These are indeed the times that try one’s soul, and thus I sympathize with that woman senator who could not face cold camembert and cracked crackers as an airplane meal and had to wait until she got on the ground to put on the feed bag.

I also have travelled and suddenly faced food choices that gave one pause. Let me give you an example from the distant past when I was not hurtling through the sky in an aluminum tube, but chugging through the woods on a railway train.

I had flunked out of high school and found a job on the CNR dining cars. In those days, the cars were elegant and I was less so.

We had three chefs, a steward running the dining room, four waiters in white jackets and, back there in the pantry, me in a hand-me-down chef’s uniform. Five sizes too big because in those days, the chefs were all immense. I made salads and sundaes, but what I did most was wash dishes. Many of them.

Those dining cars seated about 40 and offered roast beef, steak, chicken and, sometimes, fresh fish. Everything was good and plentiful.

We had apple pie and sundaes and perhaps a piece of cheddar. We thought camembert was a French revolutionary figure who perhaps was stabbed in his bathtub along with Pierre Boursin and the count of Rochefort.

When the last passengers had been fed in the evenings, we locked the dining car and the chef dished out meals for all of us. No choice here. “It’s roast beef tonight, kid,” the chef would say.

Utterly ignorant of the ways of railways and the power of the chef, I asked for mine well done. The chef put a plate before me, with a slab of beef the size and color of a red barn door. “This is the way we serve beef from my kitchen,” the chef said. “Eat it all.”

And so, I cast 17 years of gray roast beef aside and cleaned my plate. That was the way to eat beef then and that’s the way it is now.

Moving through the ages, let us look at the days when airplanes not only served food but gladly handed out cunning little bottles of liquor and somewhat bigger bottles of wine.

I was coming back from a writers’ conference and was flying economy because someone else had booked the tickets.

As the flight attendant came by with her trolley, she offered me a couple of bottles of wine and a selection of cognac.

I was just explaining that in my new mode of clean living, I had to turn down her offer when a distinctive voice sounded from behind me.

“In fact, miss,” the voice said, ” my friend actually needs several bottles of wine and please go heavy on the cognac.” And forthwith, she piled them on the chair tray.

“Writers always take the wine and liquor, Rush,” said the voice. “It is often a long flight.”

(That was the message from Peter Gzowski, who had been the keynote speaker.)

My other story of free airplane handouts goes back into the mid-1970s when the outfit I worked for did not mind that I flew first class.

I recall eating steak and always having three or four of those little liquor bottles. A number of times, and once when I flew into Toronto from Montreal, the flight attendant stopped me on the way out and handed me a little bag.

“I noticed you like these things,” she said, “so I gathered some of these little guys for you.”

My ego, always healthy, grew even larger and I thought how the people at the script meeting I was going to would be impressed when I handed around my little bag of bottles.

Alas, not so. They were all empties

Worse than cold Camembert.

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