Do you travel with food allergies?

After the joys and hassles of another international trip in gluten free style, I want to know how others handle traveling with dietary restrictions.

I'm not a group tour kind of girl, but was surprised to find out there are Gluten Free travel tours available. This could be a great solution for some, but does not address the needs of business or independent travelers, or people traveling out of necessity.

Yesterday, I met a woman at the health food store whose son has autism and can't eat gluten or casein. They don't do much traveling, which she said would be overwhelming, but have to make a regular five-hour car trip. She packs sandwiches for him and they have a restaurant en route that takes extra care in preparing her son's food.

If you travel with a limited diet, do you pack everything you will need from home, plan out your stops in advance, or use phone apps to find restaurants?

I actually brought a portable electric burner with me to the Caribbean, but this did not turn out to be such a good idea.

Have you ever stayed at home because of dietary restrictions?

Do you have tips that would make life easier for others traveling with food allergies or sensitivities?

Please leave a comment or email me at joanie.conwell@gmail.com and tell me what kind of traveling you do and how you do it.

The Lonely Plate

A brand new website has launched called The Lonely Plate: The Food Allergy Guide to Fun and Safe Dining.

Founded by former News Coverage Manager at CNN's Washington Bureau, it features (and is actively soliciting) reviews of restaurants, hotels, airlines and kid-friendly venues. One nice feature is that you can select reviews by category of insensitivity - milk, eggs, tree nuts, gluten, etc. I've found a big gap in information about airlines and airports, so The Lonely Plate is one more resource to checkout. It's too early to tell if this will me the ONE that manages to truly consolidate information, or if it's just another drop in the infinite universe of online health information.

What's this blog about?

Whether you have diabetes or celiac disease, a peanut allergy or lactose intolerance, you still love to travel. The goal of this blog is to make travel easier for you, when you travel for business or adventure, alone or with family.

The idea came about because I believe that food sensitivities should not be an impediment to seeing the world.

Searching the internet, I found many resources on traveling with various food sensitivities, but even the most polished looking among them was incomplete. Some of the gluten-free travel sites, for example, offer reviews of restaurants in major European cities like Paris or Rome, but no information about traveling even slightly off the beaten path. There are tips and tricks to traveling with ease, and soon they will be featured here.

My intention is not to reinvent the wheel but to aggregate the best information on the web about traveling with dietary restrictions. This will be a work in progress for some time, so please bear with me. If you have a resource to share, I'd love to know about it.

Bon voyage!