Do you feel that airlines haven’t hired the best chefs around to prepare a yummilicious meal for you ? Well, please spare the Airline Chefs . They are not the ones who should be blamed for bad tasting food at Airlines. And, here’s why ?

The multi sensory properties of the environment where we consume our food can alter our perception of the foods we eat. Airline cabins are an unusual environment, in which food is consumed routinely under extreme noise conditions, often over 85 dB, and in which the perceived quality of food is often criticized. At 35,000 feet, the first thing that goes is your sense of taste. In fact, our perception of saltiness and sweetness drops by around 30 percent at high altitude. It also doesn’t help that the decreased humidity in the cabin dries out your nose and dulls the olfactory sensors essential for tasting the flavor of an ingredient or dish. Dry cabin air can evaporate nasal mucus, and pressurization may cause membranes to swell, both of which effectively numb your taste buds on a flight. Hence , the food appears twice as bland.

Some of our senses, however, are unaffected by altitude, especially the so-called fifth taste, umami (pleasantly savoury taste imparted by foods such as sardines, seaweed, mushrooms, tomatoes, and soy sauce. Umami taste is actually enhanced by loud background noise .And because tomatoes are so rich in umami, guests order Tomato juice & Bloody Mary more than what they order on ground.

Originally published on Wordpress