As if being charged for the bland airplane food we once choked down for free wasn't reason enough for business travellers to pack a lunch, a Health Canada report reveals inspectors found more significant violations in the preparation of food in this country's massive flight kitchens this past year than in the year before.
Health Canada inspectors found what the report terms “critical violations” in four out of 10 of the facilities that prepare meals for both domestic and international airlines operating out of Canada from April, 2009, to March, 2010. Given the recent industry trend away from in-flight meals for short flights, the food prepared in these kitchens is mostly consumed by long-haul travellers.
Though Health Canada refused to divulge specific details about the violations or the offending kitchens, citing a non-disclosure agreement it has with the flight kitchens, spokeswoman Ashley Lemire did say it was a “noted increase.”
Last week a USA Today story, based on Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, reported on inspections of flight kitchens in the United States that found ants, flies, live cockroaches and roach carcasses “too numerous to count.”
According to Lemire, in 22 announced inspections of 10 flight kitchens here, Health Canada found six critical violations (compared with just one in the previous 12-month period), including raw and cooked food being stored together, best-before dates not being properly marked, staff unfamiliar with how long and at what temperatures the food they were handling had to be stored, and improper disinfecting of washing equipment. Sightings of insects and rodents, and the proper documentation of such sightings, are considered critical violations – there were none.
Though there is no reported evidence of passenger illness directly linked to any of the six violations, Brita Ball, interim director of the Food Safety Network at the University of Guelph, says that's not the point. “In food safety, we talk about the potential,” she says. “It's all about risk.”
And since the Health Canada report notes that these flight kitchens prepare 1,000 to 15,000 meals a day, the risk posed by these violations is spread over large numbers of people.
Ball is concerned about the report’s findings, especially given the fact that the inspections were announced. “That makes it even worse,” she says. “I would really wonder what’s going on that has led to there being such an increase in violations.”
— Ben Clarkson for The Globe and Mail
Health Canada has no executive power to act on violations it uncovers. Instead, it sends the food companies reminders of the inspectors’ findings 30 days after the inspection, and then again every 15 days thereafter. According to Lemire, the average “corrective action response time” this past year was 35 days from the time of initial notification. (By comparison, for the single violation noted during the 2008-09 inspections, the response time was six days.)
Though the overall inspection findings were positive – out of a 100-point system, the average finding was 96.6 – the increase in Health Canada’s most serious category of violation is “dramatic,” says Robert Church, who runs a flight kitchen in Edmonton.
Church is the general manager of Edmonton International Flight Kitchen, which produces meals for Canadian North Airlines and First Air. He says his operation, as well as its sister kitchen in Yellowknife, has never had a critical violation, but he is familiar with the sort of action that qualifies.
“It could be something like a health inspector noticing raw chicken being placed over cooked sauce,” Church says. “Or an inspector might come through and the final rinse temperature on your machine is not up to temp,” which can result in bacteria being carried on utensils used in the preparation of food.
Canada’s leading provider of catering to the airline and rail industry is Cara Airline Services, which supplies food to 60 airlines. (Cara Operations Ltd. also owns restaurant chains Swiss Chalet, Harvey’s and Milestones.) The other major flight kitchens are run by Newrest (a European company) and CLS Catering Services Ltd., which is a joint venture between Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. and LSG Sky Chefs, one of the operations cited in the USA Today report.
Neither Cara nor Newrest returned requests for interviews, and CLS’s director of Canadian operations, Suneel Reddy, declined to comment.
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