The greatest fictional food poisoning on an airplane first premiered in 1980 in the satirical movie, Airplane!.

“We had a choice (for dinner) of steak or fish.”
“Yes, yes, I remember, I had lasagna.”

Everyone who had the fish becomes violently ill and a passenger is forced to land the plane.

But food poisoning can be nasty in real life, if you’re on a flight that still happens to serve something approximating food.

USA Today tomorrow has an editorial questioning the sanitary conditions at some of the catering facilities that provide 100 million meals yearly to U.S. and foreign airlines at U.S. airports.

Six months ago, U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors say they found live cockroaches and roach carcasses "too numerous to count" — as well as ants, flies and debris and workers handling food with bare hands — at the Denver facility of the world’s largest airline caterer, LSG Sky Chefs. Samples from a kitchen floor tested positive for Listeria, a bacteria that can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections.

USA Today’s Gary Stoller, who obtained the inspections from the FDA, also found reports of violations at two other major airline caterers, Gate Gourmet and Flying Food Group.

The editorial says airlines can also do their part by demanding safe, sanitary food from caterers or refusing to do business with them.

In response, Jim Fowler, executive director of the International Flight Services Association, writes in a manner befitting a kindergarten teacher (no offense, mom) that “readers may be surprised to learn that the food served on airplanes is crafted in catering kitchens that operate with more stringent safety processes than those in many restaurants and fast-food establishments. The state-of-the-art standards followed voluntarily by airline caterers were first developed by NASA, whose guidelines are stringent and in some instances actually exceed other state or federal health requirements.”

Yes, it’s called HACCP, explain the lousy inspection reports.

“The incidents reported by USA Today were isolated.”

So the IFSA would be all for open and transparent grading of airline food safety, just as restaurants in most major cities are now embracing?