The Psychology Behind Buying Bad Airport Food—Again and Again

28.06.2024 - 11:29 / cntraveler.com

This article is part of our airport food survival guide, which includes tips and tricks—even a hot take or two—that challenge the notion that airport meals are always dull, overpriced, and tasteless.

The absolute worst way for a person to spend $37 for dinner in New York City is on an undressed Caesar salad accompanied by a weird little roll that comes in its own plastic sack and a lukewarm gin and tonic.

The absolute best way for a person to spend $37 for dinner within the confines of a New York City airport is, however, on an undressed Caesar salad accompanied by a weird little roll that comes in its own plastic sack and a lukewarm gin and tonic. This isn’t so much a code I live by as it is a truth that I have come to accept. The moment I see those 25-foot tall circular rings of falling water with a pulsating light show in La Guardia’s Terminal B, all notions I have constructed of a curated—and occasionally aesthetically pleasing—canon of culinary and alcoholic preferences vanish instantly.

In the presence of immense stress (a woman who is screaming into a phone that her son just had diarrhea, and who is also somehow still more put together than I am and ahead of me in the security line) and in the absence of any self-control or foresight, that $37 meal—consumed under flickering fluorescent lights—feels both inevitable and physically healing. In an airport, a visit to Hudson News, with its bounty of $8 Cheez-Its and nutrition bars, is more effective than back-to-back phone therapy. A poorly imitated French bistro that unspools itself as I wheel my perpetually broken suitcase around a corner is as thrilling as the prospect of quenelles de brochet at Benoit. If I am lucky, there will be a floating oasis in the central strip between the gates, appearing like a mirage to a shipwrecked sailor, and its name will be something that’s neither a real word nor even a real sound, like S03EO, and it will offer craft beer and three or four extremely disparate omelets—and it will be the place to which I didn’t realize I had been waiting to pull up a high top stool for my entire life.

There are two issues at play here. The first is my propensity to succumb to a purchase at all, even when it’s 8 a.m. and I’ve already had breakfast, and my flight is only 74 minutes long.

“We go through our days fighting temptation,” says behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who has penned a number of books on the topic of irrational decision making. “We say no to a cookie. And then we get to the airport. We’re fed up with life.” Ariely calls this—the moment that we shed all pretenses of self-control, adherence to budget, or culinary preference, in favor of a small scary snack—the “break point”: when it feels as though everything is