Eating at gigs

ttreit

TL;DR - eating healthy at gigs is not easy. Share your stories.

Anyone in the music/entertainment/live event business want to share their stories about eating on the road?

My experience:
I'm a live sound engineer and food is often part of my compensation. I work most Saturdays at a bar - at the bar they are very accommodating - I can order as much or as little food as I want and customize it any way I want the entire night. (I'm there from 7pm - 1am) Being on a tight budget it's a little hard to resist "free" delicious things like Irish Nachos and their 1/2 pound cheeseburger but so far I do ok there. I know what's on the menu and I plan my calories accordingly.

For other events I generally get to the venue several hours before the band and it's a lot of hard physical work loading in the PA. There's often very little time and you never know what gremlins are going to show up. So from the time I get there until after sound check I'm working pretty hard. Sometimes there's a break after sound check for me and sometimes there isn't. Then I'm running front of house and/or monitors. Then we're striking for the night.

Somewhere in there they usually feed the band and I take time to eat. Sometimes we get what the guests are having (score!) or sometimes they bring in pizza or sandwiches for the band. Thankfully there's usually plenty of bottled water along with the soda and lately La Croix drinks have been showing up too. If it's just sandwiches I'm usually fine, if it's pizza I eat more than I ought to. If it's a buffet of delicious guest food I try very hard to make good choices but inevitably eat more than I probably should. Calorie counting is hard because you don't know what's in anything and I don't have time to log individual items. I usually end up looking at my plate and assign it my best guess as far as calories go.

I could pack my own food and if I was perfect I probably would - but the miser in me doesn't want to lose part of my pay (dinner) and quite honestly having one more thing to do on a gig day is not attractive to me.

One tough part for me is the mental stress piled on top of the physical stress of the day. Even on the way to a show my stress level is already elevated: "I hope they have good power distro...I wonder what the acoustics are like...I really need to remember to dial the keys player in better than last time...what mic should I be using since the singer has a cold and I didn't like the one I used last time...why is traffic not moving, I'm losing time!"

So lots of mental stress + physical stress + long hours = not the greatest eating habits.

I don't really have a question and I'm not sure I'm even looking hard for a solution - I'm just wondering if others encounter the same thing and am curious to hear stories and commiserate.

The great thing about gig days is that I'm burning a ton of calories, no question.

I think my biggest problem/challenge is like what happened last night. We were playing a wedding and they had this really delicious salmon, capers, onion, cream cheese spread you put on crackers. They also had cherry tomatoes stuffed with some kind of cream cheese filling. I LOVE cream cheese - so you can imagine how that went. lol.

Anyhow tell us your road stories!

EDIT: Also tough are shows where you sound check at like 3 but then have to go dark until 7 and they've stocked the green room with chips and nuts and candy and soda. Must. Invoke. Some. Amount. Of. Discipline!

fiddletime

I’m a part time musician and really love to get free food. The problem is that, like most of everyone, free food is always hard to turn down. I try to keep the carbs low and the meat high. Sometimes I just eat the topping off of pizza. I try very hard not to snack, as often the green rooms are stocked with candy and munchies. It’s a constant battle. Portion control and doing my best at guesstimating calories, is how I work at surviving all episodes of free food, be it at my in-laws, a party, work, or a gig. It’s tough, and I stumble a lot, and work on getting back on track ASAP.

Moxie42

I spend every Wednesday after work (and some Saturdays) in a bar with free tacos because of the pool league I'm in. I eat lighter during the day (enough to not be hungry of course, but I stick to fruit and yogurt for breakfast, and soup or salad for lunch). That way I can have the free higher-cal food without throwing the whole day out of whack. I also commit to not having more than one plate (2 tacos and some rice & beans). I know I don't need more than one plate so if I'm tempted later I just remind myself that I only want it because it's there. I don't have second or third helpings at home so there's no reason to do it in a bar. If we're at a different bar I'll order a wrap or sandwich and split it with a friend or ask for half of it in a box right from the start. Then I just commit to not opening the box.

AnnPT77

Not a musician - well, not good enough to play gigs! - but I have a thought from my life. Maybe you already do this, though.

Sometimes when I'm at some big event where you get a plate of food and take it off to eat someplace, I use my phone to take a quick photo, if I can do it without being obnoxious, in order to log later. If there could be doubt, I'll include my hand or fingers in the frame as a size gauge.

ttreit

AnnPT77 wrote: »

Not a musician - well, not good enough to play gigs! - but I have a thought from my life. Maybe you already do this, though.

Sometimes when I'm at some big event where you get a plate of food and take it off to eat someplace, I use my phone to take a quick photo, if I can do it without being obnoxious, in order to log later. If there could be doubt, I'll include my hand or fingers in the frame as a size gauge.

This is brilliant!

Although most of the time while we're eating I have background music playing so my phone is plugged in at the sound board. Another reason to upgrade my phone and keep my old one just for music!

Rosemary7391

I can sympathise with not wanting to waste "free" food. I try and think about it as part of my calorie budget as well as my financial one. Maybe trim down on breakfast the next day to compensate? Or eat at maintenance on gig days and a more severe deficit on non gig days? Only the overall average matters, not which days you do what

I do similar things at church every so often - I actually play in the band, but we're short on folk so we also set up the PA equipment and so on. Definitely a job you need to be well fed for! I balance the desire to eat free food with the fact that I can't play if I stuff my face (sax, clarinet and flute) and that I ought not be eating at all for at least an hour before I play because it can damage my instruments over time - which is inevitably when they want to feed us... I know that isn't your situation - but I guess I've got something that matters more than "hey, free food" or being a bit hungry. You might be able to find the same feeling in something else?