Not being a dick, but why does this sub sometimes have REALLY obvious questions & answers that can be Googled in 2 seconds. Type "Why does a pilot and his co-pilots not eat the same food on a flight?" as per the title into Google right now and see what I mean. You don't even have to click a link to see the answer.

Have you ever seen the movie Airplane!? If you haven't, go see it, it's the funniest movie of all time.

Anyway, in that movie, the pilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer (from back when commercial planes still had engineers) all become deathly ill from food poisoning from eating the same in-flight meal, and the plane has to be landed by one of the passengers. And although it may all be a big joke in the movie, that is the exact situation that rule is meant to prevent. It's not actually mandated by law (at least not by the FAA) but it is policy for most airlines.

The food is prepared en masse. If something is wrong with one type of dish, the odds of the second type of dish also having something wrong with is is minimal. Where as if they both eat the bad dish, well, you’ve got no pilot left.

I’m going go out a limb here and guess that it’s to avoid them all getting sick at the same time from eating the same food. If the pilot’s salmon is bad, good thing the co-pilot had the chicken.

Airline food is prepared in big batches, and then split between multiple trays. So if something bad got into, say, the chicken meal, it could possibly make everyone who ate that meal very sick. If both pilots get very sick at the same time, it might get very dangerous.

It's a longshot, but it's a possibility that they want to avoid no matter what. So just to be extra safe, they always eat separate meals, so that even if the chicken meal is contaminated, the beef meal, or the vegetarian meal is probably safe, for example.

In the 1980 movie "Airplane!" the cause of the disaster was some bad fish served on the flight which incapacitated both pilots. Even though this scenario was not realistic in reality most airliners introduced a policy of not having the pilots eat the same food in order to please public opinion. In practice this policy have not been enforced very hard and a lot of airliners have removed it by now.

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