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SPEAKER_20: Listener supported. WNYC Studios.
SPEAKER_14: This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, the novelist Jennifer Egan on how we could end the enormous problem of homelessness if we had the will to do it. That's The New Yorker Radio Hour. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab.
SPEAKER_09: Radiolab. From WNYC. Wow. Okay. Look at that difference. Huge difference. All right, let
SPEAKER_11: me just do the I'm producer Matt Kielty blah, blah, blah, blah. All right. You want to just
SPEAKER_05: take it away? Yeah, let's just jump right in because tis the season for one of the greatest
SPEAKER_11: miracles on earth. Not the birth of Christ, virgin birth, pretty wild stuff, but actually the miracle of human flight. Hello everyone. My name is David and I'm your chief flight attendant on behalf of the captain. Okay. Now I should say this is not a story. I don't have a story to tell you. Who needs a story? Matt, throw us whatever you got. We're captive.
SPEAKER_05: All right. So I wanted to start on a plane because millions of people around the world
SPEAKER_11: are going to be on them around this time of the year. Yeah. But also because of this thing that happens to me every time I fly, which is like, all right, you're on the plane, you're out on the tarmac, you're waiting to take off for a while, a long while. And then the engines start to whir and suddenly you feel this, that jolt, like the whole plane starts shaking. You can hear the seats rattling. Plane is just going faster and faster. You're doing something like 180 miles an hour. And then all of a sudden you're just like, oh, and you feel that little rise and you leave the earth and you can see the ground just start to fall away. And the higher you get, you can start to see the snakings of the freeways and the highway systems and the parks and the neighborhoods. And then all of a sudden you're in the clouds. That's where we used to think that gods exist and angels and like, we're just up there. And maybe you take a moment to kind of just take a breath, relax.
SPEAKER_08: Feeling a state of pleasant anticipation about the place you're going to be when you land.
SPEAKER_11: I actually talked to Dan Koist, who's a writer for Slate, who pointed out to me that one of the incredible things about being up there with all these people is, you know, where
SPEAKER_08: 200 people are. So and we're like a little civilization soaring through the sky, which
SPEAKER_11: is actually kind of where everything goes wrong. Because what it means is it's just you and a bunch of people trapped inside of a relatively small metal tube. And any agency
SPEAKER_08: we have over ourselves has essentially been stripped of us. You are literally strapped into a seat, no longer in control of your physical body or your fate. It is in other people's hands. And you start to wonder, who are these other people? Like is the person
SPEAKER_08: next to me a loud snorer or a drooler on my shoulder? And there's that guy across the
SPEAKER_11: aisle who looked, hey hon, hey honey, super flirty with a flight attendant. Is that a
SPEAKER_08: kid behind me? They might kick the back of your seat. Somebody sounds sick? Like they're coughing a lot. One of our pilots is a bad pilot. We could crash and I might die. And
SPEAKER_11: slowly you're confronted with the fact that this glorious miracle of human flight is really just some sort of like weird endurance test. Yeah, or like a test of your worth. Like, can you make it through this challenge with
SPEAKER_08: your humanity intact in order to earn the reward at the end, which is that you're in Palo Alto or whatever.
SPEAKER_15: Okay, this is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller.
SPEAKER_05: I'm Lutef Nasser. And today to ring in the holiday airline travel season, we are going to take you on a flight.
SPEAKER_13: A flight through these sometimes stressful. Sometimes scary. Sometimes disgusting. Sometimes pleasant. Endurance test that is flying commercial.
SPEAKER_05: We have got three different stories that examine three different elements of this strange little civilization in the air. And to kick it off?
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, it's like in all the tens of thousands of miles of space, these few inches are the most contested.
SPEAKER_05: Producer Matt Kielty.
SPEAKER_13: Okay, so Matt, maybe just rewind a second. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, go back airplane civilization. Let's see, what do I going to bring back Dan
SPEAKER_11: Koist for this? So in a little civilization, I think of I think of the pilots, the flight attendants as sort of the guardians, the providers, the authority figures. And then also up at the front of the plane, you have the first class passengers.
SPEAKER_08: They're in another universe. You won't believe what he said.
SPEAKER_11: Talking about whatever they talked about drinking champagne, imamosas. He said bootstraps. They're probably in their pajamas. Being massaged. I said, no, no, Bradley, loafer tassels, not bootstraps.
SPEAKER_08: But the rest of us.
SPEAKER_11: We are in the endurance test. 35 rows of six. Where you're stuck in these seats seemingly have no cushion, just fabric. And that's where you are for your flight. Upright lock position, except for when you finally. Hello, everyone. The captain has turned off the passenger seatbelt sign.
