The Sad Life of the Airport Salad

You know the drill. Running through your connecting flight airport, having spent three hours on one plane without real food, having forgone the available peanuts and pretzels because they are just too fattening. That is of course because we all know that four peanuts leads to four hundred.

So there you are, the mere minutes you have to run from gate B 22 to E 49 and the time to slip on the the jetway before that door is closed to you forever is fast approaching. As you run the idea that you can take the time to grab something to eat is lingering in the back of your head. No, it’s not lingering it is screaming at you, “get some food! You have another two hours on the next flight and maybe they won’t even have peanuts!”. Or worse, “Maybe the turbulence will prohibit the happy flight attendants on the fifth leg of their flying day to get out of their seats and give you a drink.”

So between moving walkways you turn your head sideways looking at the various national food vendor chains to see if by chance there is something healthy and QUICK you can grab to eat on the plane.

The first problem is nothing healthy is ever hot at the airport. Yes, every once in a while you see a boxed salad sitting lonely in it’s clear plastic coffin in the refrigerator case. The one lone box of white iceberg lettuce with a couple of strips of overly processed American cheese and nitrate injected thin cuts of ham that is posing as a chef’s salad. It’s an insult to any culinary professional who wears the white jacket. How dare this pitiful salad dare to call itself chef.

Then there are the trio of fruits, apple, orange and banana, sitting in a basket looking like they are tokens to some healthy options commitment the airport authority asked all food vendors to adhere to. Yes, fresh fruit is available, how long have those particular fruits been sitting in that basket without and expiration date on them, who knows? Too long for me to chance buying one as my meal equivalent when I am already calorie, sleep and oxygen deprived.

Now back to the hot issue. The hot food emits smells, like French fries, pizza or general tso’s chicken. Why can’t the airport have skinny foods that make an odor that entices you to eat it? The meanest smell of all is Popeye’s Louisiana Fried Chicken, red beans and rice and fluffy buttermilk biscuits. Normally that spicy and greasy smell would make me feel a little queasy, but in the terminal, between gates seven and nine it calls to me.

I think the problem of airport food is not going to change. We are never going to be allowed to bring food from home and get it through the TSA checkpoint. Somehow an agent will pick up my homemade salad with some balsamic vinegar lightly dressing it and declare I am trying to smuggle some threatening item on to my flight. Even if I try to prove to them it is safe by taking a bite right there at the body scanners, I know they will take it from me and throw my fresh arugula, roasted pears and blue cheese salad in the bin, say so long good and good for me food.

And since the time between flights is never going to get longer, nor do I want my trips to get longer, and airlines are never bringing back food service on flights and nor do I want that back, I am going to have to eat one of those good smelling, fast purchasing, bad for you meals. Now here is the innovation– airplanes need to put treadmill sections in the passenger compartment. It could serve two purposes, be a calorie burning section for those of us who have eaten an airport meal and those passengers on the treadmills could generate some power to run the plane on. I’d gladly pay a little extra not to have to sit cramped between the grandmother who rarely flies and talks to me the whole trip and the mother who thinks it is OK not to buy a seat for her almost two year old freakishly large child who wants to kick me.