Gadling

Earlier today, Tom wrote how airport food scores lower on the inspection chart than airline food.

That may be true for most places, but food prepared in the LSG Skychefs kitchen in Denver doesn’t match those findings.

When an FDA (Food and Drug Administration) inspection team paid a visit to the Denver kitchens of LSG , it found the kind of mess you’d expect from a big city restaurant with bad management.

Inside a facility in charge of making our airline meals, the FDA found so many insects, that they categorized them “TNTC” – too numerous to count.

It found roaches and ants in the repack area, wash rooms, cart washing stations, silverware station and even in the “hot” kitchen. In addition to this, they observed staff handling food with bare hands, water dripping from the ceiling, standing water and several other pretty serious violations.

The worst part, and the finding that frightens me the most, is that the FDA also found samples of Listeria on the floor in the hot kitchen. With poor results like this, it was only a matter of time before planeloads of passengers got sick from the food prepared by this kitchen. You can read the entire facility report here.

LSG Skychefs has had its classification lowered from “approved” to “provisional”, which means they’ll have one chance to be re-evaluated, and a failure will force the FDA to shut down the facility.

An LSG Skychefs representative said they can’t wait for the re-inspection and that they took immediate and effective action as soon as it learned from the findings. They make the whole incident sound fairly trivial by pointing out that they had not received any reports of illnesses or complaints from travelers.

Be sure to check out our breaking news about possible new TSA rules resulting from last week’s attempted terrorist attack.

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