SPEAKER_11: Your first little bit of freedom on the flight. And if you want to your left, there is that oh so nice little metal button, the recline button. It's such a delicious button. It is perfectly concave for your thumb to just like nestle right into. It's like a little bed for your thumb. It wants to be touched. It's begging for you to touch it. But the thing that I have not stopped thinking about for the past month is how this little button actually contains this sort of basic moral dilemma. Which is, do you push it and push your seat back, taking up a little bit of space from the person behind you for your own comfort, knowing that that might make them less comfortable. And basically what that means for Dan every time he flies on a plane, right before the seatbelt sign goes off, he's sitting there waiting, hoping, wondering. If everyone will just this once prioritize the health of the community over the comfort
SPEAKER_08: of the individual. And then the little ding goes off and you discover that people don't. They don't care about the community. They don't. They are not willing to sacrifice even a tiny bit of comfort for the greater good.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, come on. That feels so extreme. Well, I think it's sure.
SPEAKER_11: Is Dan a tall gentleman?
SPEAKER_05: Oh, no, no, no, no. Dan's five foot nine.
SPEAKER_05: OK, that's that's my land.
SPEAKER_11: But no, I think Dan has a point here, which is if you choose to recline, not only are you taking up someone else's space. They then feel they have to recline.
SPEAKER_08: And so you are setting off a cascade of unpleasant circumstances right down the line as every person now faces this decision about their own comfort now under duress. But you have to admit that it's much more comfortable to be reclined than it is to be
SPEAKER_11: upright.
SPEAKER_08: Is it much more comfortable? How much of a recline do you get on a...
SPEAKER_08: Five degrees, typically. A five degree recline. But in such a confined world, that little bit is at least something. It's like a little
SPEAKER_05: gulp of fresh water. It's like a little... Yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER_08: It's hard to imagine that the difference in your happiness from reclining five degrees is even close to the increase in unhappiness of the person behind you who now has your seat in their face. So Dan's solution is basically, therefore, no one should recline, which feels pretty
SPEAKER_11: extreme. And actually, I was talking to my roommate about this who loves to, she loves to recline. And she said, why not everyone just recline? And then you maximize happiness for everybody if everybody gets reclined.
SPEAKER_05: But then bathroom seat... The last row. The last row doesn't have the ability to recline. But her position was you
SPEAKER_11: found the back row on your own accord. That is not true. Your own individual responsibility. That's self-justifying. To wait that late to buy your seat.
SPEAKER_05: Right. You waited too long to pick your seat. That is cruel victim blaming.
SPEAKER_05: You guys build the plane to let the back seat recline and then we could all recline.
SPEAKER_11: It's a great idea. But Dan would still say no.
SPEAKER_08: It is still a selfish move to recline because you are simply saying, I'm making this decision for everyone. You're effectively saying what I want is what everyone should want. So let's all just recline. There I solved it.
SPEAKER_05: OK. Now I'm starting to feel like a monster. You're a recliner. You're a major recliner. Yeah. It's like I'll take my little corner of like, I'm usually anxious. And so I'm like, I got to take that extra inch and a half and like try to find a little comfort. OK.
SPEAKER_13: It's good because I do not recline. Really? No, I don't. I really I'm an absolutist. I don't recline. You mean like never? I mean, maybe if there's no one behind me. But like, yeah, I don't think I have ever reclined.
SPEAKER_05: OK, Mr. moral high ground. Maybe I'm just feeling defensive, but I do. I feel like I got to go here. Like I do wonder if there's a gender thing afoot here, which is like women are used to not getting any space. So a little bit less. Like I'm not affronted by anyone reclining in me because I'm used to like not taking up space and like moving. Granted, granted, different people value that space a different amount.
SPEAKER_13: Right. But it doesn't kind of matter what that person behind you is valuing, because if you choose to recline, you're making that choice for them. OK, maybe I could just jump in quick and say I on occasion do recline, but I do it as softly
SPEAKER_11: and gently as possible. What a gift.
SPEAKER_08: And that poor bastard behind you.
SPEAKER_11: But I feel I feel like we're having this moral argument, which I understand. But to me, it feels like it's more an argument about ownership because it's like I paid for the ticket for the seat that comes with a recline button. And therefore, like it feels like this the space behind me belongs to me. Like I own that space. But that makes no sense.
SPEAKER_08: What do you mean you own the space behind you? I own the space in front of me. You have no control over the space in front of you. I know that's what's so upsetting about it. But then it's like, imagine you're sitting right now, you're sitting in front of your computer, right? And you've got a microphone in front of you and you're recording this. And what if your next door neighbor just fucking showed up and like put his lawnmower on your desk? It's exactly the same.
