Air Canada served a bottle of water as the vegan meal on 10-hour flight

boing
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Generally when I pay $99, or $300, or $1000 for something that says it includes a hot meal or two hot meals I do expect them.

Plus generally if you are on a ten hour flight you don’t get to step out on the wing and sample the local restaurants, nor do they provide a tally to heat things, so really they are the only “choice” for hot foods. So it does actually make sense that they are in fact offering them. Less sense that they don’t actually follow through.

Exactly!

Although I do like nuts, so at least that doesn’t go too badly for me.

Yep. The only reason I try to board as early as I can is to make sure I can put my one carry-on item in the overhead bin.

Flying has continued to find ways to get worse, I’m so glad I don’t need to do it very frequently anymore.

I had a vegetarian friend, a few decades ago. He had been on a veggie diet for maybe five or ten years. He still remembered how good steak tasted, and one day at a BBQ he decided he had had enough years of eating grilled carrots and whatnot (to be honest I didn’t pay attention to exactly what he grilled, maybe because I’m a bad person, or maybe because being a poor cook checking out what others cook doesn’t come natural to me). Anyway he decided to get himself a steak, grill it up, and eat it.

Warning, this is a little goose:

About four bites in his stomach rebelled and he ran for the bathroom, and didn’t even make it into the house before he barfed all over.

So I’m glad she didn’t try to suck it up and pick around the meat.

Well, actually I’m a bit of a sociopath and don’t really care all that much if a bunch of people on a plane I’m not on get barfed all over…but I do try to actively work against being a sociopath and imagine myself on that plane, and doing that I can absolutely see I would rather she not try to pick around things that might make her quite ill (maybe only because of something mental, maybe something biological).

To be honest I can also imagine being her and being given the option of ordering something that I can eat and discovering that the airline decided not to bother and getting nothing. So maybe I’m not a particularly good sociopath. You seem better at it than me. If that isn’t your goal, I can assure you that while empathy can’t really be learned, you can get a decent simulation via practice.

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I flew for a business trip for the first time since I was a teen a couple years ago (pre-Covid). Since I didn’t know how my stomach would handle it I didn’t eat anything until that night, 12 hours easily. But I will agree that everyone’s different. My wife needs something to eat on the regular, while I can skip a meal or two and not really care.

I haven’t flown international before, but I’m not sure I could eat on the plane. Maybe a pack of nuts, but nothing meal like. I’d likely be headed for the bathroom in short order. I’d rather be hungry than be suffering diarrhea. (again only speaking for myself)

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And as for peanuts (or other nuts), it’s possible your seatmate has allergies, so that may put the kibosh on eating nuts, leaving even fewer options.

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I think you have been hit by the curse of spillchook.

I have twice flown on flights that have had all nuts removed because someone suffered from severe nut allergies, on one of those the cabin staff insisted that because my vegetarian meal was prepared in a factory that also used nuts I could not have it. They offered chicken(!), when that was rejected, I had bread rolls, cheese and fruit (which I am quite happy with).

As several people have pointed out the writer should have received her vegan meal(s) and could not wander off to a restaurant, but airline staff have little control over what they can do once airborne, there are rarely any ingredients or facilities to whip up a replacement and a limit on what they are permitted to do if a meal is not supplied or dropped/misplaced or given to another passenger in error.

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They had the knack of it sixty or seventy years ago.

In the 1950s and 1960s, flying was an expensive thing you did occasionally, and you expected the food and drink to match – forget a can of beer or a miniature plastic bottle of wine.

Back then, champagne and brandy flowed endlessly, and a flight seemed like a cocktail party in the sky. There was lobster, and beef carved as you salivated and buffet tables instead of a packet of peanuts and nicely-folded napkins. Some meals lasted for three hours. Oh, for the good old days.
Source: Skyscanner.com

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This is the only reason anyone does (and everyone does), which has made boarding into Thunderdome, with people crowding the gate and breaking rules to sneak into earlier boarding groups. I suppose a conversation about how all the incentives are broken for carry-on vs checked bags is out of scope for this thread, though.

