Many academics travel regularly for conferences, seminars, or research, and sometimes even for vacations. If you are headed to a country where you don’t speak the language and you have specific food allergies or other dietary restrictions, it can be very helpful to bring along a printed card explaining this in the local language. For example, you can check out Allerglobal, where you can select your allergies and language and print a free card.
I do not have any food allergies, but I once found having a card along these lines very useful in a restaurant in Tokyo as it was a struggle to find something vegetarian on the menu. For vegetarians, you can find free translated phrases and printable cards for a large number of languages at the International Vegetarian Union.
To be on the safe side, you may want to paste the text from the above sites and add some images of the food items in question. If you want something a little bit more professional-looking, you can order dietary restriction info cards in many languages at SelectWisely.
Do you know of other useful diet-related tools for travel? Post them in a comment.