SPEAKER_11: Well, but it isn't because it feels slightly different. It's like what if it feels more like if there was like some sort of movable wall with my neighbor that I had no access to control, but they paid their price for their apartment. And it's just like one of the features of their apartment. And so if for some reason they need to like, they're having a large dinner party and they need to move the wall over three feet, they're just going to be like,
SPEAKER_08: Do you see in trying to invent this analogy that it's insane? It's the very idea. Here's a question. What do you do? You're on a flight, you're in your seat, the person in front of you has reclined, you're annoyed about it, you're simmering, then they get up and go to the bathroom. They leave their seat reclined. I would never. I always, always go push their button and pop it back up. Dan, I thought you were a model citizen.
SPEAKER_10: I am a model citizen.
SPEAKER_11: I don't know. It's that you sound like a tyrant is what you sound like. I'm just a good parent. But as I was reporting the story, I did start to wonder, like, who actually owns that space? That's right. So I talked to these two lawyers, Michael Heller, Michael, professor at Columbia Law
SPEAKER_10: School.
SPEAKER_21: Jim Salzman, professor of environmental law at the University of California, Santa Barbara School of the Environment and UCLA Law School.
SPEAKER_11: So Jim and Michael wrote a book called Mine. Am I on the exclamation point?
SPEAKER_21: Mine. Yes. So the book Mine is basically who gets what and why.
SPEAKER_11: And in the book, they point out what is actually kind of obvious, which is that the airlines are the ones who own the space on a plane. Like they're the ones who actually own this reclined space.
SPEAKER_21: There actually is a rule the airlines have, which is you're allowed to recline. Airlines will never enforce it. And they told me that, in fact, flight attendants are trained to just deescalate conflicts about
SPEAKER_11: reclined seats, not actually come in and say who controls that space.
SPEAKER_10: And by not making it clear who controls the reclined space, they get to sell that space twice on every seat and every flight. Because the recliner thinks that they own it and the reclined into thinks they own it.
SPEAKER_11: They basically pit us against each other.
SPEAKER_10: A new air war has broken out.
SPEAKER_10: Which leads to two passengers, irresolvable conflict, got into a brawl Sunday.
SPEAKER_11: There's been drinks thrown, fists thrown, punching the back of this woman's seat after
SPEAKER_00: she reclined it. I mean, there have been flights that have been grounded because of fights over reclining.
SPEAKER_11: And sure, maybe you actually have more self-restraint than that and you deceive in your seat with frustration if somebody reclines into you. But the whole point is we get mad at each other. We turn against each other because we're in this confined space where we all think we own this precious little sliver of it.
SPEAKER_10: And it's mine. No, it's mine. Lets you experience that conflict as being between me and you rather than between being us and the airlines.
SPEAKER_05: Ah, so this is all the airlines fault. They like encourage this conflict to just be left in muddy waters. No clean, you know, no clean boundaries. Like boundaries are an illusion, I guess, but we agree upon them. No clean boundaries. It's just going to be murky. It's just going to like, it's incentivizing conflict. It's incentivizing hating of your fellow human. Like, so let's just hate the airlines.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I agree. I agree with that. I agree with that.
SPEAKER_05: And then like, but that's not the problem is that doesn't actually solve the problem
SPEAKER_11: though.
SPEAKER_05: Well, no, it does. Here's why. Because then you can do either thing. Uh-uh, uh-uh. No way. You can't wash your hands here, Lulu.
SPEAKER_13: Well, I might ask now.
SPEAKER_05: I can, I can learn. I think I would, I think I would ask.
SPEAKER_11: Well, I should say, I do think there actually is a solution here, which I, okay, say, say, say it, say it, say it, say it. Okay. So there was this research done by two other lawyers actually, um, like back in 2014 it was something that was published in Slate, but these two lawyers, uh, did a survey. It was online where they pulled, I forget how many people, and they were trying to figure out is there actually some sort of solution that seems viable? So the research showed that like actually just asking somebody, trying to be polite, trying to ask like, can I lean back or can you please move your seat forward is ineffective. That doesn't actually get you what you want. Ineffective. And so then they, they, they started asking, well, like how much money would it take for you to either stop reclining or for somebody to give up the space in front of them to allow somebody to recline? And this is kind of absurd. The amount of money it would take for somebody to give up the rights to the space in front of them, $39 is what the number came out to be. You have to pay somebody. You'd have to pay somebody $39 essentially to be able to recline into their space. Like that's how strongly they felt about the space in front of them. That's the dollar amount that did.
SPEAKER_13: Feels reasonable. That weirdly feels like a reasonable amount of money. To stop somebody from reclining, the number was $41.
SPEAKER_11: You would have to pay somebody more. Well, so what does that mean?
SPEAKER_05: To me, I see it, there's more pain in, you're willing to pay more.
SPEAKER_13: There's more pain in reclining. No, but it's more luxurious. It's like, no, no, no, it's more. No, no, no, no. Like, this isn't even the point I'm trying to make.
