What passes for food in airports

I had some time on Monday evening – a couple of hours right around supper time to be exact – to meditate on the lack of edible food in our public places, in this case the Calgary Airport.

Having disembarked for my stopover – a tiny packet of pretzel-like substance my only sustenance during the four hour flight from Ottawa – I was looking for something freshly cooked or remotely resembling fresh edible food. But what a wasteland it is for the connecting traveller, with most so called food outlets already scraping up their leavings to shut down for the day at 7pm, or already closed. Unless your tastes run to donuts or foul smelling sandwiches, or greasy steamtabled chinese style food, or nasty looking pasta, you will roam the hallways hungry and without so much as a single decent retail outlet to distract you. There was no longer even a Dairy Queen to brighten the horizon.

The one sit-down restaurant – Montana’s last time I was there, but now replaced by Kelsey’s (no real change there since the same American company owns Harvey’s, Swiss Chalet, Second Cup, Milestones, Montana’s, Kelsey’s and Toast Cafe) – served me food and drink so utterly vile on my last visit that I was moved to write a letter of complaint. The response from the company was to offer me a coupon to dine with them again. As if.

Speaking of ownership, I read in the Guardian an article about corporate ownership changes to ethical companies including Green & Black’s (Cadbury), Rachel’s (Dean Foods), Ben & Jerry’s (Unilever) and the subsequent decline in their ethical rankings. Even the Body Shop is no more the lone voice in the cosmetic wilderness, since it’s been sold to L’Oreal! It’s so hard to keep up. Another good reason to try to give your custom to the dwindling number of locally owned operations wherever possible.