Guest post by Dom Bailey

Car packed, tent, sleeping bag, spare pair of boxers, toothbrush, and wellies (just in case), and we’re ready to head for The Levellers’ Beautiful Days music festival in Devon.

Just about to pull off, when my father-in-law asks “is this bacon in the fridge for your festival?” Nice thought, but who takes bacon to a music festival? We shrug and hit the A303.

Festival food says as much about a festival as its toilets – not what you go for, but you’re happy if it’s of a high standard. Festivals are no longer catered for solely by hot dogs or greasy burger vans – the Slough dual-carriageway “Three Nation” types where burgers, Chinese food, and kebabs swim in the same grease, absent of any subtleties the original recipes may have once had.

And it’s not all veggie burgers and lentil cutlets either. At most festivals nowadays you can eat your way “around the world” and back again, such is the variety of food stalls on offer.

Beautiful Days is no exception. In fact, the global route could take you from Indian curries, to Italian pizza and pasta, Mediterranean kebabs, English fish and chips, Spanish paella, Thai, Japanese noodles and Tibetan stews, and that’s just for starters.

Or you may choose to eat your way “around the farm”, with hog roasts, beef dumplings, lamb shish, chicken paella, and ostrich burgers. Or “around a health food shop” – from vegan mushroom burgers and liquorice sticks to a Liverpudlian speciality of patisserie (it wasn’t exactly a stall, just a guy with a biscuit tin wandering around whispering “ash cakes?”)

Ultimately, it’s up to you whether or not a music festival – which can involve a 20-minute queue to the bar, a 15-minute queue for food, a 10-minute “oops sorry, excuse me, excuse me, why are you dressed as a Rubik’s Cube, get out of the f***ing way” wade through the crowd to wait for the 20 minute sound check, and then the hour-long set, then the 15 minute post-set queue for the portaloos – is really the place to try an Indian phall for the first time. Or whether it’s the right time to decide that an ostrich burger won’t count ‘cos you’re vegetarian most of the time at home.

A stick-to-what-you-know, or are vaguely familiar with, approach doesn’t mean you are going to miss out on quality food, but it may mean you miss out on less bands. You could always leave the delicious Tibetan Kitchen sha shi sesame chicken for the last night – then you’ve only got to worry about about the Little Chef toilets on the way home (sorry Heston).

So, what is the best festival food?

The Tibetan Kitchen could make an entry with its momo dumplings filled with spinach, cheese and garlic. Pure Pie’s just-thick-enough shortcrust pastry casing – with saucy fillings like steak and horseradish, or pork and mustard – are winners at the end of a long day drinking cider in the sun followed by a long night jigging around to bands like Mad Dog Mcrea.

Freshly stone-baked pizza (which didn’t seem to stay open long enough) were also quality, as were the Mediterranean stall’s lamb kebab or falafel pittas. The Real Sausage Company always seemed to have a healthy queue for its real sausages. You can see where I’m going here, the key to festival food is that it has to be comforting, familiar, filling and easy to eat.

For some unknown reason – probably a family feud-related incident on the Cornwall-Devon border, I don’t know – I didn’t spot anywhere selling pasties. There were more pasties being sold 180 miles away on Ealing Broadway station than in a field with a captive audience of 12,500 people, 40 miles from Kernow.

They would have been the outright winner. They keep their heat, are filling, and you don’t need to balance a plate and a pint and keep a hand free for cutlery. And, a half-eaten one will quickly slot into your pocket and keep its shape (probably) when you have to dash off to hear Carter USM knock out Sheriff Fatman.

But the true festival winner is even simpler than the pasty – a good old bacon sarnie. And it doesn’t even have to be from a stall. Some of the camping Beautiful Dazers had brought their own.

Now, there are festival-goers who camp, and there are campers who go to festivals. The former include the category of “Shit, I thought I’d packed my sleeping bag, now I have to sleep in my rucksack…”

Some don’t make it fully into the tent after binging on two-litre bottles of Thatchers cider. Their comatose bodies, half frozen from sticking out of the tent all night, being tripped over and pissed on, and half baking inside, where the drying pool of vomit may, or may not be, their own. I thought my bag of Bombay mix, a litre of water, and two packets of chewing gum was cheating a bit, until I took my first festival morning stumble through the tents.