The circumstance of customers boarding airplanes shortly after ingesting their purchases affords food handlers employed at airports the opportunity to relax their adherence to hygienic practices. These shortcuts in neglect of cleanliness, while sure to be unpopular with the randomly visiting food safety inspector, can be confidently exercised by the self-centered server, who recognizes that a victim of food poisoning is unlikely to file a complaint when their destination and the culprit of their illness are separated by a great distance. In this limited context, then, the lowly spatula wielder is elevated in rank to an untouchable. I found myself considering this while snacking on sushi prior to boarding at Sea-Tac.

One might posit that a victim’s conviction their nausea is due to another’s indefensible negligence, combined with the embarrassment and discomfort of purging from one or two orifices while aboard a plane, would motivate negative customer feedback and possibly a threat of lawsuit, but I suspect that the victim’s resolve to complain would weaken as a result of being unable to confront the offending establishment in person. The futility of a long-distance complaint is only exacerbated when one considers further. For instance, if vomiting was the only manifestation of the food poisoning experience, the victim may have trouble convincing the complaint department that turbulence alone was not to blame. And bolstering one’s claim of illness through corroboration with other customers similarly affected would be quite difficult. Also, I doubt many people keep receipts of their airport food purchases, so the only tangible evidence supporting the would-be complainer’s argument is what had left their body, which no one would be interested in seeing anyway. True, if they paid by credit card there ought to be some record, but confirming their purchase this way strikes me as too tedious a service for a manager to offer.

A natural progression of this train of thought is to question whether awareness of their freedom to ignore meat-handling protocol, etc., with little fear of repercussion would embolden an employee to go further. In other words, rather than merely passively neglecting to do the minimum required to prepare food safely, would their confidence in not getting caught lead a nefarious individual to actively contribute to the health risk? It’s plausible. The drudgery of repetitiously preparing the same food the same ways for weeks, months, and years, in addition to a perpetually regenerating line of customers with whom all interaction has the singular purpose of facilitating monetary/goods transactions, probably engenders misanthropy. In any case, my sushi was fine.