Sustainable airline food?

Consumer awareness and demand are driving the food industry in industrialized countries toward sustainability - locally sourced food and waste reduction are among the top trends for restaurants in 2014, according to a US restaurant association survey. Demand for regional and organic food continues to increase in Europe, including in Germany.

Despite ever more organic bistros sprouting up, it is still not standard practice to serve sustainable or locally-sourced food on airline flights. But this is starting to change.

"Increasingly, customers want to know where their food is from and how it's been sourced," explains Sinead Ferguson, a menu design manager for British Airways. "So we've embraced this."

Sustainability taking off

In the UK, one percent of all food transport is done by plane, but it accounts for 11 percent of carbon emissions, according to Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs statistics. By using food grown locally that doesn’t have to be flown to the airport before being served to passengers, airlines can reduce the amount of greenhouse gases produced.

Today, cookies served on British Airways flights come from an organic bakery located on the Scottish island of Mull. The fish, tea and coffee served are sustainably sourced, and the airline says its bottled water comes in packaging that is entirely renewable.

In October 2012, China Airlines began labeling food on flights from Taipei to Frankfurt with its respective carbon footprint, becoming the world’s first airline to do so. The carbon footprints are calculated by the Taiwan-based Industrial Technology Research Institute. Items such as the "Authentic Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup" for business class passengers and "Plain Omelette with Mini Sausage and Hash Brown" meal for economy class range from between 0.43 and 3.52 kilograms (one to 7.76 pounds) of equivalent carbon dioxide emissions per meal.

Another airline using sustainable food and beverages is KLM. "We want to set the standard for sustainable aviation," says Roel Verwiel from KLM. "Instead of getting the chicken [on our flights] from South America or Thailand, we've replaced that by locally-sourced chicken."

And Bobbie Egan from Alaska Airlines says that utensils on the US carrier's flights are compostable - and the airline's coffee mugs are made from recycled water bottles.

Coming back down to earth

But despite these projects, Simon Heppner - founder of the Sustainable Restaurant Association - says airlines still have a way to go before being truly sustainable in the food and drinks they serve.

He sees the main problem as the tight profit margins in the aviation industry, which make prioritizing sustainable food products and packaging a low priority. This is combined with the fact that airlines tend to tackle one issue of sustainability at a time.

"I think there have been lots of examples in the past couple of decades of airlines that have focused on a specific issue within sustainability," Heppner told DW. "But no one's looked at it holistically and said 'we want to push forward on all of these, and all at the same time.'"

Food waste is another issue, Heppner says. Due to international regulations, uneaten airline food and the containers they are in must be incinerated, used as fuel or disposed of in a landfill. This is done to avoid spread of nonnative animal or plant species that could harm local ecosystems.

"The reality is that everything you see on board is not able to be recycled," says Heppner.

Sharing sustainability

With the continued growth of worldwide air travel - airlines carried more than three billion passengers in 2013, according to the International Air Transport Association, with the according to the Carbon Neutral Company's roundtrip flight from Frankfurt to New York emitting more than a ton of carbon dioxide - British Airways' Ferguson says focus on sustainable food and drinks may increase in the future.

And, indeed, some German airlines are beginning to include sustainable food on their flights. Lufthansa's "Discover Slow Food" campaign, in cooperation with the sustainable food advocacy group Slow Food, served business class passengers on European flights local German specialties such as Diepholzer Moorschnucke, a breed of sheep from Lower Saxony.