Airline food is a cuisine in itself, and often for the wrong reasons. British hot head, sorry, I mean chef, Gordon Ramsay, once a consultant for Singapore Airlines, famously blurted “there’s no fu**ing way I eat on planes”, and for many of us, it’d probably be the same, if it wasn’t for the uplifting powers of that little silver trolley rolling down the aisle to help pass the time on a longhaul flight from Sydney to London.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen airlines taking serious steps to improve their food and beverage offering, both in the air and on the ground. Collaborations with high-profile chefs have helped Qantas (Neil Perry), British Airways (Heston Blumenthal) and Air France (Joel Robuchon and Alain Ducasse) to draw on the kitchen wisdom of the best, while the spread of cheffy outposts in airports and airline lounges (from Ramsay’s joint at Heathrow’s swanky Terminal 5, to Frank Camorra’s MoVida tapas bars in Sydney and Melbourne) has saved us from the tyranny of extortionate pre-packaged soggy sandwiches.

Cathay Pacific, who are headquarted in Hong Kong, don’t have a Michelin-starred chef affiliation, but they have invited me into their catering facility on the outskirts of Hong Kong International Airport for a taste of what it takes to create an inflight meal.

The scale of food is near impossible to conceive for the lay-cook. The kitchen capacity at Cathay’s catering facility is 40,000 meals a day, and to be clear, a meal includes entrée, main and dessert, so you could really triple that number to get a better idea of how much food the mega kitchen processes daily. The total area of the facility is 13 football fields and it takes me a good half hour to get around this frenetic beehive of activity.

The kitchen is designed across a single floor and there’s a one-way movement of raw to cooked food through the space to avoid any cross contamination. The first rooms I enter are the fresh produce prep rooms, and to my astonishment, everything is cut by hand. Those little trays of fruit salad, the capsicum in your main meal, the single slice of cucumber in your side salad, have all been sliced by a human wielding a knife, much like you or I prepping our evening meal. That was surprise one.

We head to the bakery through a corridor lined with crates of papayas and rockmelons, palettes of coconut milk (the same brand I use at home), dried pasta and Corn Flakes. Automated rolling and shaping machines plop out uniform blobs of dough ready to bake into rolls – around 30,000 a day. Airline breadrolls are an anomaly at the best of times, but the smell of baking here is real and a benchtop of cooling treacle tarts smells just like home (well, what home would smell like if I baked).

Treacle tarts aside, the sheer size of the industrial equipment at the next stop, the hot kitchen, reminds me I am not in Oz anymore. A fried-rice cooker the size of a 4-person jacuzzi sits in corner, churning 300kg batches at a time; in another, an omelet machine that resembles a roundabout in a children’s playground. Four people work across two shifts to cook 8000 omelets a day and I am transfixed watching the raw egg shoot through a tube into the rotating surface of frypans (the humans are there to flip the omelets). Surprise two.

In the plating area at the tail end of the kitchen, Economy trays whiz by on conveyer belts, seated employees on the production line filling the little compartments (by hand!) with pats of butter and jam, sleeves of cutlery and those plastic cups of water you only get on planes and in hospitals. The level of human touch is astonishing in this industrial, automated facility. Plating is done by hand, and as I swing by the blast chillers where all the food goes before being uploaded to the planes, a woman is garnishing hundreds of dishes of sweet and sour fish destined for Business Class with sliced red chilli (by hand!).

Would you like a drink with that?
The trouble with high-altitude dining is that our taste buds just don’t work properly. The air pressure dumbs our taste receptors, the vibrations of the aircraft have a subtle effect on the way our minds perceive molecules, and the extremely low humidity (drier than the African Savannah) dries out our mouths and nasal passages, so the chemical reactions needed for us to taste a food molecule simply can’t happen, like trying to light a fire in a bed of snow.

This is why selecting wines for flights can be just as tricky as serving the right food. Cathay Pacific’s wine expert Ronald Khoo says some flavours simply don’t work up in the air, which is why he and his team taste over 500 wines every three months to pick the 80 best to put on the airline’s rotating wine selection. “We try to look for bolder, more intense and fruity flavours. Our lack of sense and smell reduces our ability to taste the wine, so a delicate or mild wine can disappear in the air,” he says.

Khoo says tannins increase with altitude, so he avoids anything too oaky or woody. Instead, he recommends sipping Beaujolais, an Australian shiraz, Champagne (his pick is Deutz) and a white burgundy – “something with a long finish, a lot of fruit and not too oaky”.

Khoo’s in flight tip is to order a Bloody Mary, or any dish with tomato because it actually tastes better in the air. What, why? He explains our sense of umami – the fifth taste (after salty, sweet, sour, bitter) that belongs to rich savoury foods such as meat and tomatoes, and translates to ‘delicious’ in Japanese – is heightened when we’re on a plane.