VALENCIA’S regional health department confirmed on Tuesday that there had been 44 cases of food poisoning among diners at the filming of a Masterchef episode in the city’s Oceanographic.
The filming took place on 19 January and was publicly called out on social media by one of the Oceanographic workers who ate the food. According to reports in Valencia Plaza, the worker tweeted a photo of herself and colleagues sitting around a table during the programme and claimed that everyone had suffered gastroenteritis. She said: “The next night I had to go to A&E to get an injection of Primperan to stop vomiting”.
“I lost 5 kilos in three days”, she added, and complained that since January, the company hadn’t even had the decency to write to them to apologise.
The health department said that a few days after the event, and following the first notification of food poisoning, they carried out a study of contacts and as a result were able to confirm 44 cases of intoxication, with symptoms of gastroenteritis, ie, vomiting and diarrhoea. No details were given, however, about where these people were treated, nor which food had caused the food poisoning, as several days had passed and no remains of the food were available to be analysed.
The programme-makers, Shine Iberia, said they deeply regretted that diners who had attended the filming in Valencia were ill.
They said: “This is an absolutely exceptional case in these 11 years of MasterChef in Spain, a programme where it is an absolute priority to guarantee the nutritional care of the people involved.”
The production company explained that during the filming in Valencia, the foodstuffs were analysed at source with positive results and traceability was guaranteed throughout the process.
For their part, Oceanogràfic, Valencia’s complex of aquariums, reiterated that they hosted the event “like any other” and that the facilities were “a mere container”, with no relation whatsoever to the food that was prepared there.
The Valencia Report 