Only a week to go before we (the d-i-d part of d-i-p-i-d-y) depart and Deb is too busy making lists to add to the blog. So now its my turn to join the blogosphere. Deb gets excited by lists – she says this isn’t true but we know better! Am I (Ian) excited too – as friends at StreetO are now asking?

Nope.
I wouldn’t call it excited.
More like a mix of exhaustion and trepidation.

Exhausted by the countless preparations. As for the trepidation: try making sense of your carefully thought out travel plans after you run them by tripadvisor.com. Everyone who has had something on a trip go badly seems to put the details in a review of whatever hotel or restaurant they felt did wrong by them. But one bad meal can’t ruin a trip, can it? (I hear you silently asking?) Perhaps not normally, but it’s not so simple when you have Coeliac disease. When every bit of food you woof down has the potential to make you sick, the loss of control when eating food prepared by others is bound to have some effect. Especially when you can’t reliably communicate with the the chef that has you at their mercy.

Travel is always a risk. You weigh up the pleasures of exploring new places against the chances of being taking for a ride by dodgy cab drivers or getting your passport stolen by a pickpocket. You try to take a few sensible precautions. The precautions take on another dimension when eating is not something you can do casually like the majority of tourists. So what does having Coeliac mean when you are making travel plans?

A brief primer is necessary at this point. Coeliac disease (or Celiac to our American cousins) is a hereditary auto-immune condition that (currently) requires a gluten free diet as its only treatment. And not the sort of diet where you can “cheat” occasionally. Gluten is found in wheat, rye, barley and (often) oats. So Coeliacs (pronounced in Australia as “silly-aks”) cannot eat any wheat based products such as biscuits (cookies), cakes, bread, pasta, pizza, buns, rolls, donuts… Nor can we eat anything contaminated with wheat, barley or malt – the so called hidden gluten in many sauces, mainstream commercial breakfast cereals (you know who I mean), snack foods, confectionery, takeaways etc etc. How do we tell what is in our (manufactured) food products when hunting for the hidden glutens? Mostly we read the labels – very carefully!

For the most part, label reading works well. Until you travel to France, Belgium, Turkey and Italy. And you can’t read French, Turkish or Italian. And you are not travelling with a tour guide or interpreter. Wondering why anyone would brave travel in these circumstances? Me too!

So what precautions have I been making? Mostly an awful lot of time on Google. You start with the local Coeliac Society. The Victorian branch has produced a handy Travel Guide for many if not most countries. Next you find the websites for the Coeliac Societies in the countries you plan to visit. Look for a friendly Union Jack to click on (= website version in English) or run the web pages through Google Translator. This works surprisingly well but doesn’t guarantee you will find what you need or want to know. The next step is googling terms such as gluten-free-Paris and following up any useful leads. The final step is producing English-to-relevant-foreign-language cheat sheets.

So now I know that “gluten free” (gf) is “sans gluten” in French, “senza glutene” in Italian and “glutensiz” in Turkish. Thanks to google, I have a rough idea of how to pronounce these terms and other food related words. Fortunately all the countries we are visiting use the latin alphabet rather than, say, the arabic script so I have some chance of reading product descriptions. I also have a set of cards that can be given to waiters that explain my diet needs in their native language. I have a few restaurant recommendations from other Coeliacs who live in, or have travelled to, the places I am going. Partly to save money we have booked accommodation with “(some?) cooking facilities” and I have googled supermarkets and food shops in the relevant cities. Other precautions include carrying as much non-perishable food as I can with me, including gf breakfast cereals, biscuits and other snacks.

Early expectations are that Paris will be good for gf food shopping in both supermarkets and health food stores. Two relatively new gf (only) establishments are high on my list; a bakery and a cafe both near our central Paris accommodation. These are rare, the main one in Melbourne having recently closed down :-<  Turkey will be a lot harder as the diet there is heavy with wheat products and Coeliac awareness is not high. Fortunately awareness is reported to be high in Italy, with a few well-known celebrities with Coeliac and many traditional Italian foods (pasta etc) commercially available in gf format (made from corn, rice or other gf flours).

In due course I will report back with my findings. Meanwhile I have ordered gf meals for the long haul flights (local/budget airlines serve no included food these days so I will have my own snacks for these flights). We are travelling with Emirates who have a good reputation for service so I should get something to eat on the plane… as long as they remember to load it… and give it to me (not another passenger),… and don’t toss a bread roll on top (thereby contaminating and rendering it inedible)… and it’s not just a rice cake and an apple…

30 days in foreign lands: will it be “The Amazing Race” or more like “Survivor”? We shall see.

Ian