Singapore Airlines' signature flying Thermidor has been on planes since 1998. Illustration / CC
Singapore Airlines' signature flying Thermidor has been on planes since 1998. Illustration / CC
Arranging to have a lobster to meet you in midair is a novelty. Never in the lifespan of the crustacean did the thought pass though its carapace that it would end up flying, First Class as part of the Book the Cook meal service.
Singapore Airlines' flying Thermidor is a surreal meal worthy of Dali. However, airline catering is full of oddities, even in economy and the mean end of the cabin.
In between peeling the foil off their in-flight meal and the last sip of the complimentary wine, few passengers pause to think what a marvel of engineering the simple airline meal is.
Not a morsel out of place.
Providing passengers with something to eat might be dismissed as a courtesy, but it is a process so complex and costly that many budget airlines choose to do away with it entirely.
There's no doubt that meals today are leaner. Some passengers will remember air travel in the good old days - approximately 50 years ago - when meals came in courses, and passengers could be trusted with forks not made out of plastic.
The trade-off, of course, was that back then air travel safety was 3000 times worse. But at least you got proper tableware.
However the same advances in aeronautical engineering and accountability - which brought annual air fatalities from about three in a million passengers to 0.01 in a million today - also streamlined the whole process of what goes into planes.
Along with the practical, life-saving stuff came a dark art euphemistically termed "cost engineering".
If the 70s were characterised by a questionable safety record and elaborate airline menus of "prawn cocktail and rum babas", the 80s was the decade of the $40,000 olive.
The $40,000 hors d'oeuvre was the discovery of American Airlines chairman Robert Lloyd "Bob" Crandall.
Bob's claim to fame was demonstrating how removing an olive from every First Class salad would save the airline a fortune in fuel and resources.
The penny-pinching wizard inspired other companies to follow suit. In 1987 Northwest Airlines found it could save half a million dollars a year by cutting up cocktail limes into 16 pieces rather than 10.
The 80s was the decade of the $40,000 olive. Illustration / CC
If not illustrating quite how petty airline accountants can be, it shows the sheer economy of scale the travel industry works on. It's a vast network the size of which makes one's mind boggle, like the proverbial lobster contemplating the prospect of ending up in a service tray.
Perhaps the easiest place to try to visualise the scale is on a visit to Emirates' Airlines vast prep kitchen on the grounds of Dubai Airport.
Emirates' Flight Catering (EKFC) kitchens are in a warehouse the size of 28 football fields. Chefs at EKFC prepare 225,000 in-flight meals for 700 flights a day. As well as cooking for its own 60 million passengers flying through the Emirates every year, it provides catering for hungry passengers on partner airlines.
If you imagine the cost of adding an olive to each of their meals, or even an extra helping of pudding, it would add up to a vast sum.
You can understand why airlines are desperate not to cart around spare meals.
Checking and rechecking flight manifestos during the cooking and loading of meals makes sure late-sold seats are catered for, while avoiding excess catering.
Since jettisoning expensive olives, airlines have taken a more high-tech approach to streamlining the catering process. On a recent tour of the catering facility, I discovered EKFC machine learning and data from loyalty programmes are being used to predict the demand for meals over routes.
Singapore Airlines is trying something else entirely. Originally a way to expand meal choice, The Book the Cook programme can also be used to cut down on excess catering.
Anthony McNeil, the airline's food and beverage director, explains that allowing passengers to choose their meal before takeoff vastly expands the menu.
"In some circumstances we will have up to 100 meal choices, depending on the sectors you fly to."
Originally a First and Business class initiative, the menu is filled with Singaporean classics and local favourites. Including the flying lobster.
The Auckland-to-Singapore service offers the choice of Wakanui beef and South Island salmon.
Miraculously, the Book the Cook service not only helps to increase meal choice but also reduce costs.
According to McNeil, the process "allows us the opportunity to select specifically the meals that the people want to be in flight it also determines how many meals we need to uplift".
It's something the airline recently extended to Premium Economy passengers, and McNeil says could soon be offered to all passengers.
"To be able to look into the future and give people in Economy the opportunity to book their meal, that's also something which will help us with our sustainability approach in the future."
Though premium economy passengers from Auckland might have to downscale from lobster to perhaps a king prawn in the seafood mee goreng, the choices are far more appetising than "Beef or Chicken?"
