A passenger on Air Canada filmed her inflight meal, zoomed in on the packaging dates, and announced she was being served food that “expired six months ago.” The labels read “05/11/2025” and “06/11/2025.”
She thought “05/11” meant May.
This is the kind of thing Americans get mocked for abroad. It’s not so much “stupid Americans” as it is provincial Americans who assume the rest of the world uses U.S. conventions. Air Canada is a Canadian carrier. Canada, like most of the planet, at least sometimes uses day/month/year. “05/11/2025” is 5 November, not May 11. She was served food prepared for that week, not food that was six months old.
She doubled down and asked a flight attendant, who reportedly explained that meals can be frozen for months. That only reinforced her certainty that something was wrong, even though nothing was.
- Passenger misreads something because it doesn’t match U.S. formatting.
- Posts confidently.
- Millions watch video. Airline gets dragged.
@comfywith_kerry EXPIRED food on Canada Air #flight #traveltiktok #airplanefood #flights #ohno @canadaairline ♬ Welp, Didn't Expect That – Yu-Peng Chen & HOYO-MiX
In fairness, we’ve certainly seen United serve expired food. That problem dates back to the early days of buy on board. In 2022, American Airlines served pre-pandemic pretzels.
I’ve written about American Airlines serving 16 month old curry vegetables. American told me at the time that while that was within industry norms, they were working with catering vendors to provide meals that were made within 40-60 days. Nigella Lawson says not to freeze curries more than three months.
Before the pandemic the U.S. industry standard for meals aging was that United would serve meals up to 6 months, Delta 12 months, and American 18 months. And – while I still believe it was a labeling error – easyJet served a cheese sandwich that expired 10 years earlier.
If Air Canada is going to serve Americans, I guess they need to have caterers label expiration dates with the months spelled out? The key takeaway though is that you cannot assume the world works the same way abroad that it does at home.
Most of the world uses Microsoft Windows. Windows uses the American date system. It’s tricky in Canada, because officially we use DDMMYYYY, but more often than not we follow MMDDYYYY in the context of a computer file.
Microsoft Windows has a lot of flexibility in adjusting regional preferences if you go into settings. Of course, many people are lazy (or ignorant) so they do not customize their computer.
“Canada, like most of the planet, uses day/month/year. “05/11/2025” is 5 November, not May 11.”
Were it to be so simple!
Both MMDDYY and DDMMYY are in common use in Canada, even in French. (Even my francophone partner uses MMDDYY, which is a source of marital strain.) Because both orders are common, to avoid ambiguity, the Government of Canada style guide requires the use of YYYY-MM-DD in official documents, which is also the recommended international standard (ISO 8601).
Also common on Canadian food packages is to see two letters for the month rather than numbers; this reduces ambiguity, too—so long as you know MA is May and not March (MR), since they need to use abbreviations that work in both official languages.
On the flip side if she got food poisoning (yes a horrible experience) she’d have a nice lawsuit.
@Raphael Solomon – Over been using computers since I was a child and have always used UK date formatting.
Most programing languages let you set a default locale too.
Didn’t expect to read about Nigella on this page.
I would love for everyone to switch to YYYYMMDD as well but I’m mostly ok with anything. Whenever there’s a chance of confusion I use Nov 6, 2025 or something like that.