  Recently, the ALICE Collaboration reported an enhancement of the yield ratio
of strange and multi-strange hadrons to charged pions as a function of
multiplicity at mid-rapidity in proton-proton, proton-lead, lead-lead, and
xenon-xenon scattering. ALICE observations provide a strong indication that a
quark-gluon plasma is partly formed in high multiplicity events of both small
and large colliding systems. Motivated by ALICE's results, we propose a new
test for hadronic interaction models used for analyzing
ultra-high-energy-cosmic-ray (UHECR) collisions with air nuclei. The test is
grounded in the almost equal column-energy density in UHECR-air collisions and
lead-lead collisions at the LHC. We applied the test to post-LHC event
generators describing hadronic phenomena of UHECR scattering and show that
these QCD Monte Carlo-based codes must be retuned to accommodate the
strangeness enhancement relative to pions observed in LHC data.
