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If you think the food airline companies serve up is bland or unappetising, it’s not necessarily their fault. Essentially, you leave your normal sense of taste behind at the airport departure gate. Get on board a plane and cruise to a level of thousands of feet, and the flavour of everything from a pasta dish to a mouthful of wine becomes manipulated in a whole host of ways that we are only beginning to understand.

Taste buds and sense of smell are the first things to go at 30,000 feet, says Russ Brown, director of In-flight Dining & Retail at American Airlines. “Flavour is a combination of both,(01) and our perception of saltiness and sweetness drop when inside a pressurised cabin.”

Everything that makes up the in-flight experience affects how your food tastes. There are several reasons for this: lack of humidity, lower air pressure, and the background noise. The combination of dryness and low pressure reduces the sensitivity of your taste buds to sweet and salty foods by around 30%, according to a 2010 study. Interestingly, the study found that we take leave of our sweet and salty senses only. Sour, bitter and spicy flavours are almost unaffected.

But it’s not just about our taste buds. Up to 80% of what people think is taste, is in fact smell. We need evaporating nasal mucus to smell, but in the parched cabin air our odour receptors do not work properly, and the effect is that this makes food taste twice as bland.

So (04) airlines have to give (02) in-flight food an extra kick,(03) by salting and spicing it much more than a restaurant on the ground ever would. “Proper seasoning is key to ensure food tastes good in the air,” says Brown at American Airlines. “Often, recipes are modified with additional salt or seasoning to account for the cabin dining atmosphere.”

(By Katia Moskvitch http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150112-whv-in-flight-food-tastes-weird (adapted).)

The word “So” (04) can be substituted, without a change in the meaning, by