SPEAKER_11: The point I'm trying to make is that actually the most effective thing that you can do is the researchers asked, what if somebody purchased for you a drink or a snack that's maybe like eight bucks? Oh, that's nice. And 78% of people said they would accept that offer and not recline their seat. Amazing. They only asked people who were going to recline. So it's limited to just people who are going to recline. So Latif could be like, wait, wait.
SPEAKER_05: So it could go like this. Latif could go, tap me on the shoulder and say, Lulu, can I buy you a drink to not recline? Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_05: And I'd be like, oh, I would love a little chard. And then I'd be like, Latif, can I buy you a drink to recline? And you'd be like, well, I don't want a fancy cocktail, but you could buy me a tomato juice and some, and one of those expensive cheese plates. And then I'd be like, okay, oh.
SPEAKER_11: I can recline now.
SPEAKER_05: That's classy. And isn't that so sweet? It's so cute. It's sweet, but it's back to capitalism. What? No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_11: It's gift giving. It's transactional. I mean, you're saying the solution to the problem of the plane selling that space twice
SPEAKER_13: is to buy more snacks from them and give them more money.
SPEAKER_11: Okay.
SPEAKER_03: Hello, everyone. In a few minutes, the flight attendants will be coming down the aisle to offer you complimentary hot or cold beverages, as well as a light meal for purchase. Alcoholic drinks are also available at phenomenal charge. Now sit back, relax, enjoy the flight, and thank you.
SPEAKER_05: All right. Next up, we have got a story from our producer, Simon Adler.
SPEAKER_09: Okay. When I say airplane food, what comes to mind for the two of you?
SPEAKER_05: The blandest, unhappiest, tiny packet of experience. And there's often a barfy quality making my stomach turn.
SPEAKER_09: Fair enough. But what if I were to tell you that it wasn't always this way? I am given to understand that we're ready. Excellent. Excellent. That, in fact, as food writer and frequent flyer Richard Foss here tells it, not that long ago. It was wonderful.
SPEAKER_02: Huh. To bring to your heart. Even in economy. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: For years, food was the way that airlines competed for customers. Today's menu includes a shrimp cocktail, a chocolate-nut sundae.
SPEAKER_09: And so you saw the sort of arms race for who could be tastier and fancier.
SPEAKER_02: So on transatlantic flights by SAS. Scandinavian Airlines, that is. It was a Scandinavian smorgasbord carving salmon and all sorts of things. It's all up there. An airline called Northwest Orient. Which is based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
SPEAKER_02: Served Japanese food. On flights all over America in what essentially became a flying tiki bar.
SPEAKER_16: What? Yes. It was not Japanese food as any Japanese person would recognize it.
SPEAKER_02: But for someone in the 1950s, this was glamour. You get to the point where Alitalia Airlines of Italy.
SPEAKER_02: They just made it an Italian restaurant that served you food all the way from one place to another.
SPEAKER_09: Parmesan. Prosciutto. Roma tomatoes. Red wine out of an actual wine glass.
SPEAKER_16: That's flying Alitalia.
SPEAKER_05: I want that flight.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02: It was a pretty amazing experience. So that's how it was.
SPEAKER_05: Okay. If they could return to that. Yeah, it sounds pretty good. But continue. Okay.
SPEAKER_09: Okay. Well, how airplane food became the sad, sorry thing it is today, if you could argue, all began with an olive.
SPEAKER_05: What? Yes.
SPEAKER_02: Crandall's olive.
SPEAKER_05: Because olives are great. I love olives. Me too.
SPEAKER_09: Well, they ruined it. And here's how. Okay. Back in the 1980s, American Airlines had the CEO by the name of Robert Crandall.
SPEAKER_16: See, the costs now exceed revenues. And that means, of course, that we are losing money.
SPEAKER_09: Tough guy with flicked back hair and glasses. And you know, he was trying to make the company more money.
SPEAKER_02: And what happened is, he was on an American Airlines flight where a meal had been served. And he looked and he saw that most of the other passengers had left the olives from their salad sitting there. And that just bugged him. Sure. He was thinking, we're paying for these olives and no one's eating them. So he basically went back to his office and said, cut the olives. And then he started looking at everything else.
SPEAKER_09: You know?
SPEAKER_02: Why are we using cloth napkins when regular napkins will do? Cut costs.
SPEAKER_09: Who needs metal branded silverware? You'll be a winner. Next stop giving people the entire can of Coca-Cola and instead pour it into a tiny little cup and you get six ounces. Before long, you gotta pay for your goddamn cheese and crackers that they give you in the little box.
SPEAKER_13: Like, here's a damp rag, suck on it and then pass it to the next guy. Right. Exactly.
SPEAKER_09: Pass it to the next guy.
SPEAKER_09: Exactly. And on top of this, 9-11 happens. And I don't know if you remember, but in the months after the attack,
SPEAKER_00: Overall, the industry remains in a slump. Planes are only 62% full. Revenue's down about 40%.
