When Jimmy Carter deregulated the airline industry nearly 30 years ago, he probably didn't foresee saving passengers quite so many billions in ticket prices or predict the number of airlines that would go out of business. And he certainly couldn't have anticipated the rash of anger-management classes resulting from air travel's devolution into the most torturous and dehumanizing form of getting from one place to another since the Conestoga wagons rolled west. A crushed economy class on your normal American airline resembles something out of Hieronymus Bosch: grotesques of every kind, tongues hanging out in boredom, fury bubbling, some fitfully sleeping, and all enduring coffin-tight seats and dangerous food (if any food at all).
[See how the five airlines stack up.]
I have a long endorphic memory. When I was 22 and headed for grad school in London, my highly imaginative and overly successful father gave me a first-class transatlantic ticket aboard the S.S. France. The France wasn't just the most luxurious ship in the world in the mid-sixties; it was what the noted New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne called "the finest French restaurant in the world"—three enormous groaning boards a day of the hautest French cuisine, at which you could order anything and everything on the menu without limit, then have some more sent to your cabin. I've been trying to return to that particular womb ever since.
But how? Nowadays, cruise ships are mostly a seagoing Pamplona running of the bulls, and with the exception of South Africa's Rovos Rail, trains have long ago abandoned any attempt at romance. In hopes of recapturing the glory days of hedonistic immoderation, I recently took five highly touted first-class flights (well, six if you include Continental, which you shouldn't) around the globe in a zigzag that had me covering some 27,000 miles in 11 days, catching two colds, and losing at least one entire body clock along the way. The ticket read EWR-SFO-SIN-BAH-DXB-HAM-FRA-JFK, with an earlier destination, JFK-STN-JFK. The good news is that many international carriers (but no American ones) have rethought comfort and pamper" — and, most important for me, food" — at 35,000 feet, and in some cases succeed in ways that would have satisfied my old man.
"We regularly conduct food and wine tastings in a special room calibrated to simulate cabin conditions at 35,000 feet," James Boyd told me over breakfast at San Francisco's Ritz-Carlton shortly before my first" — and longest" — international flight, 19 hours and 8,519 miles from San Francisco to Singapore. Boyd is the tall, dapper vice president of PR for Singapore Airlines in the Americas. "We discovered that human taste buds lose approximately 30 percent of their sensitivity at that altitude because of the aridity," he said, forking a pineapple chunk. "So food and drink must be bolder and more strongly flavored than on the ground."
Singapore Airlines spends an astounding $500 million a year on its food. "All carriers prepare their food roughly 40 percent cooked on the ground, ship it into the plane in dry ice, and most then reheat it on board in convection ovens," Boyd went on. But Singapore finishes its cooking separately: fish in steam ovens to retain moisture, vegetables in a microwave to keep their crunch, and meats in a convection oven to enhance their sear. Needless to say, you can't start a fire in a plane, so there's no sautéing or, God forbid, deep-frying in midair.
