EATING AND DRINKING
Eating
By now you will have realised that the main advice is to travel light and be prepared. This applies to eating. If you are thinking of cooking, then you are going to have problems. Firstly, transporting it to pitch and secondly, finding space around your pitch to cook.
If you like to eat healthily then I would suggest have a holiday from your normal regime and go JUNK! Forget cereal bars and healthy snacks, in fact forget anything that contains any form of roughage. A daily bowel movement is the most you want to have, less frequent is better if you can manage it. (See Toilets). Sweetcorn is Kamikaze!
Get all your meals from the variety of vendors that are on the festival site. You can travel world just by moving up the row of caravans from far east with noodles to new world with nachos. Again, you need to make careful choices. Avoid vegetables and salad and go for protein and carbs - food for high energy.
Drinks
As you enter the festival entrances, you will be asked to discard anything in glass containers, so you will need to decant your drinks into a plastic bottle. You don't want to have to consume a bottle of vodka before you have found your pitch, let alone erected your tent.
On the festival site you will only be allowed to take bottles of water. All other drinks have to purchased from the bars and stalls around the stages. Different companies offer different promotions, so watch out for these. Soft drinks are readily available at many stalls, but those who prefer fermented beverages have to follow certain protocols.
Alcoholic drinks are purchased with tokens. Tokens are purchased with cash. Basically you have to queue twice for these drinks. Tokens are purchased at certain stalls, usually denoted by the title-Drinks Tokens. These are situated at various strategic points around the fields, but never too close to the bars. The drinks are purchased by exchanging the tokens for the drink. Coincidentally, the face value of the token is the purchase price of the drink. I think that this may a creative way of observing the licencing laws of the UK, but I'm willing to be corrected on this point.
The queue for the tokens is longest on the first day when the festival field opens, but this is when the reformed 80's bands or McFly tend to perform. This may an acceptable sacrifice to make.
There are always queues for the bar. This is a conundrum that needs to be solved. 1) Do you queue up each time you require a drink? You have to build in queueing time to your plans. You may finish your drink and have to start queueing straight away. A problem rather like painting the Eiffel Tower. You would never see a band, only hear them. 2) Do you buy treble the amount? This leads a transportation problem. You will need to make your way through closely packed crowds and run the risk of spilling your drinks on the way.
I HAVE NO ANSWER TO THIS. YOU WILL NEED TO MAKE YOUR OWN JUDGEMENT!
However, I do have a handy tip. 25cl bottles of wine can be purchased, but they always remove the screw tops. I take 3 screw top lids from bottles with me from home, so that I can reseal the bottles for ease of transport and reduced queueing time. This has the added bonus of reduced liquid intake in the evening and less likelihood of having to make a nocturnal visit to a hedge - avoiding guy ropes etc.
