Crap food on Qantas flights

It's really just getting ridiculous how bad the food is on short sector Qantas flights. Namely Sydney-Hobart, Melbourne-Canberra. Just awful. It's all epitomised by the "Chicken panini". It is a hideous fat bread concoction "filled" with "chicken" in a "dijonnaise" sauce thing. Little cubes of "chicken" in this icky sauce, a few limp pieces of carrot or other vegetable type ingredient, and there's your meal! If you're lucky, you get a cube of Cadbury chocolate. Does Qantas seriously think these "meals" are a selling point for them? Is this what they call "full service"? Long live the days when you would take Ansett and be presented with a steaming hot, foil-covered meal that you peeled back to be met with a woosh of vapour smelling of little boiled potatoes, some kind of meat, and a tasty sauce.

So anyway, back to the paninis, they are crap. I don't have a problem with sandiwches per se. But when the bread is too thick and dry and tasteless, and the contents are smoodgy and icky and limp they are no fun at all.

And another thing. These horrible paninis, or as my one the other day was called "French Connection" (France should sue), have ridiculous lists of ingredients. This was a ham, brie and lettuce one. The ham wasn't bad. The brie was a bit tasteless, but hey, at least it's brie. Lettuce consisted of three stalks of limp baby spinach. So the ingredients should be bread, ham, brie and lettuce. Check out the actual list of ingredients:

• Sandwich pain de mie (white flour (wheat flour, thiamin), water, butter, milk, sugar, yeast, salt, soy flour, emulsifier 472e, amylase, stabilizer 412, flour treatment agent 300, sesame seeds)
• honey ham (soy protein, food acid 325, honey, maltodextrin, vegetable gum 407, mineral salts 451,452, antioxidant 316, flavour enhancer 637, sodium nitrate 250
• brie
• lettuce

What the hell was wrong with the flour in the first place such that it needed a flour treatment agent? And why was it unstable? And why did it need soy flour in it? And sugar? And thiamin? I take a multivitamin, I don't need an airline to further dose me up.

Why is there soy protein in ham, and maltodextrin, and frigging sodium nitrate? That's a well known allergen. Then you've got some kind of relative of MSG to enhance the flavour...how about using a decent tasting ham in the first place.

And then they go and call this French!

Oh, and another thing, on a bloody Dash 8 they manage to serve way better food (well, snacks) than on the mainline Qantas jet services. Launceston-Melbourne service, we got crackers with a very tasty sundried tomato dip, King Island Camembert, drinkable red wine, and an after dinner chocolate mint!