Northwestern U. Web site serves up menus from airlines’ glory years

Northwestern University Library has built a Web site (digital.library.northwestern.edu/tranmenus) featuring hundreds of digitally reproduced airline menus from the 1950s to the present. “The 380-plus menus not only document the history of airline cuisine, they conjure up a time when flying was a more elegant, more comfortable form of travel,” says Robert Sarmiento, head of Northwestern University’s Transportation Library. The menu collection began with a 1997 gift to Northwestern’s Transportation Library from the late George M. Foster, an alumnus of the university. A renowned anthropologist who served as a consultant to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, Foster saved the menus from most of his flights from the mid-1950s onward.