Epicautious's Blog

From reading my posts, you’ve probably learned by now that I love to travel. It’s easy to pack food for yourself, research allergy friendly restaurants, and generally, have backup plans in mind. But what happens when that travel is out of your control?

This week, I traveled to a conference for work in Savannah. Great, I thought! It shouldn’t be too hard to avoid nuts and all those problematic vegetables and fruits of mine. Soy could be tricky, but I’ll be able to avoid it. Boy was I wrong! That said, I have experienced some incredible southern cuisine and I owe a huge thank you to the patient local restaurants, my coworkers willing to deal with me, and food allergy friends I met along the way.

The problem: networking is important at conferences. The best place to network is at conference sponsored meals and parties. These meals have set menus and parties have food catered from somewhere but no one seems to know the ingredients.

While pecan-crusted fried chicken and sweet potatoes and ravioli with pecan sauce sounded amazing, they all had one thing in common: nuts. While sometimes I do have the “just deal with it” attitude, I do also have the “don’t die” desire so I needed a solution for this pre-set menu and I needed it fast. To add insult to injury, every other time I tried to order some real southern fried food, the allergy friendly restaurant was closed or was cooking in peanut oil that evening due to special requests.

The solution: PLAN AHEAD. Arrive early at restaurant gatherings. Speak to your server and see if anything can be made without the problem allergens (in my case, I requested the ravioli without sauce, etc). The staff at the Old Pink House was amazing (thank you, thank you, thank you!) and was able to provide me a completely safe meal prepared separately from all the others. I was informed it would take awhile, but that it would be a 100% safe meal for me to eat. While dealing with hundreds of other people, that’s pretty amazing service.

Yet, I still feel that there was more I could have done to prevent the situation. Try talking to conference leaders before your arrival whether or not they have a comments section in signup forms. Alert them to your condition and explain that it’s not a preference, it’s a matter of life and death (or severe discomfort). If all else fails, plan to meet others during breaks and attend lunch on your own at a safe restaurant.

Now, at the end of the conference, I can happily say that I’ve managed to have some truly amazing southern cuisine and I’ve met some incredibly interesting people along the way. To all my new food allergy friends, I hope you keep in touch and I hope to hear more success stories from you soon!