it that the first gentleman Arroyo’s special orders were a nutritious diet of cheeseburgers.
Expanding ideas
My parents, who usually take direct PAL flights from San Francisco to Manila, have recently been checking out the ANA flights, which usually add hours to their travel time. When I asked them why they said because there was a little more legroom and the food in economy was not at all bad. “Actually, quite good,” my mom remarked.
After successfully setting up a few hospital dietaries in Manila, Diego was transferred to do the same for another hospital in Davao.
Taking over a dietary isn’t easy, Diego tells me. You need to go in and clean up after the previous concessionaires, make sure everything is in working order, and secure the supplies for the next day’s meal rotation. "Sometimes you’re working under a timeframe of just a few hours,” he says.
But he looks back at his time in Davao quite fondly. “I learned a lot. For one, we couldn’t just bring the cycle menu from Manila to Davao. We had to change a lot of things,” Diego says. In Davao, seafood was more widely available than meat, which was one of the biggest changes to his cycle menu.
He recalls one instance where he gave the chefs a sinigang recipe. “The chefs said they couldn’t start cooking for the day because kulang ingredients, and I said, what could be missing? Turns out, sinigang in Davao needs lemongrass,” Diego says. For fish sinigang, tanglad is another way to sweeten and balance out the lansa of fish.
“Take tinola, for instance. We think tinola is chicken, but in Davao, tinola is fish. I didn’t realize it yet, but this is where I began learning about regional cooking.” Hospital food needs to be familiar, and what is familiar to one patient in Manila might not be the same to a patient in Iloilo.
Airplanes and hospital food have room for improvement (by a lot in some cases). But as the F&B industry grows even more competitive, change is imperative for growth. Younger chefs know this. More than just finding out what’s good to cook or eat, it’s also about learning to build a system that works with what it has, how to bring out the best in whatever’s available, and to always cook with people in mind.
“I grew up surrounded by people who deride airplane and hospital food. I admit, I’m still pretty hesitant until now whenever I’m about to eat airplane food, but you know, at least 85% of the time, I find it pretty good,” Diego says.*