Flying With Food Allergies In Asia

Contents

1 3 Travel Tips for Families When Flying With Food Allergies
2
3 1. Bring chef cards and download translation apps before your flight to use on the plane (without WI-FI)
- 3.1 Chef Cards
- 3.2 Translation Apps
4 2. Bring plenty of healthy snacks to plan for weather and other delays
- - 4.0.1 Convenience Store Eggs
  - 4.0.2 Portable Fresh Fruit For Your Flight
- 4.1 3. Always bring your allergy meds and copies of your Rx, and always check with your embassy for travel restrictions
  - - 4.1.0.1 We hope these 3 quick tips are useful to you when flying with food allergies.
    - 4.1.0.2 Thanks for stopping by and reading!
  - 4.1.1 Related Posts from MyFearlessFoodie
    - 4.1.1.1 Pat S

3 Travel Tips for Families When Flying With Food Allergies

Navigating through the sky with food allergies? Our journey with Jin Air, a low-cost Korean Air domestic airline, from Incheon International to Tokyo Narita International, laid the groundwork for a safe adventure. Armed with our translation apps and Chef cards, we were able to have a safe and pleasant trip. In this post, we’ll get right into the nitty-gritty with 3 travel tips for families when flying with food allergies. We’ll share how we interacted with the airline attendants using allergy translation cards, suggestions on translation apps, and snacks that were helpful to bring. We hope these 3 easy tips are helpful to you if you’re planning a flight with anyone in your group with food allergies.

1. Bring chef cards and download translation apps before your flight to use on the plane (without WI-FI)

Chef Cards

After the attendant brought over our Choco Wafer Rolls and mini canned Cokes, we shared our Chef Card (allergy card) with them. Chef cards, or allergy translation cards, are useful to service team members when flying with food allergies. We like the Equal Eats cards which listed our allergens on both sides (English on one side and Korean on the other). On our flight from Seoul to Tokyo, we used a Japanese/English version. The Jin Air attendants were friendly and helpful and took our allergy cards to the service galley to study them. As a result, they gave us rice porridge to avoid any cross contamination with sesame, nuts, or shellfish.

Translation Apps

Papago was a more reliable translation app than Google Translate, especially in Korea.

We were shocked and surprised to see that Google Translate provided the following translation as you can see here (above). The Google Translate app will insert the translation onto the photo. Here it says, This product contains milk, buckwheat, peanuts, soybeans, wheat, peaches, and tomatoes.

When we used Papago, you can see the same statement translated and superimposed onto the photo (above). Here it says, “This product was manufactured in manufacturing facilities such as milk, buckwheat, peanuts, soybeans, wheat, peaches, and tomatoes”.

Papago supports 13 languages. With roots in South Korea, it’s useful to have Papago, which may be more reliable since the language tends to more accurate. However, we recommend you download both apps when traveling in Asia.

Google Translate isn’t perfect and Asian languages often differ drastically in speech so some phrases won’t translate well through Google. Without some basic knowledge of how the language functions grammatically, it’s easy to get a bad translation.

The Choco Wafer Rolls we got on the flight didn’t list any ingredients of concern with our allergens. Through Google Translate we saw (above) that the wafers “do not contain eggs or peanuts” but produced “in the same facility”.

Nevertheless, we didn’t eat them since the attendants discouraged it. A quick search online showed us we made the right decision when we found a description of the chocolate and chestnut filling.

2. Bring plenty of healthy snacks to plan for weather and other delays

Convenience Store Eggs

We had a snow delay and the plane had to undergo a de-icing process a few times. So we were glad we packed some pre-cooked eggs for our early morning flight. It’s easy to find portable foods like the hard boiled eggs (above). These quickly became a favorite food of ours. You can find these eggs in any 7-Eleven, CU FOOD, or GS25 convenience stores (both South Korean chains). You can also find these at any Paris Baguette, a ubiquitous, French-inspired global bakery café chain based in Seoul in Incheon International Airport. These eggs are surprisingly delicious, so much so, we plan to make them when we return home. They are so convenient and easy to peel. They are perfectly salty, baked instead of boiled, and have an orange-brown yolk.

Portable Fresh Fruit For Your Flight

We also brought the seedless Jeju Gam-Gaul Mandarin Oranges (found in any market as you can see above). We also brought along bananas, which are also convenient and very portable.

Be prepared to eat any fruit or produce before disembarking from the aircraft when you arrive.

3. Always bring your allergy meds and copies of your Rx, and always check with your embassy for travel restrictions

Always bring your medications and your epinephrine pens. Also, if you use decongestants, please confirm whether they are allowed into your destination country.

We were surprised to see that we couldn’t bring common meds into Japan such as Sudafed or Claritin D. The US embassy website states, “Many common medications and over-the-counter drugs in the United States are illegal in Japan. It does not matter if you have a valid U.S. prescription for a medicine/drug, which is illegal in Japan. If you bring it with you, you risk arrest and detention by the Japanese authorities. The U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Japan do not maintain a comprehensive list of prohibited medications or ingredients.”