SPEAKER_09: Airlines were going bankrupt.
SPEAKER_00: Continental has announced unspecified cuts.
SPEAKER_09: American Airlines also fighting to stay out of bankruptcy.
SPEAKER_09: And so they sold off their flight kitchens. And these airline owned smaller kitchens got replaced by companies like Gate Gourmet. Okay, we're now entering the dish room and the storeroom.
SPEAKER_18: I just want to explain as we walk.
SPEAKER_09: Companies that began churning out airplane food for tons of different airlines all at once.
SPEAKER_10: Well, you know, this hour we've got 13 flights going out. Next hour we've got 24 flights.
SPEAKER_09: I went and visited one of these places just a couple miles from the Newark Airport. This massive warehouse the size of nearly six football fields end here. We have trucks coming all day long.
SPEAKER_09: 24 hours a day on a scale that's almost impossible to comprehend.
SPEAKER_04: We use 7,000 pounds of wet ice a day.
SPEAKER_09: Ingredients come in through the loading dock. We get pals and pals of stroopwafels, Biscoff cookies, pretzels.
SPEAKER_18: And are prepared in this stainless steel covered industrial kitchen.
SPEAKER_18: Mashed potatoes, we need to make polenta, mushroom deluxe.
SPEAKER_09: As we entered the kitchen, the executive chef Mark D'Cruz here was preparing some breakfast items.
SPEAKER_18: If you walk my kitchen you see we are braising, sautéing, stewing. So how many eggs you gonna go through today? It will be 2,600 eggs.
SPEAKER_09: Eggs that will leave on little plastic trays. And how many meals do you think you make a day?
SPEAKER_18: We make roughly like 15 to 20,000.
SPEAKER_09: 20,000 or so at a time.
SPEAKER_18: Wow. Thank you so much. You're welcome. We're gonna go back out. We're gonna go to cold food now.
SPEAKER_09: But I gotta say, walking away from that factory tour, I was left feeling that it's a minor miracle that we have food on airplanes at all. And also that, you know, at this scale there's just no way, no matter how hard chefs like Mark D'Cruz try, that this food is gonna be that tasty. But then, as I kept reporting this, I learned that these chefs are actually up against another challenge, one that has nothing to do with the airlines. We can do it closer.
SPEAKER_20: Hold on. Let's put that about there.
SPEAKER_09: And everything to do with us. That better? Yes, there. Now you sound nice and rich and full. So this is Charles Spence. Head of the Cross Modal Research Laboratory at Oxford University.
SPEAKER_20: I'm interested in the senses. And he says to understand why airplane food doesn't taste that good, we have to appreciate
SPEAKER_09: that taste isn't just what's happening on the tongue.
SPEAKER_20: Our experience of what we call the taste of food, which is really the flavor, is probably one of the most multi-sensory experiences that we have, because it really does engage all of the senses. The coating you get on the inside of your mouth, the melting sensations. You know, that's all touch. The meaty, creamy, burnt, my wife's cooking kind of flavors, which is actually your sense of smell and crispy, crackly, crunchy. Those sort of sounds are really important to our enjoyment of food.
SPEAKER_09: And in an airplane at 30,000 feet, he says, all of these different senses, they're under assault. Take smell, for example. In an airplane, it's super, super dry.
SPEAKER_20: Equivalent to being in the desert. And what that means is your nose is going to be not as moist. And so the little food molecules floating in the air, the ones that you're meant to
SPEAKER_09: smell, they're going to have a harder time sticking to your nose. Wait, for smell to work well?
SPEAKER_05: It needs to be a little like humid?
SPEAKER_09: Yep, yep. And therefore you're going to miss all that meaty, creamy, burnt goodness. However, Charles says, there is another stranger culprit at play here.
SPEAKER_20: Beyond smell, it's really the engine noise that plays a really important role in suppressing our ability to taste.
SPEAKER_09: It turns out that the 80 or so decibels of white noise that are pounding your ears from the jet's engines, they reduce your ability to taste salt, reduce your ability to taste sweet, and increase your ability to detect and enjoy umami. Increases your ability? What?
SPEAKER_20: Increases, yes. So that you need 20 to 30 percent more salt and sugar.
SPEAKER_09: And significantly less MSG or umami seasoning.
SPEAKER_20: To get the same taste experience as somebody down on the ground eating the same food. What? Yeah. Oh, wait, we know now that this is really the thing. So in 2014, we published a paper saying, you know what?
SPEAKER_09: There's something about that white noise that messes with us. And they've documented this in people both up in an airplane and then also with people down on the ground using just like headphones.
SPEAKER_20: Just playing them 80 to 85 decibels of white or engine noise. Their taste thresholds did change in this way. Sweet and salty, harder to taste. Umami easier to taste.
SPEAKER_05: That is so bonkers and specific. Doesn't that make you want to know why?
