Hunger On a Plane
Some of my worst episodes of hunger have come on airplanes.
It doesn't matter how ample the breakfast. This hunger is unlike anything I can explain.
After takeoff, my blood sugar plummets.
My stomach feels like it’s nothing but air. Dark and cold. Similar to how I pictured what being in the womb was like as a child: vast, empty.
I glance around to see if anyone else is on the edge of a low-blood sugar meltdown too. Everyone just looks worried about the turbulence.
I’m in a Maslow's-pyrimid-nosedive. Before I was comfortable and thinking almost existentially at the gate about how much I’ve done in my life.
But now I'm watching the snack cart woman. She’s about 30 rows away.
A thought pops into my head: could I pull the entire drawer out of that cart and grab say 15 snack packs while she is serving the opposite passenger? Would she care?
Being on United is even worse.
At least on Southwest they try. There's a woman whose job is to stuff the largest box she can find in the back with snacks and offer handfuls to every row she passes. I’ve found she looks almost a little dejected if you take only one.
I wonder out loud to her if she gets bonused on how much she hands out. She replies with something about a buffalo. And 'using every part of it.' Alright.
At least she is miles ahead of United's snack offering.
The choice on United is would you like a) nothing or b) one micro pack of peanuts, with the strange hot jalapeño bombs thrown in.
I look at the pack to get an idea of its weight. 14 grams.
Sometimes I like to crunch up the few napkins that I receive with my snack pack to see if they would outweigh the 7 peanuts I just ate. I decide to stare at them for the rest of the flight.
I ask the flight attendant for two cremes for my coffee. Not because I like a diluted coffee, but because drinking crème chased with crème is my plan B if I start to pass out and need calories.
I’m not interested in aesthetics or getting romantic with the people around me. I'm interested in getting something into my stomach, who is clearly insulted with the few grams of food I’ve given it.
Sometimes I get lucky and remember I packed a clementine in the bottom of my backpack. It’s been smashed down from my laptop.
It looks more like a damp pancake at this point. Oh well. I have a second round of snacking.
I get lost thinking about the cost/benefit of a clementine. The sheer prep work. And if a tangerine exists or is just a bigger clementine and we’ve been fooled.
Suddenly, the cart woman comes down the aisle at a decent trot, yelling "CART!" at customers who are mostly sleeping. The customers were very much out of the way of the cart until twitching awake at her sudden yelling.
Limbs flail. I hear someone’s elbow connect to the steel frame of the cart. The bone-to-metal sound registers. I hear expletives.
I drop my clementine in shock and watch it roll dead straight down the center aisle. We’ve on a mild descent so it doesn’t stop. It finally comes to a small thump of a stop against the cockpit door.
I've had it. I'm only 14 grams of nuts and 2 cremes in, which is causing me to start to lose my temper. My low-sugar blood starts to boil.
I seek refuge in the airplane bathroom.
For some strange reason it feels good in there. I put my nose an inch from the mirror, stare into my own eyes, and mutter "this is my peaceful space, it’s going to be fine.” I rest in the rest room for a bit.
I return to my seat and continue on with the flight, pushing through the hunger until it vanishes as quickly as it came.
Like that, it’s gone. Kind of like a dark spirit. It’s simply exorcized away by my small trip to the holy basin.
I join the rest of the airplane population in looking out the window as we finish our descent. It feels nice thinking about normal things, like if the pilot will find the airport correctly and if he’ll overshoot the runway. The plane lands just fine.
The experienced I described happens 80% of the time on flights. If it does with you too, drop me a line, and thank you for reading.
