In the last decade or so, air travel has become more associated with awful food than ever before.  I miss the days of kvetching about airplane food in your most highly-flavored Seinfeld voice, back when there was such a thing as airplane food.  Nowadays, the buying of provisions must occur before you scan your ticket at the gate, lest you spend $9 on a damp sandwich en-route.

In major hubs like Chicago, Detroit, Dallas-Ft.Worth and Atlanta you’d be hard-pressed to find a crunchy vegetable amidst the hot dog, pizza and burger chains stationed in each terminal.  What vegetables you do find in the occasional sit-down restaurant are topped with deep-fried chicken or fatty, salty meats and cheeses, and drizzled (or coated) with high-calorie dressing.  In cities that post calories on menus it becomes plainly evident that there’s nowhere to run, especially at places like Chili’s and California Pizza Kitchen where healthy-looking options pack an unsuspected knockout punch – CPK’s Thai Chicken salad contains nearly a thousand calories, 40 grams of fat and more than a Coke can’s worth of carbs.

The Delta snack box is a great example of air travel nutritional abomination.   Hungry in coach, I bought one.  Hydration-zapping white cheddar-style cheese product, gouda-style cheese product (I’m reading off the labels, I’m not being snarky), oily salami slices, buttery crackers, buttery cookies and sugary, sticky Craisins combined with rainstorm turbulence …well, I’ve been back from the airport for several hours now and still have no desire to eat.   If you're interested in seeing what others have eaten at cruising altitude, check out AirlineMeals.net and your standards will adjust accordingly.

Set foot in the European Union, however, and your airport fare is transformed: dark chocolate, mineral and sparkling water, healthy protein like tuna and hard-boiled eggs, preservative-free bottled fruit juices and salads galore.  In most American airports, you can’t get the likes of smoked salmon and radicccio on a baguette unless you count mashed imitation crab and mayonnaise on a squishy bleached white roll at Subway.  (I do not).  Granted you will also find “Macdo,” the affectionate French term for the food court staple where the Royale with cheese was born, but the options are available.

Before I knew Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport as the origin of the underwear bomber flight, it was the airport where I knew I’d be able to get and even looked forward to packs of crisp, trimmed radishes and baby carrots, low-sugar, preservative-free 6-fruit smoothies, cured beef and capers on pumpernickel and caprese salad.  Even Paris Charles de Gaulle, eager as it is to offer its millions of annual tourists pain au chocolat and éclairs from the moment they step off the plane, also offers light, healthy choices.  And from what Mireille Guiliano tells me, French women don’t get fat.

Had George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air been real, that many man-hours spent in domestic air transit would have had its cruel way with his fabulous waist.  That inevitable, looming 900-calorie sausage in a bun.  The Chick-fil-A.  Flying and all that it entails makes the vast majority of us miserable, especially these days, as a more or less undisputed fact.  Today’s food movement will firmly back the suggestion that healthier food options in our highly regulated and hugely populated airports just may improve the morale of casual and frequent fliers alike.  It would ease the caloric travel burden of the already perilous holiday eating season.  It may even improve the bickering about large passengers’ flesh spillover in airplane seats.

I was on a recent Sun Country flight to Minneapolis where plastic-wrapped microwave cheeseburgers were handed out with ketchup packets somewhere around Ohio.  Of course there’s flesh spillover!  And as of a few months ago, we know what happened to that beef before another machine sealed it in cellophane

We all travel and will all continue to, but as someone who takes the increasingly uncomfortable road traveled 35,000 feet above the ground on a regular basis, I would love to support an airport food-conscious culture that supported me back.