Festival Fare: Eating at Benicassim

Benicassim is a festival of endurance. It’s held in Spain, on the East coast, about an hour away from Valencia by coach, and goes on during mid-July. It is HOT. Really hot. Ridiculously hot. They have sun there. Every day. And very few clouds. Thus, HEAT. Water is pretty much the most important resource out there, as it is everywhere. Unfortunately, they don’t let you take bottles, cans or liquid into the site, which increases the likelihood of you paying the €2 for a 500ml bottle of water inside. NO. THANKS. So, as there are two campsites, FIBcamp and BeniCamp, we stayed in FIB camp which is a two minute walk from the festival site. We would go in to see a band, do some dancing, then skip out and back to the tent to drink and snack. Perfick!

Aaaand play ring of fire.

So! Camping without a gas stove or mini-fridge and in hot hot weather doesn’t really give much of an option on food. Everyday we went to the supermarket to stock up on water, beer and food which could be eaten in one sitting, or would keep in hot weather. Basically, I lived on dried apricots and sunflower seeds, as well as packaged salad (shredded lettuce, red cabbage & carrot), salmorejo, crisps (naturally), Frosties & cereal bars. Oh, and bread. The dried apricots provided sugar, iron and a portion of fruit. Sunflower seeds contained fats, and were also coated in salt. I like to eat a salad everyday, and I usually buy all the bits seperate like and make a PHAT pile of veg to devour over an hour, but even though we had stolen a knife from our hostel in Valencia (knives are USEFUL. Always travel with a knife and/or spork) it just wasn’t feasible to be chopping up lettuce in the tent, so packaged salad it had to be.

Salmorejo is delicious, and is made from tomatos, bread, olive oil and garlic. It’s a typically Andalucian (Southern Spain) dish, but we found in a supermarket in a carton. Yum!

It needs to be kept chilled though, and although we bought a chill bag and ice…we didn’t then buy ice again and so, it just seemed safer not to eat the food which had been kept in tepid water for two days. Let that be a lesson to you!

I also bought a packet of Frosties and muchas limonada, as I felt that the sugar would see me through until I could get back to civilisation and enjoy protein again. Cereal also tends to have added B12 and we all know how dangerous it is to let levels of that get low! I also found some Kellogs chocolate cereal bars which didn’t contain any obvious animal product and had added fibre, B12 and other vitamins & minerals one might need. Unfortunately, the supermarket sold out after a couple of days, but it was a pleasant surprise to find chocolatey goodies with no milk in! A nice little treat one day; Stephen bought a jar of asparagus soaked in…water? something wet, anyway, and I had a couple of forkfuls of that.

Ultimately, we ate junk and survived more than well enough to enjoy a few fun, dehydratory dance-filled days seeing the likes of The Prodigy, Ellie Goulding, The Specials and Gorrillaz. I would never, ever go again (I still don’t feel like I’m getting enough water!) but it was awesome this time around.