Flying Tedium
Sometimes you forget about the tedium of modern day air travel because the destination turns out to be so educational, enlightening, adventuresome, or fun. Your meetings redeem your travel efforts regardless of their purpose or outcome -- obligatory, joyful, fruitful, or entertaining. But there's no denying that air travel can be tedious.
In previous eras, travel at least required attention to your surroundings. Compared to a trek through the Amazon in the early 1900's, the riverboat tour today promising a piranha supper will be way cozier -- adventures of Homo sapiens today pale next to our swashbuckling, nature enduring ancestors. The intellectual or physical engagement once necessary for travel has been commercially scrubbed from most of today's mind numbing excursions.
U.S. airline travel offers the ultimate somnolent experience, with all the industrial efficiency required to fly 30,000 commercial flights a day, just in the U.S. Save the occasional blunder, air travel has been reduced from exotic to a mundane necessary evil. Sure, you don't want your flying experience to be "exciting". But passengers have been systematically trivialized to mindless beings who welcome the airline's beverage service with saucer-eyed eagerness.
We put Pavlov's drooling dogs to shame with our anticipation of that one-ounce packet of salty peanuts doled out on a precise timetable, barring of course, the unforeseen "water landing" that would ultimately illuminate the utility or futility of grasping for our seats-cum-flotation-devices while the plane plummets towards the water.
It's like being anesthetized during an operation -- you generally wake up alive, although there's a palpable risk that you may die -- but in that case you'll most likely succumb without too much of a fuss. Once we're sufficiently numbed for the flight, with all good fortune the plane will eventually bump us out of our induced coma by landing on the runway, whereupon everyone will finally breath in one deep, enlivening breath of recirculated oxygen.
No matter how much entertainment one arms oneself with, airline travel can bore you silly. My last flight was delayed for two hours before take off. The captain's associate wisely allowed the passengers to disembark and mill about "close to the gate". So two hundred passengers promptly lined up at a nearby concession stand. A single employee tore his hair out trying to fill the espresso and lemonade orders of agitated passengers. So those of us at the end of the line, unable to discern any progress at such a distance, abandoned our quest to quench our thirst and whiled away the hours on the plane devouring our scarce reading materials.
After take-off, non-advantageous wind patterns delayed our flight further. The Linux in-flight entertainment system crashed and the self-appointed IT guru/flight attendant stared at the system console, not daring to reboot it for fear of irking those who were watching the movie. Time-wasters like collaborative trivial pursuit were therefore out of the question and so eight hours into my flight, you might see how fighting off malaria and wild animals in the Amazon seemed preferable.
This may all have been an elaborate airline ruse to get passengers to purchase absurd items from SkyMall magazine (the link is to the amusing song, not the catalog), but instead I decided to dissect the contents of my eagerly awaited "snack pack". That offered, if not nourishment, an introduction to that mysterious subject of food science.
Snack Packs
Remember when airlines tried to "...distinguish themselves from other competitors and entice passengers with their in-flight cuisine"? I don't. I wasn't around when airplanes meandered to their destinations at a leisurely 100mph, when "pilots handed out boxed lunches to passengers as they boarded", or when airlines were so hard pressed for business they vied for customers with "sophisticated menus and elaborate meal service programs." But I've dabbled in the more recent meals of the last decade, the veal parmigiana barely identifiable from the chicken Provencale or the lasagna, all gray slabs of something with tomato sauce. These offerings, long a dependable topic for water cooler griping, are now history, relative luxuries purged in recent airline budget cuts and operational restructuring.
The least promising part of the snack pack assigned to me on this flight, was the "Pasteurized Process Cheese Spread Havarti-type Flavor" in the .75 oz plastic container. This is a substance from unknown sources that has the texture and look of condensed milk. It in no way resembles Havarti, even though they don't set the bar too high since Havarti itself, that semi-soft cheese developed on a 19th century "experimental farm" (.pdf) has few notable characteristics. These so-called "pasteurized process cheese spreads" generally consist of about 10-20 ingredients including various milk products like whey and skim milk, along with a smorgasbord of preservatives, and are usually of ambiguous nutritional value. A related product, "Tuscan" cheese spread, suggests that if you wish to know the nutritional content you can snail mail a company called "Lactoprot", in Blue Mounds, WI, for the information -- hope your not anxious for the news. In the meantime, go ahead, you adventure seekers, dip your crackers into the effluent if you dare.
The accompanying crackers in .5 oz plastic wrappers offer nowhere near the entertainment value of the runny, unspreadable spread, but do contain a miserly 60-80 calories. All of these plastic wrapped items are arranged in a square plastic container that is wrapped in yet another layer of plastic, along with a plastic bottle holding 8.5 ounces of water. A tiny box of 30 or so raisins is included on special days.
Airlines realize that although passengers may complain, they're excruciatingly bored, buckled in shoulder to shoulder in those knee binding seats. Therefore they'll alight with glee on any old plastic snack pack and gobble it down with the voracious enthusiasm of a squirrel eating an acorn on a telephone wire. Look down a row and you can see the line of passengers bent covetously over their snack packs, ripping into the plastic wrap, bits of plastic falling to the left and right of the meal tray. They dismantle layer after layer of plastic, eager prying fingers searching for a tiny little morsel of cracker buried in the plastic wrap. Then they quickly move on, deftly unearthing the next plastic encased scrap of processed food. When the passengers are done with the plastic unwrapping entertainment, the cabin crew circulates with plastic bags collecting the plastic wrappers and the plastic bottles.
Meal service used to require enduring the appetite arresting slurping and slobbering of tens of surrounding passengers. Now it sounds more like the packing area of a UPS mail room. The American Plastics Council has certainly captured the hearts and minds of the airline industry.
Airline Recycling
If you've flown recently you were no doubt concerned about the environmental impact of your flight. To eschew your guilt perhaps you offset your flight's carbon emissions, after all you can't go too far on the internet without bumping into an opportunity to do so. Less appreciated is the plastic waste we generate staving off hunger and boredom by gobbling up the 200-300 calorie snack pack. A tiny source of nutrients for a heap of plastic waste.
In December, 2006, the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC), released a report "Trash Landings: How Airlines and Airports Can Clean Up Their Recycling Programs", which documented the waste generated at airports and from flights. Did you know?
The airline industry threw out 9,000 tons of plastic in 2004, and enough newspapers and magazines to bury a football field more than 230 feet deep. Nationwide, U.S. airports generated 425,000 tons of waste in 2004 -- a figure expected to increase nearly 45 percent by 2015. Each passenger today leaves behind 1.3 pounds of trash, the researchers found. Seventy five percent of this waste is recyclable or compostable. Yet the industry-wide recycling rate is 20 percent or less -- one third less than the U.S. average as a whole.
The NRDC report suggests ways to revamp the recycling and waste programs of airlines and airports. You yourself can decline the snack pack. Trust me, this particular "Havarti-type" spread doesn't capture the very ordinary essence of the Havarti you may love, either the original flavor, or the cumin, dill, cranberry, garlic, jalapeno types valiantly introduced by flavor advocates. You would look so noble declining the snack pack. What if half the passengers on every flight declined the snack pack? How easy would that be?
