Breakfast love

Airline passengers can encounter strange meals in flight.

Briton Paul Booker was flying from Cancun to London aboard Virgin Atlantic on 14 January when he was served a vegan breakfast toward the end of the 10-hour flight.

When he peeled back the sandwich bread, he was horrified to see two limp pieces of zucchini and a charred, moldy pepper in the small baguette, Fox News reported.

Booker posted a photo of the disgusting sandwich on his X account. “It is certainly up there as the worst meal I have ever had,” he said, adding that the sandwich “looked like it was rotten.”

When Booker complained, the embarrassed flight attendant gave him a fruit salad and encouraged him to contact Virgin Atlantic for a voucher, according to Fox News. He received a £100 voucher from Virgin Atlantic, but he deemed it inadequate.

Meanwhile, a mother in Zhejiang province, China, posted videos on social media of her 16-year-old son’s breakfasts, which included several pieces of dry bread, rice crackers, and a cup of hot water. Netizens who saw the videos of Zhang Liping criticized her for serving less nutritious meals, with one accusing her of “neglecting her son.”

Zhang took the criticism as a challenge and changed the next breakfast for her son. Her next video showed the poker-faced teenager holding up a skewer of candied fruit while a sour fish soup and milk were on the table, South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports.

In other videos, the breakfasts consisted of barbecue, coffee and luosifen; durian with beef hotpot; strawberries with xiaolongbao; a type of soup dumpling; braised chicken feet accompanied by a cola; Chinese burger made of spicy strips, cabbage and apple slices; and corn steamed buns shaped like aliens, according to SCMP.

Zhang’s creative recipes amused millions of netizens. Her breakfast videos went viral, amassing more than 900 million views on mainland social media, SCMP reports. She also drew nearly 1.3 million followers.

One netizen summed up the appeal of the inventive mother’s videos: “You can never guess what Liping’s next breakfast will be.