Airline food – that perennial comedy club staple is in danger as troubled, full service airlines consider dropping it. Predictably, there was an outcry by regular passengers, but why? Is in-flight food any good? The answer is no, but it’s a way to pass and (suprisingly) track time. One interesting fact is the complications arising from the high attitude environment:

 â€œIt’s just as well that in-flight food isn’t about gustatory greatness, because meal service isn’t easy when you’re five miles high. Even coffee is problematic because it’s harder to bring water to proper temperature at 40,000 feet. When McDonald’s did a Happy Meals promotion with a major carrier in the 1990s, the burger giant had to reformulate the cheese so it would melt rather than liquefy in flight. And forget about gourmet dining. How do you create a four-star meal when open flames are verboten, prep space is nonexistent, knives have rounded edges, and flight attendants must serve dozens of passengers at once using a convection oven?

In FT, Pankaj Ghemawat argues that the world isn’t flat. Semi-globalization means that local companies can still successfully compete with global behemoths: as an example he mentions Goody’s vs McDonals in Greece! Although we tend to think that the internet has led to global hyperconnection (as people in the Victorian age thought of the telegraph), there are still cultural and economic barriers that still leave good niches to flexible players.