I was diagnosed with Celiac back when the dinosaurs ruled the earth. Regular stores had absolutely nothing for me and eating out was impossible. I drove 30 minutes to Mrs. Gooch’s just to find something beyond rice cakes. We have grocery stores on almost every corner in my town so driving 30 minutes seemed like a big hassle even if it was a needed one. My husband found a bakery in Los Angeles and would stop there twice a year to get me some bread.
I used to walk through our local Costco, crying, feeling like I will never be able to buy anything from a normal grocery store and will be doomed to a life of rice, rice cakes and brown rice, barely edible pasta.
Those days are gone, I don’t know when or where eating gluten free became fashionable, and even though I am GF by need and not by choice, I am thankful. This created a market full of options and choices for my fellow celiacs and gluten intolerant partners in crime.
This weekend I went grocery shopping with my husband to Costco. I was glad to see many gluten free options, several pizza options, snacks, bread, frozen meals, instant pho and soy sauce.
Those who have no food restrictions might not understand the feeling of finding ready made food you can eat at a mainstream store and not needing to go to a speciality store anymore.
And even though these gf finds are not the healthiest it is still nice to see them available.
I am a Celiac who loves to travel, this is not always easy especially when I travel to countries that love wheat. I returned from a trip to Japan last week and yes, I was hungry. For me being a GF with a mostly vegetarian diet was not easy, I also avoided pork for religious reasons which made my trip a little harder.
This was part of an organized group tour so I did not have an option to cook for myself. Thankfully, all the hotels had a refrigerator so I had somewhere to keep yogurt and fresh produce that I bought at the convenience stores.
Japan loves gluten, gluten is in many products. The hotels we stayed at (3 star budget hotels) all had their breakfast clearly labeled with all allergens which helped immensely. As I mentioned before, Japan loves gluten, which is why I could not even eat the eggs at breakfast as they had gluten in them as well, still for the life of me I can’t figure that out.
I researched my food options before we left and knew what to expect mostly. There is an excellent group on Facebook called Gluten- Free Expats Japan. The group has many posts and tricks on how to figure out what and where is safe to eat and has a list of restaurants and recommendations that were extremely useful. I also carried a GF card and used google translate during the trips as many Japanese did not speak English.
In the suitcase I took bread with me, several GF brands like Schar and BFree have vacuum sealed smaller bread packaging and GF instant oatmeal, granola bars, GF soy sauce packets and my favorite chocolate covered rice cakes from Sprouts (trust me, they are so good it’s scary). Convenience stores are on every block in Japan, this is also excellent as they all have clean bathrooms and trash cans, there are no public trash cans anywhere on the streets and you need to carry the trash with you. 7-11, Lawson’s and Family mart are everywhere. In them I bought drinkable yogurt, rice snacks and onigiri. I did research beforehand what onigiri I can eat and went to our local Mitsuwa ahead of time to get familiarized. In Japan, packaging is labeled with all allergens, however not always in English and you need to recognize the Japanese symbol for wheat. Most of the 7- 11 rice and potato snacks had English wording and that made it easy for me and now I am addicted to the waffle potato ones, they are so good and not greasy.
The only reason I did not starve completely was the many Indian and Nepalese restaurants we found, we always found an English speaker in them so my allergies were easy to explain and for me this food is mostly safe and usually Halal so pork free. Using the restaurant lists we also found a great ramen place with gf ramen in Tokyo Station, Soranoiro Ramen. This was a complete joy for me as all my group could eat together and not look at my sad eyes while they ate dinner and I was stuck with plain rice and edamame.
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