SPEAKER_13: Why sound would affect taste?
SPEAKER_05: And particularly umami. Like why that union?
SPEAKER_20: I think no one's got the faintest clue.
SPEAKER_09: They're pretty sure that this is why people drink so much tomato juice or so many Bloody Marys when they're in flight.
SPEAKER_20: Yep, yeah. It's got lots of umami and Worcester sauce is another rich source. It's like the most umami-ish thing you could drink.
SPEAKER_09: We are such weird animals, man. Oh, yes. Okay.
SPEAKER_09: Okay, before I hop off, a couple quick solutions here. Yeah, yeah. Give me some advice. So number one, it's been recommended that you bring along a nasal douche, a small little
SPEAKER_13: bit of water. I never leave home without it, frankly.
SPEAKER_09: Just to spray, you know, to keep some moisture up there in your nose, which is going to allow you to smell things better and therefore enjoy the food more. Number two is you just bring a little MSG because MSG is very umami-ous and just put a little of that on whatever. On everything. Yeah, and it's going to taste better. Okay.
SPEAKER_05: I've got another idea. Noise canceling headphones?
SPEAKER_09: Yes. And if you want to take the noise canceling headphones one step further.
SPEAKER_20: Why not pick some music that will enhance the taste of the food you're eating?
SPEAKER_09: Charles Spence and his lab, they found that white noise isn't the only sound to impact our perception of flavor, that different sounds and different music can do all sorts of different things.
SPEAKER_20: You can't turn water into wine with music. The taste has to be there to begin with, but what you can do is dial up something in the tasting experience or suppress less desirable tastes.
SPEAKER_09: And so I will leave you with this, some empirically backed sounds you may want to pair with whatever the tray that's put in front of you.
SPEAKER_09: So if you're looking to add some salt, they recommend something rhythmic, kind of harsh and in a minor key. So you might want to try something like Supernova at the End of the Universe by The Orb here. If you're looking to bring out the bitterness, it's hard to do better than William Biesinski's The Disintegration Loops, thanks to its low, brassy drones and occasional crackles. Sour, accentuating music isn't particularly pleasant to listen to. It's high-pitched and dissonant, like composer Neil's Oakland's Horace Santé. And then, lastly, to bring out the sweetness, you're going to want something melodic, higher-pitched, and probably with a piano somewhere in there, oddly enough. Like for example, Antonio Romero's Fantasia here.
SPEAKER_00: All right, folks.
SPEAKER_09: Bon Appetit.
SPEAKER_03: Hello, everyone. We hope you enjoyed your meal. The captain has turned on the seatbelt sign. Please return to your seats and keep your seatbelts fastened. We'll be right back. Stay put. Sit down. Thank you.
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SPEAKER_19: After but her emails became shorthand in 2016 for the media's deep focus on Hillary Clinton's server hygiene at the expense of policy issues, is history repeating itself?
SPEAKER_15: You can almost see an equation again, I would say, led by the Times in Biden being old with Donald Trump being under dozens of felony indictments.
SPEAKER_19: Listen to On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_05: Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. And now, producer, Rachel Kuzick. Okay, so there's this very specific moment when I'm flying.
SPEAKER_06: It's after I've scooped out the very last bit of the world's most unsatisfying meal. I've kicked off my shoes. Everyone's like push their seat back, who's gonna push their seat back. For the first time all flight, I feel relief. And then usually at that exact moment, this little bubble arrives in my stomach. This bubble, it starts out small, but then it feels like it finds other bubbles and it grows and moves inside me. And pretty soon I feel like a lava lamp.
SPEAKER_05: Rachel, tell me you are not doing a whole story about farts.
SPEAKER_06: Sorry. Every single time, it's not like I was farting all day and then it just like continues on the airplane. It's like it just kicks on this switch in me that happens once I hit cruising altitude. And I go into this panic mode because I'm like packed in like a sardine with all these frickin' strangers around me. And I've always thought it was just me. I have had wind. You've had cabin pressure. I had cabin pressure. It is not.
SPEAKER_09: Turns out somebody passed gas on an American Airlines plane. The airplane fart.
SPEAKER_08: The fight broke out over a passenger who allegedly refused to stop passing gas. Is a global problem.
SPEAKER_06: Thousands of feet in the air, the pilot is forced to divert.
SPEAKER_08: And everyone had to be removed from the jet. It was that bad.
SPEAKER_05: I'm just in a ball of discomfort.
SPEAKER_06: I'm just in a ball of curiosity. Like what is happening here?
SPEAKER_05: All right. So then how do you answer that question? Where do you go?
SPEAKER_06: So we actually have to go down a little bit down to ground level. Okay. All right. Land the plane first. We're going to land it. No one get off. I feel better already. We have to go back to this hiking trip from the 1980s. Two men, York Miller.