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The headline is a little misleading, as the airline did not serve the passenger a bottle of water as their meal, as some sort of passive-aggressive jab at vegans, which would be a level of villainy I wouldn’t expect from even the worst airline I’ve ever seen (which is Frontier). The airline forgot to load the meal, and the passenger was also given a bottle of water. And then the heroic flight attendants did their best to fix it while in transit. But yeah, this situation sucks, and is another example of the kind of thing I thought technology was going to able to fix, taking the human error element out, when in fact humans are still ruining running everything.

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This is worth noting- the headline is awfully click-baitey, something BB is not usually too guilty of (post-Doctorow, anyway). We can let Carla slide on this one. :grimacing:

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Tell that to my friend with special dietary requirements who had her prepacked meal thrown out by airport security.

Maybe they had genuine concerns about the contents, maybe they were under some pressure to not allow outside food in so people would have to buy overpriced airport goods, or maybe they were just assholes.

Since they’re not mutually exclusive I’m inclined to believe two of those are the truth.

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I said I wanted vegan, NOT low-cal!

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Yes, only they clearly knew at the first service that the passenger’s booked meals hadn’t been loaded, yet they waited until after the second service to offer her a piece of fruit.

A far better response would have been to offer her fruit and rolls and a fulsome apology at the first mealtime. A complimentary glass of champagne might have been good too. IDK if Vegans can drink champagne.

I’ve often thought any company can make a mistake and it’s how they deal with it that makes the difference to the customer.

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She may very well have an allergy. I have a friend who is de facto vegan not because she doesn’t enjoy meat, but because she has a contact allergy to something in cow’s milk. Her gums bleed and her throat swells. Unfortunately, people tend to hear “she’s lactose intolerant” and then they figure a little dab of butter mixed in won’t give her a tummyache… but it’s a whole other thing.

That having been said, as a vegetarian of four decades who long since abandoned any firm moral convictions about meat-eating, I assure you, the pick-around strategy will not work on a practical level. If you mean picking the meatballs out of the spaghetti, it’s just begging for the kind of digestive issues you do not want your passengers having on an airplane.

And if you mean eating the salads and juice cups from five meals to fill up (which is basically what the woman here ended up doing), the problem is that there aren’t usually any extra meals to poach from—for exactly the same reason that the halal/vegan/GF meals so often don’t make the plane. I can’t remember the details, but many years ago an airline CEO famously removed one olive from their salad and saved tens of thousands of dollars per year, and every B-school professor had a spontaneous orgasm. That, plus the near-monopoly power airlines can exert, is why airlines get out their micrometers every year and squish the seats a little closer together. Everything is balanced against the hypothetical point where a customer will decide to just kayak across the Pacific instead of getting on a plane.

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I once ordered the vegetarian option on a long flight, but was mistakenly listed as vegan. No big deal, I thought. First meal was lunch–a sweet red pepper salad. Not bad. Then dinner–stir fried red and green peppers with plain rice. Breakfast in the morning was a piece of toast with margarine and slices of red pepper. After that flight I was 1) starving, and 2) off red peppers for a pretty long time.

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This must be the approved Air Canada line. We have heard it several times when they messed up our vegetarian meals.

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I’m still waiting for them to reimburse us for the luggage that they lost in 2004.

Southwest started flying to Hawaii fairly recently - it only occurred to me later, “how does that work?” That’s got to be at least 6 hours from California, a long way with no meal. And depending on the airport you might face limited choices there (no vegan options, or someone needs gluten-free, etc.) and/or extortionate prices (if they’re anything like HOU).

Air travel (rather, how to dine while doing so) makes me miss Solar Falafel, sold at groceries back when I lived in Austin. Easily portable and it’s served cold, anyway.

Probably not. Vegan wine, at least, does exist but often it’s hard to spot on the label. Usually the retailer will flag it somehow on the shelf. Now that I’ve checked, it looks like vegan champagne does exist, but I wouldn’t expect the cabin crew to know, assuming the airline even bothered to obtain it (of course, one could ask for the bottle to check).

So the solution, of course, was to offer some liquor instead :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Hawaii doesn’t count on airline regulations about meal service because it is, technically, a domestic flight. Otherwise, they are allegedly required to offer food on any flight over 3 or 4 hours.

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Exactly right. Stop you getting bored. Treat you like kids, it’s the easiest way.

Surely a simpler solution is to make every airline meal vegan, nut and gluten-free, and dairy-free.
You could still come up with a tasty meal, offending only the most ravenous carnivores who will have to wait half a day for their steak breakfast. Why not?

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