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A viral TikTok has sparked a debate on plane snack etiquette after capturing a fellow passenger in the middle seat cracking open canned tuna mid-air.
TikToker Ally Jaksen was on a three-and-a-half Alaska Airlines flight from Anchorage to Seattle when she caught the person sitting next to her opening up a can of Bumble Bee Seafood’s tuna and eating it with Ritz crackers as his inflight snack.
The video, which has gained over 1.2 million views on TikTok, sent other users into a frenzy over the fact that a passenger would eat something so fishy at such a high altitude packed next to dozens of other passengers.
“Canned tuna on the plane gotta be up there in terms of crimes against humanity,” Jaksen jokingly captioned the video.
Some users commented that they would have said something to the passenger, while one claimed that they are so “sensitive to smells I would have thrown up on this person”.
“I love tuna,” another said. “But this breaches etiquette rules on so many levels.”
One commenter jokingly called for the passenger to be on the “no-fly list, immediately”.
Someone else shared their stinky plane snack experience, saying they were “on a flight once where someone opened a bag of boiled eggs”.
Others social media users did not see it as such a huge deal.
“Tuna doesn’t even smell bad…” one wrote, while another said they would do the same, stating: “I fear I would do this to hit my protein goal”.
Unfortunately, eating tuna was not the worst thing the passenger did on the flight, according to Jaksen, as she described the man as “in the textbook of someone you don’t want to sit next to on the plane”.
She added that along with his tuna-Ritz cracker hors d’oeuvres, the passenger also ordered a Bloody Mary, and while she said she loves both canned fish and the tomato juice-based drink, the two combined only added to the “wafting” smells.
To top it off, the man was also snoring very loudly, to the point she could “hear it through my noise-cancelling headphones”.
The mid-air tuna-eating debacle comes months after another passenger caused a furious online reaction for making a sourdough load on a flight from Chicago to Barcelona.
What was meant to be light-hearted content creation turned into another discussion over flight etiquette as the TikToker was called out for not considering people with severe allergies as the air is re-circulated in the cabin.
For more travel news and advice, listen to Simon Calder’s podcast
