United Airlines: Atrocious Food Service
I was just in the US, something I posted about earlier. Somehow, I always seem to end up on United, and I’m often not very impressed with their food, but it’s really gotten very bad lately.
Vegetarian Food
I don’t eat meat, and you would think a vegetarian meal would be possible on a flight with meal service. Especially on United, since almost every flight I’ve been on in the last several years has offered two main entrees, one of which was vegetarian. Usually the stewardesses can be found working the isles during food service, saying ‘pasta or chicken?’ to each passenger in turn.
The problem of course is that they tend to run out of vegetarian meals first, and if you are a vegetarian seated in the back of the plane, you may end up without a meal if you don’t make arrangements in advance. You have to ask yourself why, if they often run out of vegetarian meals first so often, they can’t stock more of them to begin with? For whatever reason this doesn’t seem possible.
I remember flying as a kid, and getting a vegetarian meal reserved on the spot by just asking a stewardess to set one aside for me, but for whatever reason they don’t do that anymore.
To be assured of a vegetarian meal on United, you have to book this at least a few days in advance, and you have to specify exactly what sort of vegetarian meal you want. You have to choose between things like a diabetic meal, a Halal (Muslim) meal, a western vegetarian, a vegan meal, a lacto-ovo meal, an Asian vegetarian meal, and so on. Even at this stage, it’s not possible to order a ‘normal’ — what everyone else gets — vegetarian meal. For what it’s worth, I usually end up choosing Asian vegetarian, and it’s usually Indian food of some sort. Other choices usually end up being a very dry, tasteless and processed vegan meal, or perhaps one that’s nothing but cheese and eggs.
Processed Foods
In the past these special meals on United used to be of pretty good quality. It’s always an issue that they tend to apply dietary restrictions above and beyond what you stated, for example insisting vegetarians must eat margarine with their bread, even though many like me would prefer butter as it’s a more natural food. Nevertheless, these kinds of things are small issues, and considering how difficult it can be to cater to everyone’s dietary needs, I don’t need to be too picky.
The real problem now however, is these special meals tend to be almost all highly processed foods, intended for long storage, emphasizing high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). I can’t say anything about the regular meals, because I don’t get a chance to eat them, but the special meals no longer have any fresh or ‘local’ ingredients at all. If there’s fruit, it’s canned fruit. The only exception might be a little iceberg lettuce in a salad. It’s always necessary to read the ingredients on label of all the foods, to make sure you aren’t eating total crap, especially if you want to avoid HFCS.
Considering all the places United flies, it really makes you wonder why they can’t source a little true local food, or at least something fresh from time to time.
For the beverage service too, it’s nearly all based on HFCS. If you don’t want something to drink with HFCS, it’ll probably be alcoholic, water, milk or orange juice. This is not really a selection most people would consider acceptable. Especially since orange juice itself is very processed, and known to contain an unusually high level of pesticides on average, when compared to other foods and drinks.
Reading the Labels
Some of the common things in United meals are just a total mix of crap. For example their vinaigrette must be reduced fat or something, and the ingredients are just a long list of chemicals. Many things are not labelled! For example, the jams and jellies are not labelled, and have the distinctive taste of HFCS.
The breads tend to be really processed and come in little plastic packages.
There was a bread on my outgoing flight with a Dutch sounding name that I forgot, that supposedly comes from Holland, but it’s made with HFCS. While some foods are made with HFCS here, it goes by different names like glucose-fructose syrup, so it’s unlikely to truly be a Dutch food if it has HFCS and is labelled as such. In any case, it wasn’t a name I recognized.
Here’s a bread that was served on my return flight:
This picture makes it look big, but this was really a small cocktail sized piece of bread, about 2″ or 5cm on a side.
And the ingredients label on the back?
So, does Rubschlager or United Airlines really think someone who ordered a special meal, is obviously concerned about and trying to figure out what they are eating, is really going to want to write them a letter while 39000 feet in the air travelling across the Atlantic? Even if I did write them a letter, I would still never know what I ate or could of ate, because they have a number of different lines of breads and this one isn’t labelled as to which one it is. Even on their website, they don’t list the ingredients.
There is virtually no country in the world where it’s legal to sell unlabelled food like this, it’s only because United serves this in international airspace that they can get away with it.
