My boyfriend and I had to take an unexpected, and very long, road trip last weekend to attend a funeral. We didn’t know for sure that we were going until about 5pm, and then we left within the hour. That didn’t leave me any time to prepare food for the road.

I tried my best to stick with the Whole30 plan during the trip, but unfortunately there were a few times I didn’t have any choice. A few of the not-so-good things I consumed:

• Diet Coke. I really needed some caffeine, and the gas station didn’t have anything unsweetened.
• Scrambled “Eggs” and sausage from McDonald’s. I had to eat something (medicine for sinus infection requires a full stomach), and it was the least bad of my choices at the time. It was about 6AM in the middle of nowhere Illinois, and I could choose from gas station food, McDonald’s, or Burger King. Check out the ingredients for what two of the fast food giants pass off as eggs, and you’ll see why it’s no wonder I felt ill after eating my breakfast:
  • McDonald’s: Pasteurized Whole Eggs with Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Citric Acid and Monosodium Phosphate (Added to Preserve Color), Nisin Preparation
    (Preservative). Prepared with Liquid Margarine: Liquid Soybean Oil and Hydrogenated Cottonseed and Soybean Oils, Water, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil,
    Salt, Soy Lecithin, Mono-and Diglycerides, Sodium Benzoate and Potassium Sorbate (Preservatives), Artificial Flavor, Citric Acid, Vitamin A Palmitate, Beta Carotene
    (Color).
  • Burger King: Whole Eggs, Whey, Soybean Oil. Contains 2% or less of the following: Salt, Natural and Artificial Butter Flavor (soybean oil, butter oil, natural &artificial flavoring), Xanthan Gum, Citric Acid, Annatto (Color).
• Lunch at Quaker Steak & Lube. This was good, except for the sauce they used on the grilled “boneless wings” I tried. It took some digging to find the ingredients, and now I’m wishing I hadn’t because there’s so much junk in it! Not only does the sauce contain soybean and canola oil, but it also has propylene glycol alginate. Well, at least everything was gluten free :-/
• Breakfast at Denny’s. Again, my choices were limited, and I was pretty exhausted, so didn’t make enough effort to determine a “safe” meal there. I couldn’t find the ingredients for Denny’s, but I did find an allergen statement, which lists MSG and soy in the sausage I ate. The bacon doesn’t have any allergens, but I’m pretty sure it had sugar in it. They also list soy for the eggs, so I’m guessing they were cooked in soybean oil.
• Green beans at Cracker Barrel. I don’t recall why I even got these instead of a side salad, but I could taste the bacon in them! I’m pretty sure they didn’t bother to use clean, sugar-free bacon. I looked for Cracker Barrel’s ingredients online, and came up empty-handed, but I did find a recipe that claims to be like theirs, and it contains sugar. YUCK!

Surprisingly I was also able to find some pretty good options while on the road. These included:

• Pure Leaf Unsweetened Iced Tea. This was nowhere to be found on my first stop for caffeine, so I drank a Diet Coke. When I found it at the next gas station, I bought several to use for the rest of the drive. The ingredients listed only brewed tea and citric acid.
• Dinner at Steak & Shake. I didn’t expect this one. Steak & Shake has a drive-through, for goodness sake! This was one of the few places I found that had food without a ton of crap in it. Granted, they also had food with tons of crap, but I ordered a single burger with lettuce and tomato only. I looked up the ingredients for the burger, and they are simply “100% pure beef patty.” WIN!
• Hormel Natural Choice Hard Salami. This isn’t a great option, because it has turbinado sugar and dried cane juice in it, but it was better than everything else we could find ready-to-eat at the time. It was about 10pm on a Sunday, so all of the restaurants were closed, and Meijer and Walmart were all we could find. We picked Meijer, and found the hard salami, fridge pickles (no junk in them), some fresh veggies, and some delicious watermelon chunks.