‘They Weren’t Joking’: Emirates Passenger Finds One Lonely Cashew Nut In Meal And Some People Are Furious

A travel influencer has caused quite the stir on social media after pointing out the seemingly absurdity of Emirates serving a butter chicken curry with a single, lonely cashew nut resting on top of a portion of rice.

The influencer, who goes by the name Sophia’s Passport on TikTok, poked fun at the Dubai-based airline in a now viral post that has been viewed more than half a million times, although she probably wasn’t expecting many people to get quite so furious over the post.

@sophiaspassport_ I didn’t think they meant literally one cashew until it was staring at me 😂🙈 @Emirates #fyp #travel #funny #emirates #relatable ♬ Funny – Gold-Tiger

The post, which is captioned “Emirates were not kidding when they said ‘a’ cashew nut,” shows the influencer pointing at the menu description of the meal before panning to the meal tray and showing the single cashew sitting atop the rice.

Sophia was quick to point out that this wasn’t necessarily a criticism of Emirates, but that she found the situation so hilarious she couldn’t help but point it out.

Some viewers were, however, less than impressed, slamming Emirates for serving a meal containing a cashew, which could potentially cause someone with a severe nut allergy to go into anaphylactic shock.

“Nuts in airplane food should be banned by now,” one person wrote in response to the video, with others saying that airlines should do more to protect nut allergy sufferers.

While Emirates hasn’t served peanuts for a very long time, the airline does still offer nuts in premium cabins, and some meals do contain nuts as an integral part of the ingredients… and it’s this reason why Emirates’ butter chicken dish has a single cashew on top of the rice.

Cashews or other forms of nuts are blended into the butter chicken sauce to give it its distinctive flavor and consistency, but that might not be apparent to many passengers or even flight attendants, for that matter.

The single cashew nut was added to this dish to immediately alert allergy sufferers and flight attendants that the dish is not appropriate for passengers who could have a reaction to eating nuts.

The addition of the single cashew nut stems from an incident aboard an Emirates flight in June 2024, when a former contestant on the popular British reality dating show Love Island suffered a severe allergic reaction when he ate some of the butter chicken.

Jack Fowler, who appeared in Season 4 of Love Island, has suffered from a severe nut allergy all his life, and when he was offered the choice between ‘chicken or fish’ on an Emirates flight to Dubai, he made sure to ask the flight attendant whether either of the meals contained nuts.

The flight attendant served Jack a Shahi chicken korma, which also had cashew nuts blended into the sauce. Jack, however, didn’t know this just from looking at the meal and quickly tucked in.

Within moments, he felt his throat closing up, and he started to find it extremely difficult to breathe. Jack quickly administered an EpiPen to deliver a life-saving dose of Epinephrine, while the cabin crew rushed to get an oxygen bottle for him.

In this incident, the menu did, in fact, state that the curry contained cashew nuts, but this wasn’t immediately obvious from looking at the dish.

Emirates says it cannot guarantee a nut-free environment on board its planes and does not offer any form of accommodations for severe nut allergy sufferers, such as allowing them to board early to wipe down their seats or creating buffer zones where nuts won’t be used.

Very few airlines offer special allergen-free meals, partly because of the risk of cross-contamination, as well as the cost of producing these meals in special food preparation facilities.

While more and more airlines avoid serving dry nuts, they still use them as ingredients in meals because the risk of airborne articles affecting someone with a severe allergy is greatly reduced when the nuts have been cooked and contained within a sauce.