Warsaw - Post Report Question and Answers
What do people who suffer from environmental or food allergies need to know?
Poland is generally aware of allergies and will work with you, though without much knowledge of the local language this may be difficult. However, they'll understand Google translate. - Oct 2021
Our kids have food allergies. We managed milk and peanut allergies in Poland. We had a great experience! They are attentive to the food allergies and we didn’t have any reactions at restaurants. Peanuts are not widely used at all and we found that very easy to deal with. Ice cream was the hardest to navigate for peanuts as they shared spoons between all the icecreams. Lots of ice cream options at the grocery stores though! Milk is a harder food allergy to navigate but we faired well. Our restaurants were limited, just as they are in the US, but we managed to find a bunch of great spots. More dairy free options were popping up in the grocery stores the longer we lived there. We traveled all around Poland and had great experiences with food in the other cities as well. Poland has a 10x LESS prevalence with food allergies but I felt they gave greater attention to the allergies than the US does. - Jan 2021
Ingredients lists on food items are often only available in Polish. Even when the original packaging listed the ingredients in English or another language, it will be covered with a Polish-language sticker. That said, vegan, lactose-free, and (increasingly) gluten-free food options are becoming increasingly common. However, peanut/nut labelling is rare. - Sep 2019
Learn a few words in Polish about your food allergies, because English won't always work, especially outside of Warsaw. - May 2018
Asthma and seasonal allergies are an issue here but generally anti-allergy meds and inhalers can address this. - Apr 2018
Ask when ordering your food, have a list of foods translated that you cannot eat and keep it with you. - Dec 2016
I don't know anything about food allergies. Seasonal allergies can be a problem because of all the flowering trees in Europe in the spring. Also, central air conditioning is pretty rare, so you won't get the filtering that you would in the States. We run portable air filters year-round in our apartment for that reason. - Mar 2016
There are a lot of trees and weeds here so be prepared for seasonal allergies such as ragweeed, etc. You can get every over-the-counter medicine for allergies. - Nov 2014
