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It is evident that most of the Airline industry (and its agencies) could benefit from the wisdom of parody. After all, parody has been a powerful genre to uncover that common knowledge that oftentimes gets dismissed as unimportant, remember Borat? In the words of Umberto Eco, parody, “if it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile –and without a blush– in steadfast, virile seriousness.”

Eco’s parody has indeed been taken seriously by a wide variety of professionals, from architects to anthropologists as he explains in the preface of How to Travel with a Salmon: “Parisian friends from Transcultura, an organization that imports African and Asian anthropologists to study European cities, say that their program was inspired by my ‘Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society,’ in which Melanesian anthropologists analyzed the primitive Milanese by sophisticated phenomenological parameters.”

Going back to the Airline industry and inspired by a recent international trip, one wonders why so many of their resources are focused on advertising as opposed to solving structural issues (i.e. mediocre meals). Perhaps they need a different type of advice similar to Naked Communications' recommendation to Boots Pharmacy which led them to improve their in-store experience as opposed to create more TV spots (see a brief summary within a Fast Company article here).

In any case, the frustration that surrounds airplane meals have been documented for decades and Umberto Eco's Diario Minimo offered an insightful review in its article How to Eat in a Flight, published in the above-mentioned second compilation titled How to Travel with a Salmon.

Here is an excerpt from How to Eat in a Flight, written at least two decades ago. It drives home the point with amazing clarity:

“…a typical in-flight menu comprises some long-cooked meat smothered in brown gravy, generous portion of tomato, vegetables finely chopped and marinated in whine, rice, and peas with sauce. Peas are notoriously elusive –not even the greatest chefs can produce petits fois farcis– especially if, deterring to the insistence of Miss Maners, the consumer is determined to eat the peas with his fork rather than the more practical spoon. Don’t tell me that the Chinese are worse off. I can assure you it is easier to grip a pea with chopsticks than to pierce it with a fork. It is also pointless to rebut that the fork is used to collect the peas, not to pierce them, because forks are designed for the sole purpose of dropping the peas they pretend to collect.

Furthermore, peas in flight are dully served only when there is turbulence and the captain turns on the “fasten seat belts” sign. As a result of this complex ergonomic calculation, the peas have only two alternatives: either they roll down your shirtfront or they fall on your fly.

As the ancient fabulists taught us, to prevent a fox from drinking out of a glass, the glass must be tall and slim. Glasses on planes are short, squat, rather basin-like. Obviously, any liquid will spill, obeying the laws of physics, even when there is no turbulence. The bread is not a French baguette, which you have to tear with your teeth even when it’s fresh, but rather a special friable roll, which, the moment is grasped, explodes in a cloud of fine powder. Thanks to the Lavoisier principle this powder vanishes only in appearance: on debarking, you will find that it has all accumulated under your behind, managing to stain even the seat of your trousers. The desert tends to the meringue genre, and its fragments mix with the bread, or else it dribbles over the fingers immediately, when the napkin is already steeped in tomato sauce and hence unusable.

True, you still have the perfumed towelette: but this cannot be distinguished from the little envelopes of salt, pepper, and sugar, and so, after you have put the sugar in the salad, the towelettte has already ended in the coffee, which is served boiling hot and in a heat-conducting cup filled with brim, so that it may readily slip from your seared fingers and blend with the gravy that has now congealed around your waist…

…why, then, in first class, where space is ample, do they serve compact foods, like Russian caviar or buttered slices of toast, or smoked salmon or lobsters chunks with a drop of oil and lemon? Is it perhaps because in the films of Luchino Visconti, when the Nazi aristocrats say “shoot him,” they pop a single, compact grape into their mouth?”