Why is airplane food always stewed meat and stewed vegetables? Senior inflight chefs teach you meal selection strategies

 ▲Common airplane meals featuring stewed meat and stewed vegetables (illustration, photo by reporter Chen Shichang)

By Rita

If you often take long-haul flights, you must seriously consider this question: how to choose airplane meals? Many people think it’s just food, so why bother? But when health is taken into account, it becomes a serious matter.CNN has compiled several suggestions on choosing airplane meals, highlighting many commonly overlooked pitfalls.

The report clearly tells readersthat the golden strategy for ordering airplane meals is to choose “stewed meat and stewed vegetables” when available, the second-best option is fried rice or fish, and the least recommended are pasta, chicken breast, or fried foods. These suggestions come from inflight catering companies that have served millions of meals.

▲Airplane meals (illustration by reporter Cai Wenjun)

From the perspective of inflight catering companies, “deliciousness” is not their primary goal—“safety” is. Because the scale of inflight meal production is enormous and leaves no room for error, they must ensure passengers’ food safety. Typically, airplane meal menus are decided a year in advance, and ingredients are continuously inspected. If any ingredient quality issues are detected, the menu will be changed immediately.

“We’re not a restaurant—we can’t go to the morning market to buy the freshest ingredients,” said the director of Pacific LSG Inflight Catering.

The ins and outs of inflight meal preparation may not be imaginable to most passengers, but these details explain why our airplane meal choices are so limited. Seafood like “sea cucumber” will absolutely never appear on airplane menus, because inflight caterers and crew do not want meal content to cause passenger confusion or delay meal service due to questions.

That said, why is it recommended to choose “stewed meat and stewed vegetables”?Because airplane meals are often reheated multiple times, and “stewed meat and stewed vegetables” are generally less affected in taste during this process. But pasta is different—it can easily become very dry.