Friday Tips: Vegan at the airport

Vegan Goodness:

Today we ate:

Breakfast: A bit of Odwalla smoothie for LP, and then cheerios and soymilk for everyone.
We were on the road today and got a special treat – Jamba Juice smoothies! We sure wish we had Jamba Juice on the East Coast!
Lunch: Tempeh BLTs and wonderful vegan potato salad and bean salad thanks to “Little Baba” (LP’s Grandma)
Dinner: Autumn Vegetable Stew, also from Little Baba

Money Matters:
Today we spent the following:

$11.65 on our Jamba Juice treat

Friday Tips for Living Vegan and Living Cheap – with kids!:

Plan ahead for everything . . . but especially for the airport!

This week we are a family of traveling vegans, and today we started our journey at Logan Airport. We actually have flown quite a bit with LP in the last few years, and over time we have adopted some strategies that make our flying a bit easier and less stressful. One of the ways we do this is by thinking and planning ahead for our vegan eating. Here are the two most important strategies we use to make the food part of our travel a breeze.

Bring food: This is a good tip for vegans in general, but I find it especially helpful when traveling. That goes for both flying and driving, but flying requires a bit more attention to the type of food we bring and how we store it. On planes we learned to bring a variety of food after once being told that we couldn’t bring hummus or yogurt through security because they were considered “liquids.” After that trip (where hummus, pita chips and yogurt were the only food we had brought) we packed more of a range of foods, just in case something didn’t work out. For example, today we brought the following with us to the airport:

hummus (it made it through security this time!)
peanut butter
bell pepper slices
pita chips
oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies
cheerios
apple slices

Also, when we are packing our food, we pack it in disposable containers. We have a lot of containers that we keep when we get take-out food. At home we wash and use them multiple times, but when we take them on trips to the airport we don’t stress if we lose them or need to throw them out to make more space in our luggage.

Look up your options: In addition to bringing food with us, we also look ahead to see what our airport options are. Most airports have a website where you can find out what food options are in your terminal. At Logan Airport, in Terminal C (where we usually fly from) there is a Starbucks (yay for soy chai!) a Johnny Rockets (veggie burger!) and the U Food Grill with has a tofu vegetable stir-fry. Since we know what is available to us we pack what we need, but also know what we can get to eat once we get through security.

Additionally, it is worth checking out your airline. We mostly fly Jet Blue, and they have Terra Blue Chips, Nuts, and even animal crackers that are vegan. Again, we can look this up online before we travel, so we know if we have to pack extra snacks in case we get stuck on the plane. If we flew United (which doesn’t give you any snacks for free anyway, last time I checked) we would simply pack more of our own food.

Now all I have to do is come up with a better way to remove my shoes in security while also juggling a baby in the Moby wrap! I’ll practice a bit to make sure I’ve got that figured out before the trip home