No such thing as a free lunch (on a plane)

June has been an extremely busy travel month for me. As I write this I am sitting in the Minneapolis Airport with Stu Orefice, dining services director at Princeton University, on our way home from a very successful College & University Summit that FSD staged in Austin, Minn., with the folks of Hormel Foodservice. I’ll be reporting more on this summit in the days ahead.

But so much airline travel lately has me thinking about airline food. USA Today on Tuesday reported on the trend among U.S. airlines to add more charges for items once considered to be “free.” It is difficult to find an airline that doesn’t charge the average customer $10 or $15 for a checked bag, and their “success” with what I consider to be highway robbery has led some of them to begin charging for pillows and blankets, and at least one airline has talked about charging to use the restrooms.

Of course, most airlines have been charging for food for several years, and those that provide free food have drastically scaled back their offerings. The USA Today article quoted several people expressing anger at the idea of charging even for snacks. One traveler complained to the reporter about paying $3 for a peanut-based snack mix. “We pay so much for the flight and they can’t even give us peanuts?”

It is a far cry from the old days when people complained or made jokes about the quality of airline food—“it’s lousy and there’s not enough of it.” But what intrigues me about passengers’ anger over the loss of free food is this: the complaints are coming from people whether they are on a 6-hour flight from Boston to San Francisco or a 2-hour hop from Newark to Chicago. Why do we continue to feel entitled to food on airline flights? In an age where obesity and nutrition issues are hot topics, why is it that Americans can’t face 180 minutes without a meal? People who can work through lunch without blinking an eye somehow can’t face three hours on a plane without a snack. It’s almost Pavlovian.

I’ll board my Continental flight in about 90 minutes, and I’m pretty sure that the flight attendants will offer us a free snack, because Continental still does that on some flights. But I just ate lunch a little while ago, so I think I’ll pass. But if they want to waive the fee for that bag I just checked, I’ll happily accept.