Source of Secret Sauce of Airline Food Discovered

If you don’t already pack a bag lunch of your own for a flight, you probably should start. Because this is how SkyChefs, the maker of fine airline food does their meals:

From NPR here:

With airlines charging $4 for a tiny container of crackers and cheese these days, we’re not sure who’s buying in-cabin meals and snacks anymore. But the Food and Drug Administration just gave us another reason to think twice about a purchase: nasty conditions in a Denver kitchen preparing an average of 35,000 meals a day for airlines ranging from American to United.

We can sum up the findings in the LSG SkyChefs facility a few months back with a four-letter abbreviation used to describe the roaches and other insects found there: TNTC. That stands for Too Numerous To Count. Yikes!

Here are a few of the problems cited by the FDA in a written warning to the company that was released yesterday:

Cart wash area – Live and dead roach-like insects too numerous to count (TNTC);
Repack area – Live roaches (TNTC), as well as ants;
Dish machine wash area – At least 13 dead roaches inside the machine loading area and 31 or more dead nearby the machine.

Inspectors also found evidence of contamination with Listeria monocytogenes, a cause of serious foodborne illness.

The FDA downgraded the status of the facility to “provisional” from “approved.” If the kitchen fails a reinspection, airlines would be prohibited from using food from the Denver facility.

Listeria is no joke. The death rate of salmonella poisoning is 1%. You eat listeria-infected food and the chances of you dying shoots up to 25%!

And in other news, there is still airline food. But waitaminute- Why does the FDA act as food inspectors for SkyChefs and not the local health department?