Why We’ll Miss Southwest Airlines’ Peanuts
When they pass out those peanuts mid-flight it feels like we've hit the lotto. We might never eat nuts on the ground, but in the air, they taste SO good! As of August 1st on Southwest Airlines the peanuts are gone, and we've got one big reason why they'll be missed.
Southwest Airlines is tossing the peanuts to be sensitive to people with nut allergies which is completely understandable. Parents can't send peanut snacks to school with the kids because of the allergy risk to classmates, and there's a nut-free zone in almost every cafeteria and some public picnic spots too. Serious nut allergies are super common, so we get why it's good to remove the risk. But we'll miss the in-flight nuts.
Delta replaced peanuts with almonds last year, and Southwest had already supplemented its peanut offering with pretzels to give passengers a choice. But as of August 1st, they'll remove the peanut option altogether on Southwest flights.
We might only get eight nuts in those little airline-sized packages, but dang they taste good at 30,000 feet! We'll miss them because they had personality. They were part of the Southwest culture. If nuts can be fun, Southwest Airlines helped make them that way.
I flew Southwest on my birthday one year, and one of my friends told a flight attendant that it happened to be my big day. The next thing I knew, the flight attendants were signing their own made-up happy birthday song to me over the intercom, and one of them marched down the aisle to present me with a birthday gift -- a paper air sickness bag full of those delicious and coveted peanuts! I will always remember how loved I felt getting the puke bag full of honey-roasted nuts on the way home from Chicago, and for that reason, the Southwest Airlines peanuts will always hold a special place in my heart.
Oh...they'll still have pretzels, and longer Southwest flights will offer cookies. So things would be worse. And grocery stores have no plans to discontinue peanuts anytime soon, that we know of, so it's not a total peanut loss and we can still get them on the ground. They just taste better in the air.
So, what's next? Some mid-flight nachos might taste good with a full-sized Diet Coke. We'll see if we can make that happen.