Food and travel: Special Needs Diets are tough to stick to.

Special needs diets aren't even easy when you are at home with all your stuff. They are significantly harder when you are traveling. 

My ideal diet:  Vegetarian (responsibly obtained ova lacto), wheat free, light on the tofu, sucrose-free, chocolate-free. 

While I was in PA, I ate a lot of pizza (so lots of wheat). Why? Because there was literally no other vegetarian source. Actually, that's not true.  Taco Bell has that great veggie Cantina burrito. So, I ordered one for dinner and one for lunch the next day because I knew I'd have no time to go find food because I would be prepping for the next session I was teaching. They got my order wrong (my fault for not checking, but hey, I had ordered two of the same exact thing so I thought they would get that right), and I ended up at lunch with no time to get food and no food I could eat. They had me teaching straight through the entire day (8am - 12:30pm a 45 minute break for lunch where instead of eating, I had to set up all the equipment for the next session and then 1:15-4:15). It basically sucked (the teaching was great; the no time to eat good-for-me-food is what sucked). 

Luckily, they had a vending machine and I was able to get food. My lunch? A bag of potato chips and a Diet Pepsi. It was enough to get me through the day, barely, but it was pretty bad.

So, my heavens, I sympathize with people who have food allergies that are potentially fatal.

None of mine are fatal. If I chose to, I could eat meat, sugar, wheat, etc. I am better, much better, when I don't. But when I travel, I often end up with a diet that is a far cry from what I am supposed to eat.