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Comment by atdrummond | Hacker News Reader

Prevention would ideally be reducing the rates of food borne allergies, in as much as it is possible to do so.

After having two flights recently where our food service was cancelled due to a flyer with a nut allergy, I’m ready for us to invest whatever it takes to reverse this trend.

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How long was the flight? I can see this being an issue for people with some other health conditions - type 1 diabetics come to mind. If it's a long flight and they assume food service and then it's removed and they have nothing to eat for their blood sugar, that's not great.

you can always ask the flight attendant for food. they have something

I mostly feel bad for the flight attendants. "Why is HE getting food and I'm not?" etc. People suck.

If getting food on a flight is a medical issue, someone should be bringing their own food.

Yeah, they should, but if someone with that severe an allergy is on the plane, would that be allowed? Also people are stupid and don't think ahead or plan for contingencies: I can see people reading there will be food service and deciding they don't need to bring their own.

It's not always only ingested food that is a safety issue. Some people have allergies that are severe enough that physical contact is enough to cause anaphylaxis. For example, there was a kid with a dairy allergy who died when other kids put a piece of cheese down his shirt[1]

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/02/boy-with-all...

If someone can't tolerate anyone else on a flight eating anything, they probably shouldn't fly.

Why not? If the airline has a policy that allows them to fly, why wouldn't they? It's not the people with allergies asking the flight not to serve other people peanuts, it's the airline itself deciding to do that.

Besides if someone has a contact allergy to nuts, I can't think of a place more likely for it to happen than a plane. One patch of turbulence, and your seat neighbor's peanuts go all over you.

You mean, forced to buy food at 500% markup inside the airport.

I did. I was told I could not eat it due to the possibility it contained nuts.

Both of these flights were TATL but on the lower end (5-7 hours) of the time range. The restriction only applied to our section of business class, which neither time was fully booked.

"If being exposed to trace amounts of [an allergen] on a flight is a medical issue, someone shouldn't be taking a plane."

This made me chuckle, imagining us starting a Manhattan Project for allergies because Delta didn't distribute their customary snack packet one too many times.

I mainly meant that if the quantity of people who can die from simple exposure to food is now such a high proportion of the population that I’m regularly encountering it in this and other contexts, that seems like a significant enough potential loss of lives/reduction in quality of life to merit a serious effort to fix the problem.

I am curious why airlines seem to be the holdouts regularly putting nuts in everything/distributing nuts as the main snacks. And they all do it.

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