SPEAKER_04: And my friend Paul Auerbach, who was a class behind me at Duke Medical School.
SPEAKER_06: York Miller is the one telling us this story, by the way. Great.
SPEAKER_04: Okay. We had planned a five-day backpacking trip. In Colorado. In the San Juan Mountains. So day one, they start hiking.
SPEAKER_04: Back in there in some high country. And they go up higher. Above Timberline. And then. Probably the very first night.
SPEAKER_06: They kind of get into their tent. They zip it up. And one of them farts. And then the other one does. And all of a sudden, their tent is filled with this symphony. And it's a symphony of farts. Yeah, I'm one of these guys who likes to make as much noise as possible.
SPEAKER_05: You thought this was better lumen. I thought I was safe. Okay. You know, it could be quite unpleasant in that tent.
SPEAKER_05: Because my hands are like clenched against my face right now.
SPEAKER_06: This happens again and again. And by the way, Paul and I were stuck in a tent together in the rain.
SPEAKER_06: There's like truly no escape. It's not like you're going to step outside and fart. Ultimately they decide to expedite this trip from a five-day trip to a three-day trip. Not because of the farts. But because of the rain.
SPEAKER_10: And they're heading back home.
SPEAKER_06: And we started to remark about how much gas we were each passing.
SPEAKER_06: Wondering what was causing all of that. They considered diet.
SPEAKER_04: Granola and then various freeze-dried stuff.
SPEAKER_06: And then they thought, like, are we just focusing on it because we're stuck in this small enclosed space?
SPEAKER_04: For longer than usual. And then one of them wondered if this had anything to do with...
SPEAKER_04: We were up at 12 to 13,000 feet. Altitude and Boyle's law.
SPEAKER_04: Boyle's law? The ideal gas equation.
SPEAKER_06: Which is, when it comes to gas, any gas.
SPEAKER_04: As pressure goes down, volume goes up.
SPEAKER_06: So just imagine walking up a mountain. As you go higher, the pressure goes lower and the gas in your intestines is expanding. Right. OK. Right. Ballooning outwards until you really have no other option but to let it out.
SPEAKER_06: And so according to Boyle's law, farts increase as the elevation does. So York and Paul...
SPEAKER_04: We started to compose a letter... To a medical journal.
SPEAKER_06: They call this phenomenon HAFE.
SPEAKER_04: High altitude flatus expulsion.
SPEAKER_06: And they wanted it to have a very official name.
SPEAKER_04: To fit in with the general high altitude literature.
SPEAKER_06: They submit it. And let's just say people resonate with the topic.
SPEAKER_04: I'm sure that this HAFE paper is the most cited thing I've ever published. It's kind of a big fish in a small pond in that farting area.
SPEAKER_06: It's a really bubbly pond.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I guess so.
SPEAKER_06: Do you think that the same... And so I asked York, is this what's happening on airplanes also? Well, it may be.
SPEAKER_04: I mean...
SPEAKER_06: Airplanes are usually pressurized to about 8,000 feet. Meaning they're pumping air into the cabin at a level that's not sea level, but a level that is basically the height of a mountain. Oh, so they're pumping in thinner air. Yes, they pump in thinner air. So, but why would they do...
SPEAKER_13: Why wouldn't they just pressurize to land level and not fart mountain level?
SPEAKER_06: Because if there's too much pressure inside this airplane, the airplane could burst. Okay, fair, fair, fair.
SPEAKER_05: Okay, good call. No, no big deal. I'm down with that decision. Yeah, great.
SPEAKER_06: And the airplanes, they could pressurize it to 6,000 feet instead of 8,000 feet. They've done it before in certain airplanes. But those airplanes are more expensive. So does that mean there are certain airlines that are like, you know what?
SPEAKER_05: We do it up right. You got sea level pressure in here. And others are like, yeah, we're skimping. It's mountain pressure. There's going to be more farts. Yeah, theoretically, you could assume that those more expensive airplanes have less of
SPEAKER_06: an effect on the body and therefore have fewer farts on them.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, I hate it. And again, the thing I'm actually mad at is money. It's like there it is lurking in all these stories.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, it's like we set it up at the beginning as this civilization in the sky. And you know, here are three moments that we've found where, you know, we could have prioritized human dignity and comfort, but no, we chose not to.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yes, yes. It is like everywhere you look in this little metal tube, you find capitalism over humanity. Yes.
SPEAKER_05: All right, well, should we get off this plane? Let's do it.
SPEAKER_03: Hello, everyone. We're beginning our final descent. Wait, wait, wait, wait.
SPEAKER_06: Before we go, I just have one last little tidbit that I think could help us clear the air. Let it rip. OK, so I talked to this pilot named Lou.
SPEAKER_07: Lou Boyer. I'm a 747 captain.
