Photo: Brian Herzog / Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Sydney Morning Herald: Once relatively unappetising, indeed unpalatable, inflight meals have become relatively healthy, appetising and aesthetically appealing, thanks to advances in food science.

Among other things, airlines assume that their passengers might be pregnant, or elderly, for instance, Potter says. “This means food-safety issues require cooking everything to a sort of “well done” formula. Hospitals have similar constraints, although the level of acceptable risk for people eating the food is much lower.”

Airline chefs work around this by picking dishes where cooking preference isn’t as much of an issue. “We cook beef tenderloin to medium for certain flights – such as the US-Australia-Europe routes,” Schafer says. “For Middle East routes, we have the meat well done. So we do not cook around it: we serve braised as well as seared or grilled meats.”

Click here to read the full article from the Sydney Morning Herald.