I hate plane food. You should too.

I just got back from vacation and let me tell you, I ate some horrible food on that flight. Here’s an example, I got a Thai green curry and the ingredients were as listed:

Water, white rice, modified food starch, coconut oil, maltodextrin, salt, less than 2% of the following...

We all know plane food is terrible, especially when you fly economy like me. But this was one of the first times I actually stopped to read the ingredients, and I'm not even sure if I was surprised. Nutritionally, this obviously has little value. White rice is not a whole grain since it only contains the endosperm, while a whole grain includes the entire piece of rice: the endosperm, germ, and bran. You don't need to know what those are, but just know this is processed to the point where most of the nutrients are basically gone and it's just empty carbs. Maltodextrin and modified food starch don't even sound like real food, right? Yeah, that's because they're highly processed ingredients that cause spikes in blood sugar. Coconut oil is not as tropical and healthy as it sounds since it's actually pretty high in saturated fat. Also, can we talk about the fact that there's no curry in this Thai green curry? Literally no real vegetables, no herbs, no protein worth mentioning. The name is pretty misleading.

This is a pretty good example of what's called an ultra-processed food, which is something engineered for shelf stability and affordability rather than nutrition. You don't need to know much about nutrition, but if you look at the ingredient list, you're going to see that it's not really food they're serving you. It's just straight up chemicals.

On my inbound flight, they gave me a cookie bigger than the sandwich. Yes, you read that right. I wish I was joking, but I'm not. And that's not an accident. It just shows how industries like the travel industry are not trying to keep you healthy. They just want to make money. Healthy whole foods are objectively harder to store, harder to mass produce, and much harder to keep shelf-stable on a 15-hour flight. So as a result, you get maltodextrin, modified food starch, and a cookie bigger than your entree as a meal. Convenient for them, not for us.

This isn't even just a travel problem. The food industry spends billions of dollars engineering products to be addictive and cheap, not nutritious. Ultra-processed foods are designed to make you keep eating and buying more, just so they can make money. And when these foods are the most accessible, affordable, and heavily marketed options available, you are obviously more likely to eat them, which is pretty bad for public health.

Here's the harsh truth: no corporation prioritizes your health. That means the responsibility of keeping yourself healthy falls on you, which isn't fair, but it's reality.

So what can you do? The first step is awareness. Read the ingredient list. Notice when something is called a Thai green curry but has no actual curry, or question your cookie-to-sandwich ratio. The more you understand, the less vulnerable you are to big corporations profiting off of the decline of public health. Make good choices.