The Entree
So besides excessively processed breads, jams and canned fruit, what comes in a specially ordered meal on United?
I ordered an Asian vegetarian meal, and on my outbound flight the main entree was a serving of cooked white rice and a serving of peas next to it. No sauce, no spices, absolutely nothing besides rice and peas. It also had a totally inedible salad, with equally totally inedible dressing and a half canned peach.
The return flight was a little better. In this case there was a very small serving of Saag Paneer, with a few pieces of cheese as well as a small serving of vegetable curry. It also came with a serving of yoghurt, It was not terribly exciting, but not that bad. What was funny however was, a few hours later when the snack was served, they decided at that point I couldn’t eat dairy products. Since the regular snack came with butter and a serving of yoghurt, instead they served me something different with margarine and apple sauce.
Message to United
Your meal service is a disaster.
In an age where people increasing expect to eat freshly prepared food, and the dangers of eating HFCS are becoming more well known, you are serving processed crap full of HFCS. You don’t even offer a realistic possibility for people to avoid HFCS if they want to.
Would it really kill you to offer a fresh piece of fruit instead of a half a canned peach?
Why don’t you honestly label the foods you serve, or better yet serve unprocessed foods that don’t need to be labelled?
Even on your domestic flights, where you offer meal boxes for sale, you only offer processed foods full of chemicals. What you offer is also not very suitable for vegetarians.
How about charging us $5 more when we book our flights, and invest this in improving the meal service?
Strawberry Dissapointment
The first ears of Strawberry popcorn in my garden are drying out. They look really exciting! The ears are small, but they are suppose to be. They have a nice rich red color.
The kernels are also small, even though this close-up makes them look big. The parts that were in the cob are white, and the outside parts are the red color. Getting them off the cob was quite fiddly and tedious work. The reason may be because they were still a little bit moist. Even though the seeds were hard enough not to be damaged as they were removed, they were still a little stuck.
I put about 50g into my hot air popper. They whirled around, made lots of noise — smelled fantastic! The smell was like hot buttered sweet corn!
But this is what came out! You can see they only popped a little bit, if at all. The next time I try, I will let them dry out a little more, but I wonder if that was really the problem.
Anyone have any suggestions?
The taste by the way, even half popped, was fantastic. No real need for extra butter or salt, the taste was rich enough all by itself.
High Fructose Corn Syrup and Cancer
Cynthia, a reader in Virginia, sent me a link to this article.
It’s one more reason why consuming HFCS is a really bad idea.
De Vliegende Schotel
I did a post a few months ago about a favorite local bar that served local beers, and I thought it was time to do a post about a local restaurant, located at Nieuwe Leliestraat 162-168 in Amsterdam. The name Vliegende Schotel is a play on words in Dutch. Schotel means plate, dish or saucer, and a common word for restaurants to use in their menus to indicate ‘dish or dishes’. Vliegende means flying, and so the name of the restaurant also means UFO.
I’ve been going to this restaurant longer than any other in Amsterdam. My first visit was 25 years ago, when I was here as a tourist. The staff got to know me from the start, and greeted me as a returning customer on every visit. I’m really happy to say last October the restaurant has been sold, and is now under new ownership — Woohoo!! As much as I continued to go there, about once or twice a year, it used to be a really bad restaurant.
I used to go there because Amsterdam is really lacking in quality restaurants, and there are only a very small handful of vegetarian restaurants. It’s also close to where I live. It had me as a captive audience on those nights I didn’t want to cook for myself.
How it Used to Be
Americans, and maybe others, will know Molly Katzen. She first wrote a vegetarian cookbook called Moosewood. It was famous first because Molly wrote the cookbook without ever trying any of her recipes first, just off the top of her head, so none of them worked properly when you tried to cook them. The other reason this cookbook became famous is it sort of defined 1980s vegetarian cuisine in America; bland, overcooked, strangely spiced, uninspired and boring. It was also a difficult book to cook from, because every recipe needed very small amounts of large numbers of exotic ingredients, so a large shopping expedition was always needed first. Anyway, this was the sort of food the Vliegende Schotel used to serve; boring, overcooked, uninspired and strangely spiced.
In the 25 years I went there, the menu hardly changed. All the dishes were all pre-planned, usually totally lacking in seasonal ingredients, and without any inspiration from the cooks. The portions were all carefully measured, so while tofu was expensive and cabbage was cheap, it was served proportionally to maximize their profits. Much of their food came from the freezer, and it was not uncommon for it to still be half-frozen on your plate.
