A Guide for Creative Meal Planning when Traveling with Food Allergies

The opportunity to travel is a chance to explore the world and experience different environments. It’s about trying something new, embracing new adventures, and creating meaningful experiences — either on your own or with family and friends. Travel can be anything from a day trip, a weekend road trip, or a vacation far away.

Regardless of where your next adventure takes you, the constant with any trip is that we, as humans, need to eat. When your diet is limited, eating away from home takes extra effort, but it can be done with planning, preparation, and more planning.

When my husband and I started our family, we quickly discovered how difficult it was to raise a child with a long list of life-threatening food allergies. Navigating the world became a whole lot more challenging. Then adding on the prospect of going on a trip presented even more challenges to figure out.

I discovered over the years that it takes some stress out of traveling if I start planning out my son’s meals for each day we are away from home. Before our trip, I would make notes for each day, our activities, and figure out what type of meal I needed to plan for – taking into consideration where we would be eating, what I would have access to (in terms of a kitchen, food stores and restaurants), and if we would be traveling with family or friends. I would save these planning sheets in a binder.

I noticed that these planning sheets from prior trips helped me immensely with figuring out meals for upcoming trips.

While my son’s meals did evolve over the years in terms of his preferences, I could get ideas for meals and resurrect some older recipes that worked well for travel from prior planning. 

Once we returned from a trip, I would also make some quick notes about lessons learned. I still refer to these notes today to refresh my memory about how to plan around situations on future trips (once the TSA questioned my homemade hummus, considered it a liquid and wanted to confiscate it — so I don’t pack that anymore).

To give you an idea about how we leave home, I’ve created a free downloadable planning guide for Traveling with Food Allergies to help you plan ahead for meals and prep for less stressful travel with dietary restrictions. I hope you find it helpful! (See below to download.)

Also, check out my Recipes for freezer meals that travel well, and my Resources for some additional travel resources I refer to often. Safe travels!