Gluten free dining on Princess

I have a special dining restriction which is no wheat, oats, barley or rye. I'm including this special post for those looking for information on gluten free dining on Princess.

Early in the cruise I was pleased with the efforts that Princess was making to accommodate the gluten free dining requirement. However, I have to conclude that it is not safe for a gluten free or celiac person to go on a Princess cruise. I stopped blogging about the gluten free dining experience as if I had included the number of times I got sick from the food I would have no readers of the blog since everyone would have gotten bored with it.

If I could have pinpointed all the problems and solved them then I would have a different conclusion. From my perspective the problems included:

• The staff change over during the cruise guaranteed that every time there were new kitchen staff (which was frequent as the crew continually changed out throughout the cruise) I got glutened for a few weeks while they learned how to prepare a safe meal.
• Princess does not have the methods or proceedures in place that can assure a gluten free experience. Their methodology includes assigning an assistant head waiter to take all your orders. This person is supposed to insure that the meal is gluten free. Unfortunately it appeared that this person just turns around and places the order with a server who would then get it executed. For a multitude of reasons this just didn't work.
  
• Convincing the staff I really could not eat any food off the buffet and that items must be freshly prepared in the kitchen was a challenge. I had this problem with both the room service staff and the kitchen staff.
  

I'm not sure if these were the real problems. As I said if I could have figured out a way to safely order food I would have done it. I did switch to ordering the same room service breakfast every day. I also ate all lunches and dinners in the dining room (or asked the dining room staff to have it brought to my room) so as to have the same waiter. I also took Gluten-Ease, a special digestive enzyme that will help smooth the bumps of accidental cross contamination. Despite this I was frequently glutened.

There were a few items I could get from the buffet. The fruit area was nicely isolated from gluten items so I could get both the whole fruit and the fresh cut fruit. In the afternoon I could get the ice cream if none of the flavors contained gluten as they used the same scoop for all the flavors. I could also get the tortilla corn chips and salsa in the afternoon. However the very last day I did there were no tongs available for the chips so I asked the buffet attendent to get some. He went to the desert bar, grabbed a pair that had been used by people to serve themselves cake and tried to hand them to me. This illustrates why buffets are unsafe. The tongs would have transfered the wheat flour containing cake crumbs to the tortilla chips. If he had done this for the person before me and I did not see it happen, then I came along after I would have been confused as to how I got sick.

For shore excursions I took along my own prepackaged snack bars, cookies and nuts. This worked for all single day excursions. I had more difficulty on the multi-day overlands. Breakfasts were OK as I could get hard boiled eggs, deli meat slices, cheese and fruit from the hotels. If it was a rice based cuisine I did OK with rice and grilled meat for lunch and dinner. If it was a wheat based cuisine then I was in trouble and had to fall back on prepackaged nuts and fruit for my other meals.