Delta Air Offers Only Vegetarian Meal Options to Thousands of International Passengers After ‘Spoiled’ Food Scandal

Delta Air Lines said thousands of international passengers were offered only a vegetarian meal option Wednesday after a plane bound for Amsterdam was forced to divert Tuesday night because passengers and crew were served spoiled food.

A spokesman for the troubled carrier said it had made the decision to serve only vegetarian pasta dishes in its international main cabin out of an “abundance of caution” after paramedics rushed to help sick passengers on the Detroit-Amsterdam flight.

On Tuesday night, Flight DL136 left Detroit for what should have been a routine seven-hour flight across the Atlantic. But about two and a half hours into the flight, just before the plane was about to cross the ocean, the pilots suddenly decided to turn around and divert to New York JFK.

It turns out that hundreds of passengers and crew had been served a moldy, spoiled chicken meal, and the pilots were afraid that they and the passengers would become violently ill on the flight to Amsterdam.

Flight attendants only discovered something was wrong after serving most of the meals, when a passenger alerted them to the problem.

Today, Delta’s in-flight service manager, Ash Dhokte, tells flight attendants they are the “last line of defense” and urges them to carefully review meals before serving them to passengers.

Dhokte said “immediate corrective measures have been implemented to prevent the issue from recurring,” and that at least 75 flights departed on Wednesday without any meat option in the main cabin.

In a statement, a Delta spokesperson apologized to affected passengers, saying: “This is not the service Delta is known for, and we sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and delay to their travels.”

In May, about 70 passengers on a Condor Airways flight from Maritius to Frankfurt were struck down by a mysterious illness after eating a meal on board. About a quarter of the passengers on the flight reported severe gastrointestinal problems, but Condor said there was no evidence that the food they were served on the flight was the cause.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), some types of food poisoning, such as staph, can begin causing unpleasant symptoms like nausea, vomiting, stomach cramps and diarrhea within just 30 minutes of eating contaminated food.

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