In all fairness, airplane food was famously tasteless
and subpar, so much so that inquiring about its "deal"
remains one of Jerry Seinfeld's most famous jokes.
Mind you, the question isn't actually about airplane
food. It's more about ripping on the audience's
common enemy, which is no different from asking:
"Boy, that Hitler, what a character, right?"
Airline food tastes the way it does due to the plane's
environmental factors playing the fandango on your
senses with a baseball bat.
Modern planes travel at an altitude of about 35,000
feet, which, in terms of places most likely to kill you,
ranks somewhere between the foot of an active
volcano and inside the wife of an angry lumberjack
who unexpectedly came back home for lunch. That's
why airplanes have to keep the cabin artificially
pressurized -- to keep your brain from swelling and
leaking out of your ears. The problem is that, according
to modern research, the cabin's pressurization
combined with the plane's white noise can numb your
taste buds, suppressing your ability to taste salt and
sugar in non-fatal doses.
Obviously, airlines tend to use the cheapest ingredients
possible in their in-flight meals, but even a steak with a
10-minute-old kill date would still taste like ass when
your senses are literally and figuratively so high, they
can hardly feel their face. Cabin air is another problem.
It's usually recycled every two to three minutes with
the humidity kept below 20 percent, drying not only the
food but also your nose, which further impacts your
sense of taste. Culinary-wise, that's like serving meals
inside an unventilated sand factory in the middle of the
Sahara.
But as luck would have it, airplanes don't affect your
ability to taste bitterness or umami. It would explain
why people usually go for bloody Marys or tonic water
inside planes: Oftentimes it's the only thing their bodies
recognize as having a taste. With everything else, you
might as well be chowing down on gravel and
cardboard, as far as your taste receptors are
concerned.