“Airplane Food”

Copic Marker on Paper, Winter 2025

#118: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, 1987

In 1928, the first hot meal was served on a Lufthansa commercial flight from Berlin to Paris, galvanizing the new experience of fine dining and luxury air travel. As the airline industry evolved into the post-war "Golden Age" of air travel, inflight meals transitioned into a commodified pre-packaged experience, a product of efficiency, mass distribution, and questionable quality.
In a span of a century, the public's growing dependency on air travel has led to normalizing the lowered bar that is commercial flying. Not only has flying commodified the option of inflight meals, but has also commodified our time; flying sells us the "luxurious' yet incredibly stressful option to accelerate our travel time, providing space in our lives for expanding careers, physical availability, the autonomy to choose where one calls home, and the time to spend with loved ones. If flying can successfully provide these needs, an over-nuked, inflight slice of lasagna could arguably be considered an acceptable offering.