The big changes came about around 5 years ago, when they started serving alcohol legally (they used to have it behind the counter if you knew to ask for it), and they started using organic food ‘when available’. This ‘when available’ business meant you never knew what, if any, part of your meal was organic, you knew profit was their overriding goal, so you never knew how much extra they were willing to pay for certified organic food rather that just stating it was unavailable. Also, local had little to do with their purchasing choices, rather they just served supermarket certified organic foods. They were associated with a natural foods store, that sold supermarket style certified organic foods, and presumably what was served at the restaurant was the leftovers.
They also had a ‘quiet non-smoking room’. This was a little bit revolutionary in a city which until about a year ago pretty much didn’t have any non-smoking areas in any restaurants. I guess the ‘quiet’ part about it was to somehow rationalize it for smokers as not being a room that discriminated against them too much, and perhaps at one time was full of loud non-smoking Americans, so they wanted to ask them to tone it down a bit. This was a separate room, but the door between it and the rest of the restaurant was usually open, letting in smoke. Also the staff of the restaurant used to smoke outside the window of the non-smoking room and blow all their smoke in.
You also needed to order your food at the counter which was in the smoking area, so no one was allowed to escape. I only sort of appreciated the effort they went to providing a non-smoking room.
It’s all changed now!
Steph and I went there for dinner, the first time we’ve been there since it changed owners.
It was really good!
Amsterdam has for more than a year now banned smoking in restaurants, so that’s no longer an issue.
The menu still has a lot of the old dishes on it, but I hope they will soon phase these out. There are several new and interesting dishes, including daily and weekly specials offered at a low price. There are lots of vegan choices.
I ordered a salad, and the cook not only took a great deal of care preparing it by hand, but he came out to the table and presented it with pride. It was really nicely made.
They like sprouts, everything from bean, radish, lentil to pea and more. This really gives their food a fresh taste, and is something unusual. It’s a little early to know if they will truly embrace the idea of local and seasonal foods, but their heads are in the right place and I have high hopes. Their English is excellent, I think they are native speakers, and the menu is in Dutch and English.
Time will tell if it really turns into a nice restaurant in the long run, but for now I can safely recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in Amsterdam and is looking for a vegetarian restaurant serving fresh and unprocessed foods. In fact, it’s still one of the few choices available.
Allium Roundup
It’s allium season!
Of course you can have alliums most of the year but this is what’s mostly been coming out of the garden lately. Boy do they taste good! I’ve started to notice my garden is getting especially full of perennial alliums. Can you ever have too many alliums?
Now for the tour…
This is a new bed I’ve started this year, so it’s not very full yet. In the front left I have the Utrecht Onion (local version of Allium dictuon) and the right is the Amish Onion. In the middle left are a few plants of what I call Afghani Leek, because I got them from an Afghani gardener a few gardens down, but I think these are allium currat. On the right is Mc Cullar’s White Onion, that I got from Stephen (stevil) in Norway last year, and directly behind that is allium ceruum or knodding onion also from Stephen and finally in the back left are Cook’s Multiplier also from Stephen.
While we’ve been eating both the Amish Onion and the Utrecht Onion already this year, the others will have to wait a few years before we have enough to both grow and eat.
In the back of this bed is Heritage Sweet White Multiplier from Søren, but originally from Paquebot in Wisconsin. In the front are klimt shallots from Frank in Belgium, just starting to poke through the straw.
Here are the two victory onions I got several years ago from Søren. They are really great, but haven’t been multiplying very much and all we’ve been doing is eating the leaves from time to time. I’ve been growing them in tubs on our roof. I think this year I have to try moving them to the garden, and see if they do better there.
These are He Shi Ko Bunching Onion from Baker Creek. I just bought and planted these, and don’t know a lot about them.
I guess these don’t look a lot different from all the other pictures of onions here, but these are Egyptian Walking Onions. I got these from Salt Spring Seeds in Canada years ago, and they’ve been going great.
Finally, these are a few of my roughly 1000 bulbs of garlic I grow each year. I currently have about 60 varieties.
Can you tell I like onions and garlic? Does anyone have anything else I might want, and want to trade??
