A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton Read Free Book Online Page B

withrejected samples, most of which had ended up there on the grounds of cost, not so much because of the airline’s miserliness as because of its sheer size, an overspend on a single chair having dramatic consequences when typing out a purchase order for thirty thousand of them. A tour of the premises, with a close look at the early designs for plane interiors, offered a pleasure similar to that of looking through the first draft of a manuscript and seeing that prose that would eventually be polished and sure had started out hesitant and confused – a lesson with consoling applications for a universal range of maiden efforts.

    I came away from the back rooms of the airport regretting what seemed a wrong-headed imbalance between the lavish attention paid to distracting and entertaining travellers and the scant time spent educating them about the labour involved in their journeys.
    It is a good deal more interesting to find out how an airline meal is made than how it tastes – and a good deal more troubling. A mile from the terminal, in a windowless refrigerated factory owned by the Swiss company Gate Gourmet, eighty thousand breakfasts, lunches and dinners, all intended for ingestion within the following fifteen hours somewhere in the troposphere, werebeing made up by a group of women from Bangladesh and the Baltic. Korean Airlines would be serving beef broth, JAL salmon teriyaki and Air France a chicken escalope on a bed of puréed carrots. Foods that would later be segregated according to airline and destination now mingled freely together, like passengers in the terminal, so that a tray containing a thousand plates of Dubai-bound Emirates hummus might be lined up in the freezer room next to four trolleys full of SAS gravadlax, set to fly part-way to Stockholm.
    Aeroplane food stands at a point of maximum tension between the man-made and the natural, the technological and the organic. Even the most anaemic tomato (and the ones at Gate Gourmet were mesmerising in their fibrous pallor) remains a work of nature. How strange and terrifying, then, that we should take our fruit and vegetables up into the sky with us, when we used to sit more humbly at nature’s feet, hosting harvest festivals to honour the year’s wheat crop and sacrificing animals to ensure the continued fecundity of the earth.
    There is no need for such prostration now. A batch of twenty thousand cutlets, which had once, if only briefly, been attached to lambs born and nursed on Welsh hillsides, was driven into the depot. Within hours, with the addition of a breadcrumb topping, a portion of these would metamorphose into meals that would be eaten over Nigeria – with no thought or thanks given to their author, twenty-six-year-old Ruta from Lithuania.
    7 The British Airways flight crews also maintained offices at the airport. In an operations room in Terminal 5, pilots stopped by throughout the day and into the evening to consult with their managers about what the weather was like over Mongolia, or how much fuel they ought to purchase in Rio. When I saw an opening, I introduced myself to Senior First Officer Mike Norcock, who had been flying for fifteen years and who greeted me with one of those wry, indulgent smiles often bestowed by professionals upon people with a more artistic calling. In his presence, I felt like a child unsure of his father’s affections. I realised that meeting pilots was doomed to escalate into an ever more humiliating experience for me, as the older I got, the more obvious it became that I would never be able to acquire the virtues that I so admired in them – their steadfastness, courage, decisiveness, logic and relevance – and must instead forever remain a hesitant and inadequate creature who would almost certainly start weeping if asked to land a 777 amid foggy ground conditions in Newfoundland.
    Norcock had come to the operations room to pick up some route maps. He was off to India in his jumbo but first wanted to