Originally Posted by BYOB

Those catered meals are paid for by the company. Some stations have better catering than others. What is universal regardless of station is the portion size. The salad is smaller than the palm of your hand; I’d say a third of the time the hot meals are inedible; what you can count on are delicious sweets and treats, which are not exactly nourishing for your body.

On my most recent experience I had the steak (a chunk of meat that was more of a medallion sized piece of meat that had a grey/green tint to it, no I’m not making that up). I hunt and process my own meat so I was a little skeptical but took a bite anyways. I didn’t swallow the piece of meat I was chewing because it was apparent that it was bad. I tossed that meal. The next day in Germany I paid the price for trying to eat that meat. Another crew member ate the lasagna, he also paid the price for about 24 hours in Germany.

And that was how we spent more than 36 hours in Germany....in our hotel rooms.

Maybe it would be better if we used our $50 per diem to do our own catering?

You’re missing the point if you think that the company is paying for catering out of the goodness of their hearts. They do the absolute bare minimum catering to keep planes moving and have (as of late) made unannounced changes to the catering guidelines established when I came here. For instance, coffee is no longer a required time (despite the fatigue training in the classroom with a slide showing a pilot with a nice cup of coffee) and now milk has also been removed from the catering guidelines.