When British Airways announced earlier this week that it was reducing the number of meals provided to passengers on some economy flights and providing the opportunity to buy M&S sandwiches instead, one or two commentators deplored the change. But, in general, the news was greeted with a collective sigh of relief by a travelling public increasingly ground down by the indignities of air travel.

I have a dirty little secret about airline food. I love it. I know of other foodies who so loathe the whole business that they now travel with smug little hampers of goodies so they can wrap themselves in a pashmina, turn on the expensive headphones and bury themselves in a private world of airborne luxury. But I can’t go that way.

There’s always been something incredibly exciting about communal eating while mashed into a seat and surrounded by the detritus of inflatable neck cushions, headphone cables, magazines and books. Long, long before hipster chefs were selling meat that had been cooked fashionably low and slow, cabin crew with fireproof legs and plastic smiles were serving chicken-or-beef that had spent most of a day being cooked, sealed, transported and stored.

Before Heston, if you wanted a cut of beef cooked for 24 hours at 56.6C, you had to take a DanAir flight to Gran Canaria. And there’s just something so modern, so sci-fi about getting a whole meal, in compartments, on a plastic tray. Even today, when the sealed, reduced-salt, allergen-cleansed meal pod is passed down the aisle, it feels like something an astronaut might eat, with the design aesthetic of a Bento box.

This is not, I’m relieved to say, a solitary passion. Kevin English, a contributor to airlinemeals.net, where inflight food lovers can post pictures of their meals with accompanying comments, takes a similar view. “I think it goes back to the romance of travel,” he says. “My father was an expat and I remember travelling back to England regularly on BOAC in the 70s.

“Travelling was more inaccessible then and the food and nice service were exciting. Even today I think people find travel boring, the experience of checking in, security and boarding can be frankly unpleasant, so once they sit in the seat the inflight meal is one of the highlights of the journey.”

It’s long been believed that altitude somehow affects the tastebuds and that airline food is specially flavoured to overcome this. Sadly, says Prof Barry C Smith at Centre for the Study of the Senses at the University of London, this isn’t quite right. The tongue itself is unaffected but “white noise (like the sound of engines) in the ears makes the brain detect less salt, sweet and sour from the tongue by about 15%”. So do the airlines alter the menu to compensate?

“Lufthansa seem to know,” says Smith. “They give their business class passengers noise-cancelling headphones … for a better taste experience.

“Dry air and high altitude or low pressure make it less easy to smell our food, so that reduces enjoyment, but we can overcome this a little with more spices because they engage a different system – the trigeminal nerve, which makes peppermint taste cool in the mouth and mustard taste hot. That’s why BA used to give people more curries at the back of the plane.” That is, in economy class.

But the umami flavour is immune to this effect, says the professor, “which is why you should drink bloody marys on a plane” – and perhaps why my memories of some of those long-simmered, rich-gravied braised meats have stayed with me so much longer then the bleach-flavoured salads or the styrofoam rolls.

Menus from the great historical airships occasionally crop up at auction, revealing a degree of luxury that diminishes today’s business class by comparison. These flights were intended to compete with the great transatlantic liners, then at their apogee, and so offered breakfast, lunch and dinner with consommés, French sauces, soufflés, fresh coffee and fruit, all presented by silver service waiters in mess jackets.

The first meals on passenger planes are thought to have been served by the Handley Page Transport company in 1919, flying from Hounslow Heath aerodrome in London to Le Bourget, Paris. Sandwiches and fruit were brought aboard in hampers and distributed by stewards or “cabin boys”.

After the second world war, international air travel became regarded as a symbol of status rather than a simple matter of transportation. The national flag-carrier companies, in particular, took every opportunity to show the world their best.

An Air France menu for the Paris-New York run in 1964 offers a starter of caviar and then a choice between “aiguillette de caneton Montmorency,” “gigue de chevreuil ‘grand veneur’” and “suprême de volaille ‘Coq Hardi’” – an enviable spread by today’s standards, though I’d pay folding money to see today’s cabin crew serving it with silver spoon and fork over the heads of screaming kids in cattle class.

