A few weeks ago I was sitting in an airport waiting to board a very delayed plane. A flight attendant who was traveling on the same plane to pick up an assignment was seated next to me.  When she opened the travel bag I glanced at its contents. To my surprise, it was filled with containers of food and freezer paks. “Are you planning to sell the food to hungry travelers?” I asked, “or are you just going on a very long trip?”

Telling me that she would be traveling for about 10 hours that day, she explained that was in the habit of taking food for all her meals with her. “I don’t have to tell you that airport food is mostly unhealthy, expensive, or both,” she went on. “And I am certainly not going to buy the snack foods that are sold on the planes; they are really unhealthy and expensive. So I bring my own.” She went to say that it took her some weeks to figure out which foods traveled well and did not take too much time to prepare and pack. When I explained to her that my interest in her traveling food stash was somewhat professional, she offered to show me what she had. “I pack food for at least two meals,” she said. “I can always get juice, water and milk on the plane so I don’t pack liquids.“ She had small containers of yogurt, a sandwich bag filled with a high-fiber breakfast cereal, a large container with grape tomatoes, dark green lettuce, baby carrots, cut up broccoli and fennel, a container with grilled chicken, and two shelled hard-boiled eggs. There was another sandwich bag with two pita breads and a small one containing several low-fat meringue cookies. “I really need to eat something sweet after a few hours on the plane,” she admitted. “The stress on this job really gets to me and I find that eating something sweet calms me down even when the passengers are not.” I nodded knowingly since I was one of those white-knuckle passengers who was sure she was going to crash every time there was turbulence.

Her food packing experience is something all of us should pay attention to as we enter the spring–summer travel period. Although we may spend a lot of time making our travel-vacation plans, it is probably fair to say that few of us pay that much attention to what we are going to eat while enroute and in some cases after arriving. For the sake of your health—and your wallet—it is worthwhile taking a little time to make yourself a food- savvy traveler.  There are just two basic steps to this process:

1) Accumulate containers, disposable utensils, wipes, freezer paks and a few plastic or canvas bags.

2) Buy foods that can go into those small containers and are easy to eat in a car, on a picnic table rest stop, in the departure lounge, or on a plane.

To begin, pick a place in your kitchen and store non-perishable items for your food stash so you can pack them quickly. Wash and save small plastic tubs, plastic tableware that comes with take-out foods, and small packets of salad dressing, mustard, ketchup, salt and pepper from previous take-out meals. (I save wooden chopsticks that come with take-out Chinese food.)

Non-perishable foods (i.e. foods which do not spoil easily) include canned or pouched tuna, chicken, sardines, peanut butter, raisins and other dried fruit, nuts or trail mix, cold cereal, Ramen noodles (their salt content is high but they tend to be a favorite among many teens and are easily turned into a quick meal with some hot water) cold breakfast cereals, pretzels, protein and energy bars. rice, soy or corn cracker snacks, animal crackers for the under 20 crowd, low-fat biscotti for the older ones.

If you don’t have any, buy a few small freezer paks for perishable items, put them in your freezer and stick a note on the door reminding yourself to put them in the food bag before leaving the house for the trip. (Don’t forget to take them back home after the trip.)

Perishable foods however should be bought and packaged relatively close to the day you are leaving. Drinkable or spoonable yogurt (if you aren’t traveling by air), small packs of cottage cheese, lean luncheon meat, sliced chicken or turkey, low-fat cheese sticks or sliced cheese, cut up vegetables, hard-boiled eggs  (a good way to use up the eggs in the refrigerator before you leave), tuna pouches, and leftover rice or pasta turned into a salad by adding vegetables, chicken or canned fish and a little oil and vinegar. Keep everything cold with the freezer pak and well sealed. There is nothing like cold macaroni spilling over the person sitting next to you on the airplane to ruin someone’s trip.

There are, of course, many more options and what you choose depends on your family’s tastes and ages.

All this may seem like a lot of preparation but once you have the food in the airport or plane or packed in the car, you will be happy it is there. You will also be renewing a long tradition of making sure you have enough food to sustain you regardless of the length of the trip.  My husband’s grandmother would never go anywhere without making sure her family had enough food for a voyage across the Atlantic even if the trip was only to Atlantic City. And my mother would load me with so much food for the hour bus ride back to college that my dorm mates ate it for a week. And if you carried too much food you can be sure that your fellow passengers hungrily gnawing on ice cubes will be happy recipients of the leftovers.

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