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Dear List:

I know this list often has stories about air travel. After this past week's
experience, I just had to add this one.

I flew from Denver to Atlanta on business this past Saturday on Delta
Flight 320. It's a 6:10 am departure with only a snack for a meal. The
attendants come around with the meal and mine is separate from the others.
The attendant looks at my seat number, picks up the meal, and asks, "Mr.
Kolber, did you order the gluten-free meal?" I  said yes and received my....

        "Special K." For those who are not familiar, the first 2 listed
ingredients are "Rice, Wheat Gluten..."

I know that airlines sometimes mess up, so I wasn't to upset. I called over
the attendant and explained the situation. She agreed to write up the event
and checked to see what was available. I forget the name, but it turned out
that the "regular" snack was a corn and rice cereal wit a more benign
ingredient list.

As I say, this happens from time to time, even on the best of airlines. if
this was all, I wouldn't bother to write it up. But there's more...

My return flight to Denver was Flight 675 also a snack flight (no real
meals here) which left Tuesday evening at 7:40 PM. Again the segregated
meal, and this time with a lovely "Gluten Free" tag (which I will place in
my book of memories). The snack?

         Pasta salad and a cupcake!

No kidding! I started to feel I was in the middle of an old Alan King
routine (for those of us old enough to remember).

I hadn't flown Delta in about 4 years. And here, within the space of a very
few days, flying out of two different cities, with two completely different
ground crews (one of them at the airline's main hub), Delta has shown
complete and total ignorance or insensitivity to a condition that affects
so many people.

I've still been trying to figure out which is worse - the rather obvious
pasta and cupcake (although neither had an ingredients list) or the more
subtle Special K - a meal someone not as careful about checking ingredient
might have eaten. And what if the person who ate it had high gluten
sensitivity, or worse, had a true wheat allergy and stopped breathing?

A word to Delta -- I've flown airlines that when asked for a GF meal,
simply say "We're sorry, but we don't have those available." That is
certainly preferable to putting a big "Safe to Eat" sign on a can of lye.

--
Mark Kolber
Denver Colorado