Over the course of her career as a chef, Molly Brandt has had all kinds of prestigious jobs.

I basically worked in every part of the restaurant industry from large-scale hotels to private hotels,

Michelin-star restaurants, to cruise lines, to my own catering business.

But today, she works on dishes that aren't often in the spotlight.

I am the innovation chef for North America for Gate Group.

Gate Group is the parent company of Gate Gourmet, one of the largest in-flight catering

companies. It makes food that's served on airplanes all over the world. When you hear the

words airplane and food in the same sentence, you might think of rubbery meat, flavorless pasta,

and wilted salad served on a plastic tray.

Airline food is the butt of all the jokes, right? And I fully understand that. But it doesn't

have to be that way. We want to move the needle in airline catering. We want to make it a little

bit more interesting. But making food that tastes good at 35,000 feet is harder than it might seem.

We're fully cooking, we're chilling down, and then plating cold.

And then it goes up into the aircraft and it gets heated up again.

That makes it very challenging to make food, let's say, multi-dimensional.

Every second counts. I know it sounds cliche, but in this business, we always have to be on time.

We always have to be there when we're supposed to. The food, the napkins, the glasses, all of that

has to be perfect out of the kitchen. For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the

economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crackett. Today, airplane food. To understand why modern day airline food is, well, the way it is,

you first have to understand how food ended up on planes to begin with.

Early commercial airplanes in the 1920s generally accommodated fewer than 20 people

and couldn't handle much extra weight.

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