Today, if BA is guessing correctly, it looks like the glory days of airline food are behind us. They can’t see a reason to keep up the pretence, and perhaps I should be happier to let it go.

At one level, airline food is purely functional. If humans are going to be confined in a metal tube for eight or more hours at a time, then certain biological needs must be met. Over the years, though, airlines have invested the in-flight meal with much more. Planes are one of the vanishingly few public spaces in which a class system is still rigorously enforced rather than hidden. The difference in price between a first and an economy class ticket is vast and, as all passengers arrive at exactly the same time, in exactly the same place, and equally clobbered with jetlag, extraordinarily difficult to justify on any rational economic grounds.

Given the limited number of services an airline can offer to passengers strapped into seats, food became one of the most important signifiers – the best opportunity to remind people of their place, and to justify what they’d paid for it. It’s an intriguing thought that, as more and more passengers bring their own in-flight entertainment in the form of laptops, smartphones and tablets and the airline has lost another opportunity to stratify the offering, perhaps lowering the standards of economy is the only way left to maintain ticket class differentials.

Much has changed in airline catering. A rise in economy class flying by both business and leisure flyers has meant that costs have been cut to the bone. Outside the rarified “front end” of the plane, behind the curtain, tiny economies in large numbers of cheap meals can have a proportionally higher greater effect on profitability.

Many of the prestigious catering operations that once served the flag carriers have separated from their parent companies and now supply high volumes of economical ready meals in an international market worth millions per year. LSG Sky Chefs, originally the catering backbone of Lufthansa and Gate Group, originally Swissair’s chefs, are the two biggest players in the game; whoever you fly with, you’re likely to see one or other of their trucks backing up to your aircraft.

The kitchens, though, which once served their finest in a grand gesture of national pride, are now undifferentiated feedmills for the herds in transit. And the shape of the meal has changed. Fears around terrorism after 9/11 have removed anything like proper eating utensils from circulation in the cabin, meaning that anything that’s not a finger food or effectively a packaged snack can’t be served. Increased sensitivity to allergies among fliers mean that food is laden with disclaimers and warnings, giving it all the delicious appeal of a shrinkwrapped bio-hazard.

Passengers’ expectations have collapsed as flying becomes more common and as no-frills airlines make a benefit out of highly visible cost-cutting. The industry has got itself into a weird, self-destructive loop, a race to the bottom in which, if a passenger in an economy-class seat actually receives something decent to eat and which isn’t charged for as an extra, they will think they’re somehow getting ripped off.

Finally, the airports themselves have upped their game. Once, there was only a joyless institutional airside cafeteria where you could sit under a striplight and drink plastic coffee while lovers bid tearful goodbyes and lonely business travellers drowned themselves in canned lager. Now that international legislation has robbed duty free of its financial advantage, the airports have concentrated on feeding travellers.

The food court at an international airport today is a high-function holding pen that might have been designed by Temple Grandin to stall the milling mass of humanity and strip them of cash in exchange for glittering, recognisable high street food brands. It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting an economy inflight meal if they can get their favourite fast food or gourmet sandwich at only marginally hiked prices, just a shuttle short of the gate.

Kevin English sums it up ruefully. “We just have to accept that the days of a free hot breakfast on the 7am to Glasgow are over. Catering is a cost centre and airlines have to turn it into a revenue stream. Something’s got to give.” But, for a privileged few, he believes, there’s still hope. “Many airlines are putting more effort into their premium cabins – first and business class.”

So, perhaps those irritating foodies have a point. Maybe next time I should just go where the inevitable pressures of science and economics are guiding me. I’ll get some noise-cancelling headphones so I can taste the bloody mary in my Thermos and, buried in my smug little hamper, wrapped in a linen napkin to incubate it at a steady warm temperature, I’ll put a piece of beef I’ve braised for something like a week, some over-stewed carrots and a kick-ass gravy, in a tinfoil tray, with a cardboard lid.