My Continental Airlines Hindu Meal

There was a time when you ordered a special meal because there were so few requests for them that they had to be individually prepared. This meant you usually ended up with something that was a grade above the ham and cheese on a fat white bun that you could otherwise expect. Well those days are gone. Now that cost-cutting measures have resulted in fees for checked bags, pillow-count reduction and other assorted insults, airlines have found a way to make the 'special' meal absolutely ordinary. The good news is that their secret research might have unintentionally provided us with a ray of hope for achieving world peace.

How do they do it, you ask? Let's call it 'meal-combining.' This sounds a little like the faddish 'food-combining' that peaked in popularity a few years ago. The idea is to take the common denominator of all the special ideological dietary mandates of the World, and to create dishes that simultaneously satisfy every set set of rules!

Of course, the airlines didn't think of this first. My guess is that the pioneering efforts should be attributed to Kosher Indian-Vegetarian restaurants, which differ from airlines because their food tastes good. Take a look at the label below:

Let me first draw your attention to the fact that this is the ingredient label for a breakfast sandwich. This breakfast sandwich was served to me on an evening flight, more typically the time when 'dinner' is served. This certainly didn't bode well, but I had a seen an Indian woman eating lentils with chapattis that looked really tasty just weeks ago, so I was still caught off-guard.

Now, this was only a single item out of the whole tortuous meal box, and all the other offerings had similarly long lists of ingredients, so I've chosen to use this merely as a representative example.

From this label you will see that our hope for world peace lies in our common interests. All of us, well not all of us, but VGML, VLML, MOML, and HNML people all want the same things! Among those things are, apparently, azodicarbomide, calcium sulfate, and vital wheat gluten. To decode the encrypted meal descriptors, they translate as follows:

VGML= Vegan Meal	VLML= Ovo-Lacto Vegan Meal
MOML= Moslem Meal	HNML= Hindu Meal

How something like ethoxylated diglycerides qualify as Vegan is a bit mystifying to me, but I guess it's listed in a handbook somewhere. In case you have trouble reading the label, you are looking at the recipe for a 'Wheat English Muffin, Vegan American Cheese, and a Vegan Sausage Patty.'

The accompaniments included a quinoa salad, which tasted even more like bird food than quinoa usually does, if such a thing is possible. It promptly went back in the box. Maybe that should be the name of the 'restaurant' where this food is made, 'Back in the Box.' There was also some sort of cookie-ish thing, which I found detestable, but which my 3½ yo daughter had no trouble happily gobbling down.

I don't know what Air France is doing these days, but the paté de campagne, the camembert with a crusty baguette, and the little bottles of Bourgogne rouge that followed one another, like loyal French mercenaries, in an endless procession toward their demise, still stands for me as the pinnacle of inflight meal service. Adieu, HNML!