SPEAKER_06: And Lou helped me realize we are not the only civilization flying around up in the clouds.
SPEAKER_07: I've flown just about every animal you can think of over the years.
SPEAKER_06: And you two buckle up and put your seats in the upright position for what I'm about to tell you next. OK, all right. In his 30 plus years of flying, Lou has flown bears, horses all the time, small containers
SPEAKER_07: of reptiles. You know, we get snakes.
SPEAKER_06: Samuel L. Jackson was not lying. There's actually snakes on planes.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And we flew 562 llamas when we took off. At least it was 562 llamas. When we landed, it was 564 because we had two live bursts while we were en route. Wow.
SPEAKER_06: Lou has flown fish and cows and elephants. I've flown whales.
SPEAKER_07: I've flown tigers. I've flown everything. You've flown whales? I don't know. They need a whale, I guess, in Japan for an aquarium. And they don't have one. I guess they fly one in. You know, I mean, it's a...
SPEAKER_06: He's flying whales, folks. Yeah. I'm picturing, like, Noah's Ark.
SPEAKER_07: That's a pretty good imagination there. They just don't roam freely on the main deck.
SPEAKER_06: Do they have, like, big giant aquarium pools that you just, like, one at a time you plop a whale onto the plane? Yeah, sort of.
SPEAKER_07: It's its own little capsule, if you will. Well, not little, but they have their own compartments, so they can't really move around much. There's obviously a veterinarian there that, you know, they're sedated and everything else.
SPEAKER_05: Are these planes specifically just animals? Are these, like, in the cargo on a passenger plane?
SPEAKER_06: So it's a mix. Oftentimes these animals are just plopped on a cargo plane. But I did read about these two sloths that needed to get transported to a zoo, and they just blocked out seats for the sloth and the handlers at the front of the plane, and they're just sitting. Were they given drinks? Apparently they refused the peanuts. I don't know if that was, like, a writerly line or if they actually didn't want peanuts.
SPEAKER_13: And their arms are so long, you can just picture their hands, like, draped over the armrests. And then one of them leans back and, like, reclines their seat and the other.
SPEAKER_05: And they're just, like, leaning so slowly, like, errrrr.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it sounds like a Disney movie. But hearing about these animals that are flying in the sky, it reminds me of this absolute magic that happens on an airplane. Like 200 years ago, a flying human probably sounded about as crazy as a flying whale. And now every single day, hundreds of thousands of us are up in the sky in our own little tanks and we're breathing out of thin air and being taken care of by our flight attendant handlers and going to the bathroom and watching Bridget Jones's diary. In a place we never were meant to. And even I get tired of that amazingness. And I focus instead on the small amount of leg room and the sad little meals and the farts in the air. But I think next time I fly, I'm just going to try to remember that I'm a flying whale.
SPEAKER_05: Is that the end? Do we make it to the end? Yeah.
SPEAKER_13: Not even close. I have so many more questions here. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: Imagine like a farting whale. No.
SPEAKER_05: Can we, are we done yet?
SPEAKER_13: But maybe if their blowhole sort of take care of all of that. Yeah, farting above.
SPEAKER_05: Although, is it different issues? Because it's a blowhole about like a lung. Yeah, I wonder.
SPEAKER_13: That's a great question. OK, we're here. Thank goodness. OK, so this episode was reported and produced by Matt Kielty, Simon Adler and Rachel Cusick with production help from Sindhu Nyanasambandhan and mixing help from Arianne Wack. It was edited by Pat Walters and our flight attendant was none other than Mr. David Gable. Bravo, bravo.
SPEAKER_05: Special thanks to Natalie Compton, Julia Longoria, Mike Arnott and everyone at Gate Gourmet. If you want to learn more about the history of airplane food, check out Richard Foss's Food in the Air and Space, the Surprising History of Food and Drink in the Skies.
SPEAKER_13: Thank you. I hope you have safe travels, whether you are a farting human or a farting whale.
SPEAKER_05: One thing I wanted to recommend during this travel time, which can also be emotionally complicated, our colleagues over at Death, Sex and Money have a truly awesome series about estrangement that is out right now. It talks about family estrangement. It talks about people who are thinking about estranging themselves, people who have been estranged against their will. It looks at it from all kinds of angles and I personally have listened to every single one, found it very powerful. You can check that out over at Death, Sex and Money and just click on the episodes that have estrangement. Bye bye. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_01: Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Hi, this is Finn calling from Storrs, Connecticut.
SPEAKER_17: Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Simons Foundation Initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Special support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
SPEAKER_12: WNYC Studios is supported by On Being with Krista Tippett. I'm Krista Tippett of On Being, where we take up the big questions of meaning for this world now. In our new podcast season, we're going to have a different human conversation about AI and also the intelligence of our bodies, grief and joy, social creativity and poetry, and so much more. A conversation to live by every Thursday.
