recently discovered photograph that some believe shows Amelia Earhart alive and well on an atoll in the Marshall Islands has exhumed the never really buried mystery about the pioneering aviator’s disappearance after her Lockheed Electra vanished in the South Pacific on July 2, 1937.
But while feverish speculation about how she died has long dominated her story, breeding ghoulish theories including that her body was eaten by giant coconut crabs, it might be more enlightening to look at what she liked to eat on those long 15-hour solo flights across the oceans.
It was a topic of keen interest to American women at the time.
“A question I’m asked frequently concerns what a pilot eats on long flights,” Earhart said in a radio interview she gave sometime between 1935 and 1937 . “This aspect of ‘aeronautical housekeeping’ particularly interests women.”
Her answer was simple and surprising. “Tomato juice is my favorite ‘working’ beverage, and food too,” said Earhart. “In colder weather, it may be heated and kept hot in a thermos.”
When Earhart got her license in 1923, the aviation industry was in its infancy, and as she pointed out, not much scientific research had been done on the right kind of diets for pilots and passengers. It offered “a fascinating field for research,” she said, but until then, her in-flight menu was determined by three rules.
The first, she said, was to be fed enough to “prevent fatigue but not enough to prevent drowsiness.” This balance may be difficult to achieve because it’s hard to exercise in a cockpit, she said, joking, “Probably football players are easier to feed than pilots.”
The second was that the food had to be something that she could eat easily — she was fond of Chinese, but chopsticks in a cockpit were a tricky affair. “Since pilots have only two hands and dozens of things to do, mealtime technique has to be simple,” she explained. “So I’ve developed a gadget, which is really a fat ice pick. With the can between my knees, one-handed, I punch a hole in the top. A straw just fits the hole — and the rest is easy.”
Tomato juice and a few squares of chocolate is what sustained her on her historic 1932 solo flight across the Atlantic, from Newfoundland to Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Sometimes a handful of raisins or a swig of cocoa from a thermos supplemented the tomato juice. And on her 1935 solo flight from Mexico City to New York, her “mainstay was a hard-boiled egg.” Easy to munch on, eggs were no doubt on her mind when writing a log entry, in which she described the “little clouds” as “white scrambled eggs.”
Her third rule had to do with weight. Earhart was obsessed with weight — not her own, she seemed naturally slender, but that of her aircraft. She carried as little aboard as possible — a handkerchief, a tube of cold cream, tomato juice — to allow for more fuel. As she tartly told her husband and manager George Putnam, “my concern was simply to fly alone to Europe. Extra clothes and…
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