Or, people could suck it up and not eat for an hour or two. Sure on longer flights a meal is welcome, but even missing a meal should not be a terrible burden.
No one is complaining about not getting food on a 1-2 hour flight.
Many of us routinely take plane flights that are longer than two hours. A cross country flight is 5-6 hours plus 2 hours at the airport before and often a half hour after to get checked baggage. That's an 8-hour day.
Sitting on a cramped airplane for 5-6 hours is pretty unpleasant already. Doing it hungry doesn't improve the experience.
With 5-6 hours of flight time I'm often lucky if it is only an 8-hour day. I almost never have access to a direct flight cross country, so tack on at least another hour plus taxiing, running to catch a connection, then waiting for the connection to depart. If you let airline algorithms/travel agents select cheapest available flights, the connection is quite possible entirely in the wrong direction, too, adding a bonus hour or two to flight times.
I've had companies crazy enough to ask if they could interview me on a cross-country flight day to save themselves a hotel night (after they were already planning to schedule the cheapest flights they could find), and I can only imagine those people have never traveled cross-country much.
When I fly international, it's more like 10-12 hours. Even assuming I had dinner before I boarded, sleep, and then wake up, I'm going to need some breakfast and a decent cup of coffee.
Then you have an even better incentive to fast, since it has been shown to reduce or eliminate jet lag [0].
I use this protocol on long flights and find it works well, getting me back in action within a day, even after traversing 8 time zones
It's not the airlines job to incentivize what some guy on the internet considers healthy habits. I want breakfast after sleeping through the night. Just a bit of fruit, some cottage cheese or yogurt, and some black coffee. Maybe throw out the dairy and give me an egg.
I already pay for that as part of the ticket price. I do not want them unbundled in a way that makes my very necessary breakfast more expensive.
Other people could say "Its not the airlens job to incentivize eating breakfast when so many people don't any more". I'm perfectly happy unbundling wasteful unnecessary gimmicks (from my point of view). And guess what? I win this one!
