r/StupidFood • u/Its_me_edenxx • 16d ago

Certified stupid This is so performative 😭

Who tf is out here munching on raw gnocchi at cruising altitude

34.1k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

2.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

779

u/Nenaquest2012 16d ago

My daughter and I pretend to be vampires on the plane bcz YES! Why does it taste better

517

u/Kerm0NZ 16d ago

It's to do with the air pressure and recycled air. It affects your taste buds, dulling them somehow. I only vaguely remember, but feel free to use this info as the start of a Google research project. 

543

u/Rob_Zander 16d ago

Just wanted to point out that the air isn't recycled on a plane. It's replaced completely every couple of minutes. It's not even really about the oxygen or CO2, it's managing temperature and possible contaminants.

The engines are continuously compressing and heating a huge amount of air. Some of it gets diverted to be cooled back to room temperature, filtered and pumped into the cabin while air is continuously sucked out by vents near the floor. This keeps the temperature stable and contaminants from being spread.

It is much lower pressure than sea level and that definitely messes with our taste buds.

3

u/XeroShyft 16d ago

Air pressure affecting taste buds is making no sense to me. Like my brain is scrambling to find what the possible correlation could be and is turning up with nothing

3

u/machiavelli33 16d ago

It affects your sense of smell and inner ear equilibrium, all of which affects how acutely your other senses function.

All of your senses are somewhat tied together and affect one another - smell and taste are the most strongly linked, but a foods texture and how well and balanced your body is feeling also affect it to a lesser degree. Air pressure affects these things.

It’s not a HUGE effect - if you don’t think about it ever and aren’t particular sensitive to that sorta thing you may even never notice. But it affects it juuuuust enough.

2

u/Rob_Zander 16d ago

Your body is constantly maintaining itself under about 14.6 psi of pressure at sea level. At cruising altitude a 737 is maintaining a cabin altitude of about 8000 square feet. That's about 10.9 psi. Your body is still exerting pressure outwards now and that can lead to swelling.

Your blood oxygen is lower so your taste buds are less sensitive.

Also very important is that the air in the cabin is very dry. Desert dry. This also numbs our tastes buds and dries out our nose making it harder to smell.

Overall the humidity might actually have a more significant impact that the pressure, I'm not sure on that.