We are on the very first leg of a trip that will take us to San Francisco, then Los Angeles, then Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane before flying back to Los Angeles; then to Boston before flying HOME to Laramie.
Lots of airplane rides and lots of food.
And plenty of opportunity to get food poisoning, which got me to wondering, “What do pilots eat?”
The answer of course is that they eat what we eat (in first class anyway). But, and this is the interesting thing, the captain and the first officer usually do NOT eat the same entree.
Why?
To avoid suffering from concurrent food poisoning. That’s why.
If that sounds a whole lot like one of the gags in the 1980 comedy Airplane, it should, because it was. Most of the crew, including the pilots, ate bad fish and suffered from severe food poisoning during the course of the film.
And for what it’s worth, food-borne illness is the leading cause of pilot incapacitation.
“I’ll have what she’s having,” is (hopefully) not what our pilots say to the flight attendant.
