The Psychology Behind Buying Bad Airport Food—Again and Again
Maggie Cowles
This article is part of our airport food survival guide, which includes tips and tricks—even a hot take or two—that challenge the notion that airport meals are always dull, overpriced, and tasteless.
The absolute worst way for a person to spend $37 for dinner in New York City is on an undressed Caesar salad accompanied by a weird little roll that comes in its own plastic sack and a lukewarm gin and tonic.
The absolute best way for a person to spend $37 for dinner within the confines of a New York City airport is, however, on an undressed Caesar salad accompanied by a weird little roll that comes in its own plastic sack and a lukewarm gin and tonic. This isn’t so much a code I live by as it is a truth that I have come to accept. The moment I see those 25-foot tall circular rings of falling water with a pulsating light show in La Guardia’s Terminal B, all notions I have constructed of a curated—and occasionally aesthetically pleasing—canon of culinary and alcoholic preferences vanish instantly.
In the presence of immense stress (a woman who is screaming into a phone that her son just had diarrhea, and who is also somehow still more put together than I am and ahead of me in the security line) and in the absence of any self-control or foresight, that $37 meal—consumed under flickering fluorescent lights—feels both inevitable and physically healing. In an airport, a visit to Hudson News, with its bounty of $8 Cheez-Its and nutrition bars, is more effective than back-to-back phone therapy. A poorly imitated French bistro that unspools itself as I wheel my perpetually broken suitcase around a corner is as thrilling as the prospect of quenelles de brochet at Benoit. If I am lucky, there will be a floating oasis in the central strip between the gates, appearing like a mirage to a shipwrecked sailor, and its name will be something that’s neither a real word nor even a real sound, like S03EO, and it will offer craft beer and three or four extremely disparate omelets—and it will be the place to which I didn’t realize I had been waiting to pull up a high top stool for my entire life.
There are two issues at play here. The first is my propensity to succumb to a purchase at all, even when it’s 8 a.m. and I’ve already had breakfast, and my flight is only 74 minutes long.
“We go through our days fighting temptation,” says behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who has penned a number of books on the topic of irrational decision making. “We say no to a cookie. And then we get to the airport. We’re fed up with life.” Ariely calls this—the moment that we shed all pretenses of self-control, adherence to budget, or culinary preference, in favor of a small scary snack—the “break point”: when it feels as though everything is going wrong and our ability to resist temptation lowers. The second piece of the issue, as I see it, is not only that an airport makes some of us dissolve into completely different, frantic people, but also that as those frantic people, we end up spending more money on items we know would cost less elsewhere. At the “break point,” Ariely says, if it is within the bounds of affordability to a given traveler, that traveler is going to be willing to pay more, just to feel better.
I say “our” and “a given traveler” because I am, unfortunately, not alone in this shocking behavior. You and your partner are elbowing me in line to get the last (crust-coated) table at a pan-South American grill that inexplicably also serves sushi; I know this because according to data released by analytics company STR’s Tourism Consumer Insights team, 89% of travelers said that they made purchases in the airport before air travel. (Only 30% said they made a purchase on the flight itself.)
I also asked around.
Some people, like my friend Eric, told me they had a plan in place for airport food. (His is, roughly, to buy Gardetto’s whenever he sees them.) Others, like my friend Maddie—who frequently commutes to other cities from New York City for work—seem to reach their break point as easily as I do. “It’s like I don’t believe the flight will ever take off, which is a valid fear, and so while I’m earthbound I must eat and hoard calories,” Maddie said. “Once I ate an edible to help me sleep on a redeye—it didn’t work, and I ended up slurping down three bowls of ramen in the lounge because I was having a panic attack.”
“Did the ramen help?” I asked.
“Like, no,” she said.
Dr. Ellen Langer, who is often called “the mother of mindfulness” and has taught this topic for more than four decades at Harvard University, believes that the negative emotions I associate with the airport are avoidable. Perhaps most integral, she says, is to preempt the mental error of thinking that situations (i.e. that one especially dismal terminal at LAX where the Dunkin’ sandwiches all for some reason taste like cleaning solution) and events (a delayed flight, a middle seat assignment) are what causes stress.
“For stress to occur,” she explained, “you have to believe that something is going to happen, and you believe that it is going to be awful.” Not only are we fairly bad predictors of actual future events, she argues, but most experiences do not turn out to be awful. Sometimes they are inconvenient, Dr. Langer says, but dreading potential inconveniences is a waste of energy and depletes our ability to be responsive and mindful in the face of strife later, a disposition she calls “defensive pessimism.”
Dr. Langer also challenged me to “accept the fact that virtually anything can be fun” through “choices that make it like a game.” If I made the choice to buy a sad cheeseburger for $24 for example, she suggested I could pretend to be at Noma while eating it, and practice “active noticing”: try to pinpoint what qualities make it good or bad. Or I could eat that $37 undressed Caesar salad leaf by leaf, and attempt to identify its terroir.
As if I needed an excuse to look even wilder at the airport.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
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