The brief period between Christmas and New Year’s is one of the few peak periods for travel where your decisions about what to eat are beyond your control, be it on board an aircraft or as an unexpected stop at something Golden Arched on the roadside. Roadside stops in the Western world tend to provide the illusion of choice rather than actual choice; an illusion recovered golden-brown  from the oily depths of a deep fryer.

I plan what I’m going to eat in advance. Planning is a source of joy in itself and food tends to be the destination rather than something that happens along the way.  I spend far too much of my time divining regional specialties and going out of my way to find food. Eating while in transit forces you to lower your expectations and hit up the bain marie.

Airline food bears most of the brunt of people’s disaffection to eating while in transit. I’m still amazed that you can get something warm to eat while airborne because it is such a neat logistical trick to roll out a hot meal and cold beer to a few hundred people from a kitchen roughly the size of a garden shed. Complaining about airline food is probably a way of dissipating how creepy it is that humans can sit in a reclining chair while a few kilometres off the ground, travelling at 900km per hour.

Food writer Calvin Trillin reckoned that for every dollar that you save by flying on a budget airline, you should spend on food to bring with you to keep you sustained and entertained in-flight. With excellent wines now being packaged with a screw cap, there is no need to attempt to smuggle a corkscrew on board lest you be mistaken for a hijacker. Similarly, the hinge on the folding tray table in the back of your seat serves as a passable bottle opener for your gourmet beer. Otherwise, you could learn this trick.

With the advent of the bottom of the barrel airlines, your food budget has much room to move, but the airlines themselves have little impetus to encourage you to bring your own.  Most warn against it with the weakest of explanations. Last time that I flew on one of Australia’s more recent budget carrier, their explanation for not allowing food on board was that it denied their inflight crew tips from those who purchase food from the hosties. When was the last time you saw somebody tip one of the flight crew?