Travelling with a food allergy: a pre-trip checklist

Almost everything that makes travelling with a food allergy stressful is solvable at home, in an hour, before the trip. What is genuinely hard to solve is the same problem at eleven at night in an airport with no signal. This is the list of things worth doing while you still have a keyboard, a pharmacy and someone who speaks the language.

Learn your allergen in the destination language

Write down each of your allergens in the local language, in the local script, and keep the list somewhere that works offline. Include three kinds of word:

• The allergen itself, including its plural and adjective forms.
• Its common aliases. Groundnut and arachide are peanut; tahini and simsim are sesame. The peanut guide and sesame guide list these, and every allergen guide carries the same table for its own allergen.
• The forms it arrives in. For wheat, the local words for flour and semolina — maida, sooji, semola, irmik — appear on far more packets than the word wheat does. The wheat and gluten guide has them.

Write a chef card and have it checked

A chef card is a short written statement, in the local language, of what you cannot eat and why the kitchen needs to care. Written beats spoken: it survives a noisy dining room, a waiter who does not speak your language, and the handover between the person taking the order and the person cooking it.

Keep it to a few lines. Name the allergens explicitly rather than saying “allergies”. Say that the kitchen needs to avoid the ingredient and contact with it — shared oil, shared grill, shared utensils — because in many cuisines the ingredient list of the dish is not where the problem is. Ask specifically what the sauce is thickened or dressed with.

Then have a native speaker check it. Machine translation handles “I am allergic to peanuts” well and “cooked in the same oil” badly, and it will sometimes produce a phrase that reads as a preference rather than a necessity. Print several copies, keep a photo on your phone, and hand the card over when you order rather than when the food arrives.

Know your medication by name, not by box

Carry what your doctor prescribed, in your hand luggage, and know how to replace it. That means writing two things down before you go: the generic name of each medicine, and where the nearest pharmacy to where you are staying is.

Brand names change at borders — the box you know may not exist in the country you are visiting, while the same medicine sits behind the counter under another name. The generic name is what a pharmacist abroad can actually act on. Ask your own pharmacist to write it out, along with the strength, and keep that note with your passport. A letter from your doctor listing what you carry and why is worth having too: it is useful at security, at a border, and at a foreign pharmacy counter. Check before you fly whether your medicine needs a prescription where you are going and whether a prescription from home is accepted. Everything beyond that — what to carry, when to use it, what a reaction looks like — is a conversation for your own doctor, not a travel blog.

Ask the airline in writing

There is no universal rule that obliges an airline to feed you safely, and policies vary enormously between carriers. So ask, in writing, and read the reply rather than assuming the industry works one way:

• Whether a special meal can be requested for your allergen, and by what deadline — usually well before departure, not at the gate.
• What the airline will and will not do about the cabin: some carriers will stop selling a snack containing a specific allergen on request, some will let you pre-board to wipe down your seat, and some will do neither. None of them can control what other passengers bring aboard.

Then bring your own food anyway. A packed bag of things you know are fine removes the airline from the problem entirely, and it also covers the delay, the diversion and the meal that arrives wrong. Check the customs rules of the country you are landing in before you pack fresh fruit, meat or dairy.

Book somewhere with a kitchen

The single most effective travel decision is a room with a fridge and a hob. Self-catering turns an unsolvable problem — trusting a stranger’s kitchen three times a day — into a solvable one: a supermarket, a label and your own pan. Even if you intend to eat out most evenings, having breakfast and one fallback meal under your own control removes most of the pressure from the rest.

If a hotel is the only option, email ahead rather than raising it at breakfast, and ask what they can actually do rather than whether they can “cater for allergies”. A buffet is a shared-utensil environment by design.

Scanning in the supermarket

Work through the packet, not the front of it. The claim on the front is marketing; the ingredient list on the back is the legal text. Remember that the emphasis convention you may be used to — the bold allergen inside the ingredient list required in the EU and UK by Article 21 of Reg. (EU) No 1169/2011 — does not exist in every country, and that the US approach under FALCPA is different again: a plain-English “Contains” statement rather than emphasis, with sesame included since the FASTER Act took effect on 1 January 2023. Where neither convention applies, the word sits mid-list at the same weight as everything else.

Photograph every ingredient panel you rely on, with the barcode in the same shot: it lets you reread the small print later and records exactly what you ate.

This is where PNut is designed to earn its place: photograph the ingredient panel and it reads the label in any of 40+ languages, or scan the barcode and it looks the product up, then returns Safe, Contains allergen, May contain or Unknown against the allergens you selected. How it works covers both routes. Treat any precautionary wording as May contain, and treat Unknown as Unknown.

“Gluten-free” in a restaurant is not one thing

If gluten is your problem, this is the phrase that varies most across a border. In the EU and the UK, gluten free is a regulated claim with a defined limit of no more than 20 parts per million, and the claim applies to food sold to the final consumer, including in catering. In the US the definition was written for labelled packaged food, and how tightly it binds a restaurant menu is a good deal less direct. And in plenty of countries the phrase on the menu is a dietary-preference tag with nothing behind it at all — a category the kitchen recognises as a lifestyle request rather than a control they maintain.

Two things follow. A gluten-free claim is not an allergen declaration: it speaks to gluten content, not to whether the dish was cooked next to wheat flour, which matters if wheat protein rather than gluten is your issue. And where the claim is unregulated, the useful question is not “is this gluten free” but “what is in it and what was it cooked with” — which is what the chef card is for.

The night before

Charge the phone. Download the offline map and the offline translation pack. Check the words list is on the phone and on paper. Put the medication in the bag you are carrying, not the one going in the hold. Then stop planning and go.