RSS…eating on the road
Dec 06
My wife and I have very specific dietary needs, you may have read about them. So the prospect of traveling is always something of an ordeal, and an understanding that difficult times and upset stomachs might be in our futures.
We just concluded a trip to Philadelphia, and traveling reminded us how difficult it can be to plan one’s meals on the road.
Just to recap, the simplest way of explaining our restrictions is that we don’t eat grains. That’s no breads, cereals, pastas, oats, corn, ect., and we also exclude potatoes. So that leaves us with meat and veggies, and as far as most American restaurants go, that’s a big limitation. As you peruse the menu at your next out-of-home dining experience, just consider your meal. What portion of your plate is grain/potato based? This is not a judgment on your eating habits, just a lament on the limitation of options for those like my wife and I who want nothing more than some fresh veggies to accompany our main course.
We are home-cooked meal people for the most part. Beyond the reasons already mentioned, preparing one’s own food is cheaper. I can prepare a meal that will serve as lunch/dinner for the next day or two for less than the price of a meal for two at most restaurants, especially when you consider things like beverages (read: wine). Cooking our own meals also allows for us to control exactly what goes into the preparation of the meal; things like salt or marinades that have ingredients that we avoid, high fructose corn syrup/sugar for the most part. And honestly, there are so many things that have a dusting 0f flour for thickening or corn for texture that it is simply impossible to control what you are being served. Considering these things, traveling can be a difficult proposition, for both planning the trip and for our bank accounts.
Earlier in this year we took a road trip to Louisville, KY where we were visiting my brother. Because we were staying with him at his apartment, we were able to grocery shop and prepare our own meals while we were there. This was a boon for us since we could pack lunches for our day trips and prepare our dinners at home. But as we planned a trip to Philadelphia in November, we were realizing that we were facing a new kind of challenge for our style of eating.
You have to understand, when you completely change the content of your diet as we have, it’s not exactly like you can take a vacation from it. If we were just calorie counters or simply “trying to eat more healthy foods” as so many people often say, it would be easy enough to say that for the few days that we would be away from home we could just relax a little and eat whatever. But when you remove entire swaths of food types from your diet, re-introducing them suddenly, even if sparingly, can have some seriously unwanted (read: ew and ouch) consequences.
While our hotel room had a refrigerator, allowing us to store some foods in the room, it lacked a kitchenette. This meant many hours of walking through the Philadelphia streets and perusing online restaurant guides looking for menus containing items that were friendly to our needs. It sounds easy enough, right? But the catch is that many of the places who could cater to our needs were very high priced. We had some luck while walking to a museum in finding a grocery store where we could purchase some supplies that would get us through breakfast and provide some snacks, but we still needed to find some restaurants for the big stuff. While we did become very familiar with downtown Philadelphia, walking up and down the streets looking for places to eat did become frustrating. At least most restaurants follow the tradition of posting their menus in the windows so that we could make quick decisions.
It wasn’t all bad, however. We did come across some dining jewels where we were able to eat comfortably with few digestive consequences. While walking through the Reading terminal station we found a Mediterranean stall that served good stewed meat with veggies for just a few bucks. There was a pub that had a good menu and cheap wine. We also found a cute Thai restaurant that had fantastic soups. But the real treat was a restaurant call Sahara Grill, a middle-eastern diner that was very reasonably priced and had great food. So good, in fact, that we ate dinner there twice. And there was another restaurant that was good and bad at the same time. We decided to go to a fancy Spanish tapas restaurant for our anniversary, a place where we knew we would be spending some money. The wine/sangria were both good, as were the cheese and meat plates. But these positives were tempered by potatoes where we were not expecting them and paying premium prices for tapas that in Spain would cost just a few euros for the real thing. It’s hard to put these things out of my mind when I’ve been to Spain with my Spanish wife, but maybe that was our mistake for expecting too much.
Perhaps when we become wealthy (read: teacher and social worker) dining on the road will be easier since money won’t be a concern. But for the time being, this trip has shown one of the drawbacks of controlling what goes into one’s own body. There are only so many ways that you can dress up lettuce. And not all steaks are cooked equally, no matter how much they cost.
Rated two and one-half stars for mixed days of dining frustration and culinary delights.
