shuttle 13: salt

Scientific research suggests that people's sense of taste is diminished significantly by certain conditions present inside aircraft cabins: notably, the lower humidity levels, adjusted air pressure, and particular frequencies of ambient white noise. So, for example, a drier mouth and throat have the effect of decelerating the communication of odors to the brain's receptors, and thereby stripping food of much of its flavor. Therefore, in order to enable in-flight food to taste roughly the same as on the ground, airline caterers compensate by supplementing their food with about 30% additional salt.

For the Danish artist Signe Emma, a gifted graphic design graduate from Kingston University near London, this information triggered a research project of her own, Airline Food, which resulted in a series of large scale scanning electron micrographs of dissolved salt. 

Astonishingly, these images resemble exquisite, crystalline landscapes as if viewed from the window of an aircraft at great height.

For Signe Emma's website, with further details of her 'Airline Food' series, see here