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By
Colleen Huber, Naturopathyworks.com
Even if you have an excellent fresh diet of whole organic food
at home, that can all fall apart while you're traveling because
relying on restaurants and markets away from home is often a disappointing
experience. The problem is worse as you move from the large cities
out to the suburbs and hits bottom in rural areas.
When perusing the Yellow Pages for restaurants in large cities
and suburbs, remember large health food stores often have good cafés
inside, although with hours limited to the store's hours or shorter.
College towns and the commercial streets near universities will
often have some of the healthiest eateries in proximity to some
of the most decadent. Also consider ethnic neighborhoods and restaurants
for gastric relief from "burger-and-fries purgatory."
What's the most challenging? Traveling in rural areas.
With some of the richest topsoil in the world, America's heartland
should be replete with markets, roadside stands and restaurants
overflowing with abundant choices of fresh harvest from neighboring
farmland. Instead, we see some of the most dismal offerings of food
in the heartland. Because of the monoculture fields and far-flung
distribution patterns, your only choices at Homer's Truck Stop may
be little more than defrosted beef or pork, canned corn or peas,
assembly-line fries and, of course, desserts. Rural markets are
not much better.
Store Options On The Road
Your best bet for decent food in rural areas is the increasingly
rare roadside produce stand or farmers' market. Also, if you happen
to travel to areas where there is community-supported agriculture,
these farms are a welcome relief to monoculture.
Although they are committed to first filling orders for their regular
local subscribers, their excess harvest often ends up in local markets
or at their own produce stands. LocalHarvest
is a web resource for community-supported farms, as well as farmers'
markets, healthy restaurants and food co-ops throughout the U.S.
Traveling by car, rather than by plane, makes eating what you want
a bit easier, because you can more easily carry a cooler in the
trunk. One thing you can count on at rural stores and truck stops
is plenty of ice. If you have small children, you will also need
small containers, utensils and a paring knife, so you can cut whatever
fresh fruits and vegetables are available into chunks for them,
and store the containers in the cooler. For car trips, pack leftovers
from home that will keep for a few days and you wouldn't mind eating
cold if necessary.
Many people make the dangerous mistake of drinking water from plastic
bottles, and leaving them on hot sunny car seats. Why? The heat
drives the plasticizers right into the water, where they act as
xenoestrogens -- like female hormones, only much worse and far more
carcinogenic. These are really, really bad for men and women and
especially children.
Instead, the next time you're in a health food store, buy your
beverages in glass bottles of convenient sizes. Then save the bottles,
at least one for each family member, to reuse indefinitely. If you
keep them clean, bottles can be left on a hot car seat or any other
relatively benign place with no harm to the water, because of the
inert chemical nature of glass.
Planning For Close Quarters
When traveling by plane, a soft-sided cooler works better because
it can fit in carry-on spaces. A regular cooler is harder to carry
on a plane because most won't fit under the seats or in overhead
bins. But if you want to have it later for the road, wrap the cooler
around a few times with packaging tape and check it in at the gate.
For the flight, pack the soft-sided cooler or a sturdy bag as a
carry-on with enough homemade food and utensils for the day that
you don't have to rely on abysmal airline offerings. Nutrient-dense
foods like nuts pack small. Apples, cheese, carrots, cucumbers and
celery stalks filled with nut butter or goat cheese are examples
of other easy "finger food" that all balance each other
nutritionally. All of it gets irradiated, of course, in the airport,
which has been in my experience unavoidable and non-negotiable.
Staying at a hotel with kitchenette facilities frees you from complete
dependence on restaurants, which is advantageous because of the
greater choices in supermarket food than restaurant menu options.
This is easiest if you stay in one place for most of your trip.
However, if you are traveling from one town to another every day
or two, use the kitchen facilities to replenish your store of leftovers
in stackable containers in your cooler, leaning especially toward
fast, non-complicated recipes that don't need a lot of esoteric
spices or other possibly expensive ingredients, and you would not
mind having cold for lunch if necessary. The more you change hotels
the harder this becomes, as your refrigeration space is limited
to that of your cooler.
Perhaps most importantly, when traveling don't suffer quietly with
the pathetic food offerings of your unenlightened hosts. Speak up
to the servers at the restaurants or the clerks in the supermarkets.
Ask questions!
- Aren't there any fresh vegetables available?
- Why don't they carry grass-fed beef?
- Do you carry Alaskan wild salmon? How about free-range organic
chicken?
Questions like these should make grocery stores and restaurant
chains wonder why they settle for second-rate food for themselves.
There is a certain Tex-Mex restaurant chain (that shall remain nameless)
where I happened to visit once with a party of 12 several years
ago. I asked the server if the guacamole was made fresh, to which
she answered, "It's canned."
I'm afraid I did not hide my horror very well when I repeated,
"It's canned?" which startled the whole table. (Just imagine
canning the noble and delicate avocado.) Anyway, that particular
chain now offers avowedly fresh and much better-tasting guacamole.
I certainly don't flatter myself that I alone changed a policy of
a national restaurant chain. As an anonymous, ordinary-looking person,
I'm sure I was a little drop in a big bucket. But enough customers
must have made their feelings known to make a big difference.
Our combined voices, each demanding a better quality of food from
our cardboard-slinging restaurants and supermarkets can conceivably
attain such impact as the very broad-based "slow food"
movement is achieving in Europe.
Especially when traveling, just remember that old rule of the road:
It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. That is to say, the
healthy zeal gets roast geese.
 Colleen
Huber, 46, is a wife, mother and student at Southwest College
of Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe, Ariz., where she is training
to be a naturopathic physician. Her original research on the mechanism
of migraines has appeared in Lancet and Headache Quarterly, and
was reported in The Washington Post.
Her
double blind placebo controlled research in homeopathy has appeared
in Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, European Journal
of Classical Homeopathy, and Homeopathy Today. Her website Naturopathy
Works introduces naturopathic medicine to the layperson and
provides references to the abundant medical literature demonstrating
that natural medicine does work.
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