The Picture of Dorian Palak

When leaf and airline food go separate ways

There is a particular vanity in offering advice one has not yet been compelled to follow. For years, friends, family, the occasional stranger trapped in an airport queue…have been informed, with the gentle insistence of a man who fancies he knows better, that on long-haul flights one must always carry one’s own food, at least for the first leg. 

Last week, on an SFO-Frankfurt-Mumbai itinerary, the inconvenience of practising one’s own preaching at last arrived. A tiffin of homemade quinoa travelled quietly in the hand luggage, and at Frankfurt, a sensible little tub of curd was acquired to keep it company.

The first leg was operated by Disunited and its Asian Veg meal arrived in due course. But declined to identify itself. Once the kindly stewardess admitted, “I have no clue,” the plate was returned. The quinoa and curd, meanwhile, performed with the discreet competence of objects that have never been asked to explain themselves. 

By the time the Frankfurt lounge appeared, dignity and digestion were both intact, a combination on which the modern traveller cannot always count. The second leg, optimism insisted, would be entirely different. This was, after all, the Maharaja’s airline – let’s call it Err India. Its head purser, a woman of considerable grace, made one feel like a long-expected houseguest. The starters arrived; the mains followed; and at length the palak appeared – deeply green, properly creamy, and yet, somehow, faintly suspicious.

I lifted my fork. Something in the palak was not behaving as palak should. The steward observed, with the philosophical calm of a man long acquainted with vegetables, “Sir, that must be potato.” The object was cut neatly in two, the cross-section politely presented. The potato, it must be confessed, had grain. And feathers, almost.

There followed apologies of a kind only well-bred institutions can produce, each more elaborate than the last, the head purser herself attending with such gracious remorse that one began to feel almost guilty for having noticed the chicken at all. Forgiveness, in such cases, comes naturally. 

Forty years of vegetarianism teaches a certain serenity, and one does not waste good karma on a 30,000-foot misunderstanding. The episode merely confirmed the old advice: Carry the tiffin. Trust the airline, but verify with cutlery. There are, in the end, only two kinds of vegetarians in the long-haul world. Those who carry their own food, and those who soon will.