Questão 93

If you think the food airline companies serve up is bland
or unappetising, it’s not necessarily their fault. Essentially,
you leave your normal sense of taste behind at the airport
departure gate. Get on board a plane and cruise to a level
[5] of thousands of feet, and the flavour of everything from
a pasta dish to a mouthful of wine becomes manipulated
$\in a$ whole host of ways that we are only beginning to
understand.

Taste buds and sense of smell are the first things to go at
[10] 30,000 feet, says Russ Brown, director of In-flight Dining
& Retail at American Airlines. “Flavour is a combination
of both, and our perception of saltiness and sweetness
drop when inside a pressurised cabin.”

Everything that makes up the in-flight experience affects
[15] how your food tastes. There are several reasons for this:
lack of humidity, lower air pressure, and the background
noise. The combination of dryness and low pressure
reduces the sensitivity of your taste buds to sweet and
salty foods by around 30%, according to a 2010 study.
[20] Interestingly, the study found that we take leave of our
sweet and salty senses only. Sour, bitter and spicy
flavours are almost unaffected.

But it’s not just about our taste buds. Up to 80% of what
people think is taste, is $\in$ fact smell. We need evaporating
[25] nasal mucus to smell, but $\in$ the parched cabin air our
odour receptors do not work properly, and the effect is
that this makes food taste twice as bland.

So airlines have to give in-flight food an extra kick, by
salting and spicing it much more than a restaurant on the
[30] ground ever would. “Proper seasoning is key to ensure
food tastes good $\in$ the air,” says Brown at American
Airlines. “Often, recipes are modified with additional salt
or seasoning to account for the cabin dining atmosphere.”

By Katia Moskvitch http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150112-why-in-flight-foodtastes-weird (adapted)

According to the text, the most outstanding factor/factors, affecting the way food tastes is/are