This weekend I had the pleasure of attending Latitude Festival. For anyone that’s attended a festival with allergies, it can be fairly hit and miss. The quality of the festival usually directly correlates to how well you’re catered for.

The good thing about Latitude is that I’ve been three times in four years. I know every blade of grass and can tell you exactly where everything is, from my favourite burrito stall to where the bubble shop is.

However, this year I arrived and was informed by my wife that the food stalls had completely changed and were now being run by Street Feast. They are apparently the organisers of London’s ‘greatest food stall markets’.

For most people, especially the sort of middle class people that go to Latitude, this would be very exciting, but for me this meant that my practically pre-planned routine of going to the food stalls I know already was completely out the window.

The first problem I encountered was the queue. I know it’s a British tradition to queue, but I didn’t fancy joining one twenty people long just to be told that ‘the wedges are marinated in a parmesan cheese and truffle oil blend before they go in the fryer’.

At this point I think I should point out that the new food stalls looked amazing. There was such a huge variety of different foods ranging from standard things like fish and chips, to steamed buns and Tibetan cuisine. Whatever your fancy, you would certainly find something to tickle your taste buds here.

So, I walked around the festival casually, trying to check out the different stalls, and reading the menus nonchalantly. Being an allergy blogger has given me a sort of unjustified confidence when reading menus now.

I spied a van that I really wanted to eat at – Chai Thali Indian Street Food. But surely, like so many times before, my hopes would be dashed… but I still walked towards it optimistically. And that’s when I saw it, this beautiful piece of paper that would stop me from having to queue and worry, an allergy menu chart, pinned right to the front of their van.

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Now, at this point anyone who has a food stall, please take note, because of this chart, I ended up going to this place three times over. I chose it over the others because they could very simply tell me the dishes that I was able to have. Ok, it helps that I also LOVE Indian Street Food, but I would have happily branched out further had other stalls have been able to tell me very simply what I was allowed to have without me having to join a massive queue. I spent £50 at that stall in total that weekend, not bad for a piece of paper and 10 minutes work.

For any stalls that want to follow this example you can download a template here: https://www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/media/document/allergen-chart.pdf.

The staff at Chai Thali were really friendly as well, and I had complete faith when I double checked the allergy information. I had two very nice Lamb Rogan Joshs, complete with naan bread and a delicious shish kebab. I’m very tempted to visit one of their London restaurants when I’m next in the big smoke.

My next piece of festival advice is to visit food stalls when the majority of festival goers are distracted. This means you get a chance to talk to them properly. The best example of this would be when one of the headliners are playing. Everyone is watching them and so you don’t have any queues to worry about and can leisurely discuss allergies with staff without any issues. I spoke with a number of stalls that peaked my interest and had no luck, and then I found my favourite eating out food ever. Burritos.

The Luardos burrito van is very cool with pink graffiti all over it. After chatting with the staff they were all too happy to help, making sure they changed gloves (a mantra that was repeated every time I visited). I went back four times in all, each time they remembered who I was and I was greeted with a friendly smile. I even met the van owner’s sister while waiting in the queue and she was very happy to hear me waxing lyrical about the staff there and how great they had been about my allergies.

The burritos were amazing as well, I had one chicken, one beef chilli and one of my personal favourites, the pulled pork. Each dish was fantastic in its own right, but the pork just melted in my mouth and mixed so well with the guacamole. I’ve found myself wishing I could have one multiple times since leaving the festival.

Music-wise, the festival was amazing, with Alt-J and a surprise appearance from Liam Gallagher being my highlights, but you don’t come here for my music reviews, so maybe I should have gone to some more food stalls and got some more reviews. I’d rather leave the theme of this blog to be about the two food stalls that took the time out to make life easy for me and cater for me. They really helped make my weekend and provide a really good lesson for any food stall owners out there. We tricky eaters are creatures of habit, if you prove you can feed us, we’re likely to keep coming back again and again and again.

You can see the huge variety of stalls at the festival on their web page. Just reading through them makes me wish that I’d spent more time searching round food stalls, but I was very much caught up with the great live music: https://www.latitudefestival.com/areas/food.

You know you’ve had it too good for too long when you find a reason to complain about something that ten years ago would have been the norm. I say too good for too long, but really I should use this as a reference point for how far the goal posts have shifted since I was a teenager, especially from an allergy perspective.

For me I can’t believe how allergy conscious companies have become. I can eat with ease at festivals, in restaurants and even abroad (country depending of course). This is why I was shocked when I went to the Great British Food Festival at Harewood House and found that all I could eat was a hog roast sandwich.

Now don’t get me wrong here. I love hog roast sandwiches. But, with such an amazing array of food on offer, I was hoping that I’d have a little bit more choice.

The two things that amazed me the most, were:

• Not a single vendor had allergy information displayed. In the whole festival, the only sign I actually saw was this one which informed me that I couldn’t try their pizza sauce as the samples contained cheese. I mean it was obvious they were serving margheritas… but at least they tried.

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• The issue was mainly the bread, every type of bread was either glazed or a brioche. I mean where are the nice safe gluten-free options here people?

Anyway, I tried queuing up at a couple of interesting stalls and unfortunately being turned away each time. The best response I got was from a lovely guy at The Crazy Punjabi stall:

He was very nice and didn’t want me to risk anything due to potential contamination, but he did say as I left, “you’re the type of guy that comes to a food festival and needs to bring a packed lunch”, that made me laugh a lot, and certainly felt true on the day.

However, enough ranting, because you’d think from the tone of this post so far, that I’d had a miserable time – but it’s simply not true. I went with my family en masse and we all had a really great day. The kids danced to the live music and just loved the rides. Dad watched what must have been about a thousand cooking demonstrations, and my brother even got to watch someone demonstrating cooking in a campervan (as a keen campervan enthusiast he loved this).

The festival was classically filled with all sorts of eating competitions, people I’d never heard of from that bake off show, and gin tastings (which my wife took full advantage AND of my offer to drive her home). I myself spent £15 on a huge tub of the most amazing olives you’ve ever eaten…. I’m eating them as I type in fact.

But by far the best person I met during the festival was the wonderful Becca, from GlutenFreegan. They create cake mixes which are free of wheat, dairy, egg and of course gluten. She was kind enough to give me a free packet, so expect a review in the coming weeks. She told me that it was through a necessity of having to work out how to cook for her husband, a man that is one of the few people in the UK that has allergies worse me, and he also has intolerances. She learnt what worked and GlutenFreegan was born. I would highly recommend checking them out because as my wife said, “the chocolate cake tastes exactly like chocolate cake”. No easy task as I’m sure you’ll all agree.

In conclusion, regardless of the surprisingly poor allergy information at the food festival it was a really great day out and one that I would highly recommend. As you can see, these two agree with me…