Transportation Library Menu Collection

The Menu Collection of the Northwestern University Transportation Library currently includes more than 400 menus from 54 national and international airline carriers, cruise ships, and railroad companies, with coverage from 1929 to the present. U.S. airlines predominate, but European, Asian, African, Australasian, and South American companies are also represented, with particular strength from the 1960s to the late 1980s.

This collection is multi-disciplinary in scope: it touches art, history, economics, sociology, culinary, and transportation topics. Because of its strength in mid- to late-20th century air transportation, the collection presents an invaluable picture of the history of commercial air travel. This collection would be of interest to transportation researchers and historians, culinary historians, sociologists, and travel aficionados.

The collection began as a gift from Northwestern alumnus George M. Foster who donated his extensive menu collection to the Transportation Library in 1997, where it has since been expanded from other sources.

During his seven decades as a pioneering anthropologist and consultant to international agencies including the World Health Organization and UNICEF, Mr. Foster traveled the globe by airplane, train, and steamship. The menus he collected on his trips preserve a glimpse of an era—now presumably forever past—in which fine dining and fine wines were considered an essential aspect of passenger comfort, and in fact constituted a significant aspect of travel’s mystique and allure. The value of Mr. Foster’s collection resides not only in its volume, but in the number of his hand-written comments regarding flight dates, airplane types, and food and wine ratings and descriptions.

In a 2006 letter to then Head of Transportation Library, Roberto Sarmiento, Mr. Foster reflected on why he created the menu collection and its significance. Though the letter remains unfinished due to Mr. Foster's passing, it provides a glimpse into his early fascination with air travel and how he "began near the beginning."

Mr. Foster's first commercial flight was in fall 1935, when he traveled on a United Airlines B-247 from Oakland, California, to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Though the flight lasted longer than ten hours due to multiple pick-ups along the way, it was a breeze compared to the other travel option, a thirty-six hour train ride. At this point in time, Mr. Foster did not yet realize how this experience would become one in a lifetime of flying.

In 1945, Mr. Foster flew non-stop from Mexico City to Los Angeles in a DC-4 and returned a few weeks later on a DC-3 which doubled the air travel time. Mr. Foster’s first trans-Atlantic flight and seemingly first experience with hot airplane meals was with Trans World Airlines (TWA) in fall 1948 to Santa Maria and Lisbon, Portugal, and finally to Madrid, Spain. His return flight on a TWA DC-4 took almost twenty-eight hours to reach New York City.