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 Andy Rooney on Travel
Gracious Dining In Flight
Andy Rooney - from Common NON Sense
Nothing is more satisfying and fun than being a reporter. Tracking down facts is difficult but fascinating work. One sliver of information leads to another and the story opens up as you collect bits and pieces of the whole picture from different sources. It doesn't have to be a story of any great importance to be interesting to the reporter writing it; I got into biscuits several years ago.
It's easy to forget that airlines had fallen on hard times even before the threat of terrorism dominated the idea of flight. You could see them pinching pennies years ago. In pinching pennies, they pinched customers. On a Delta flight from New York to Cincinnati, I was handed coffee and a little mystery package so well-wrapped we probably traveled 175 miles during the time it took me to get into it. I picked at it with my fingernails, poked at it with a sharp pencil and finally bit off a corner that opened it up enough so I could tear the wrapper off.
It was a biscuit two thirds the length of a stick of gum and about twice the thickness of one. Okay, maybe three times the thickness of a stick of gum. The label said it weighed three-sixteenth of an ounce. You know how heavy an ounce is? This was less than a quarter of how heavy an ounce is. It was not a hearty breakfast. Delta was not serving up scrambled eggs, toast and bacon or even pancakes and sausage with maple syrup. They gave me this biscuit and the announcement saying if there was anything they could do to help just ask. The flight attendants could have spent full time helping passengers get into their biscuits.
I ate the little biscuit and it was pretty good but I am puzzled by how many commercial food products that seem to have the same ingredients, taste so different. One ingredient in almost everything is "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil." The wrapper also said the little cookie is "all natural." I guess whether something's "natural" or not depends on your definition of natural. Hydrogenating vegetable oil doesn't seem natural to me.
I kept reading the writing on the biscuit's little plastic envelope. "Caramelised" was a tipoff that it was not made by an American company because we spell words like "surprize" and "caramelize" with a z, not an s.
The biscuit was distributed by a company called The Gourmet Center in San Francisco but aha! "Product of Belgium." That's where the s comes from. Belgium spells it the British way.
There was a lot of writing on the plastic wrapper considering how small it was. In the biggest letters it said "TO PURCHASE OUR COOKIES AND BISCUITS PLEASE PHONE 1-800-422-2924."
There's no doubt about it, a reporter is a naturally suspicious person. Good reporting is often based on suspicion. I am naturally suspicious. What I was suspecting was that Delta didn't even pay for this threesixteenth of an ounce breakfast they were serving. I suspected that this Gourmet Center representing the Belgian LOTUS corporation gave Delta the cookies to hand out in exchange for the exposure it would give the name LOTUS.
Well, a reporter's suspicious nature doesn't always pay off. I was wrong and I owe Delta an apology. Let me tell you what this reporter found out.
I called the Boo number and Joyce answered. She told me that a box of 200 of the biscuits would cost me $18.95. I asked how much it would be if I bought 1,000 boxes. Joyce was taken aback and said she didn't handle wholesale. I'd have to speak with Gary, their sales manager.
Gary was nice. I asked him about buying 1,000 boxes of the biscuits like the one I had for breakfast on Delta. A box of 200 weighs about three pounds, he said, so 11,000 boxes would be heavy. He told me he could give me a price of $9.90 for each box.
Actually Gary's arithmetic doesn't work out. The way I figure it, 200 times three-sixteenths would be less than two and a half pounds so he must have been including the weight of the wrapping.
I decided to face Gary with my suspicion that the cookie was a promotion gimmick and that Delta hadn't paid anything for my breakfast.
"Do you give them to Delta?" I asked.
"No," Gary said "They buy them from us."
So, that's the story. Delta pays $9.90 for a box of zoo biscuits. That comes to a little less than 10 cents each. Please accept my apology, Delta Airlines. This reporter has done you an injustice. I was sure you got my breakfast free and now that I know you paid almost a dime for it, I want to say how sorry- - and hungry - I am. |
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