Pit-stop pits

The 11-day DIY-and-pack-to-move franticness at Mother's ended last week with a 400-plus mile journey home (don't we wish that 1000 mph were the norm). Driving time on the car's computer = 7 1/4 hours (average for a straight drive with no hold-ups); total travel time = 10 1/4 hours; food hunting = 4 pitstops.

It seems that Jamie Oliver's efforts for school canteens has not stimulated the motorway service providers and pub restauranteers to think again about what their customers may want or need on their plates at their home from home. I'm talking Whole Food; I'm talking control on ingredients, for my partner who has diabetes and, as the tale will tell, anyone with a food allergy. A tale of a desperate hunt for food on the UK's main trunk roads and of inappropriate business models.

Pitstop 1: a service station that my partner and I rarely use but placed at the right distance from our last pitstop and at dinner time. The menu did not seem to offer anything Partner could eat without detailed discussion and so we moved on without trying. Little did we know that this would be the tale for the next NN miles.

Pitstop 2: a popular service station. The only thing on the menu for Partner was the mixed grill -- but could he have extra salad instead of chips? No. The only salad they had was for the burgers, which they needed to keep so they could put a large pinch in each burger. They could give a whole tomato instead of a half, and an extra fried egg: they tried their best. Partner is not on a no-veg diet but said OK, only to find the last mixed grill had just been sold, and the only other option was to have an entire protein meal (ham and eggs).

No problem we thought, there is always ------ services, 40 miles down the road.

Pitstop 3: no options at all. The chicken was battered (flour alone in batter exceeds the daily intake of carbs), the fish was battered, the sausages had unknown rusk content, and all other meals had pasta, potatoes or rice as a main constituent of the recipe. The staff were thoughtful but could not help, other than to point us down the road to a restaurant.

Pitstop 4: the restaurant, a pub-chain restaurant, and our previous experiences with motorway service stations showed this type in a slightly more favourable light (we could actually eat here -- a choice of any number of steaks or chicken with a dipping sauce (no chips or sauce please)), but still illustrate a contrast with whole-ingredient cooking and the eating-out-with-economy culture in the UK.

So what happened here, in this haven of edible food, that makes this tale go on?

(a) Partner discusses with till operator about wanting extra salad (which he can have) and no sauce (he can have olive oil instead to stop the chicken being so dry). When the meal comes, the salad looks (and feels, so I'm told) like it was prepared for yesterday's night's dinner) and while our main waiter goes to fetch the olive oil, another waiter tells us that there is none in the kitchen.

(b) Another customer is also in intricate discussion at the other till while Partner is ordering: his wife has an allergy to wheat, so: Which dishes do not have wheat? The reply: The chefs won't know what's in the meals. Though we are not surprised, read our reaction as !!!!?? (used especially well in the Peanuts comic stip, and illustrated here in the second strip down for those Not In The Know). The customer continues discussion with the ever-helpful-in this-situation assistant, who does have a chart of the suitability of dishes for different allergies/intolerances (nut, milk, etc), but susceptibility to wheat is not listed, not are specific ingredients, so it is still a guess as to what the wife will be eating ...

(c) Mother is having fish. At Pitstop 2, the fish is panga, from Finland. At Pitstop 4, the fish is panga, from Vietnam. Highly recommended at both pitstops. "Hmm," we think, "sounds like the same fish, is it really caught in coldwaters and tropical waters, a worldwide catch?" It seems not. The name panga is used for more than one type of fish but it's highly likely that the fish on the UK convenience eat-out scene is from Indo-Asian waters. Now is not the time to linger on the demise of the British fishing industry, the transportation of pangas to Europe, the state of pollution of the waters of their provenance, or the farming techniques and poison concentration within the fishes' flesh. The point is that we had lost trust in what we were being told.

Will we go back there again? No, not to any of them. We are not persuaded to part with our money again (and there are no plans for Mother to make this journey by car again, which is the only reason why we stopped at all for food).

When will food providers learn that there are (and will be) an increasing number of people who want to control what they eat. They want to say "I don't want that, I'd like that instead".

Top management will have to change how they serve food so staff and customer can know what they are serving or eating.

Yet still, Partner and I have been to a "top" restaurant whose chef understood why "no chips", or so we though, but still served meat with a honey glaze. It's still back to school for some chefs.

Note:
Partner chose a low carb diet 4 years ago to enable him to better manage the consequences of his pancreas no longer producing insulin (Type 1 diabetes) after 20 years of struggling with the protocol advocated by this country's health system. After these years of searching, he found the research of Richard Bernstein, a medic from a engineering perspective.

Partner keeps his carbohydrate intake very low, to about 20--30 g carbohydrate for the whole day.

Before he changed his diet, his blood sugar levels were very variable. He experienced extreme hyperglycaemia (high blood sugar), which leads to glycosylation (sugar binding) of nerves, tendons and blood vessels, to name just a few parts of the body affected, which can lead with time to numbness, blindness, high blood pressure, stroke and heart disease, impotence, depression. He experienced extreme hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar), which starves the brains and muscles of sugar, and at best made him shaky, unable to concentrate, unable to stand, and at worst put him in hospital. His insulin intake was high, to control the effects of relatively large amounts of carbs, and as well as this contributing to the cycle of hypers so take more insulin, then hypos so take more glucose (simple carbohydrate), and so on, insulin has its own detrimental effects on the body.

After diet change, his blood sugar levels are very much more stable. His blood sugar levels rarely rise above 8 mmol/l (up to 20 mmol/l before diet change) and the severity of hypos is reduced. Insulin intake is reduced by at least half. Stiffness and numbness of fingers has been reversed and the deterioration in his eye has been halted .

His blood sugar levels remain at the mercy of the rate of digestion and the rate of insulin absorption from the injection point, both of which are difficult to control in themselves and need tweaking with carefully measured amounts of insulin and glucose.