Can I find gluten-free food and handle allergies in Morocco?

Let me be straight with you: Morocco isn't a 'free-from' culture with allergen labelling, so you'll be self-managing — but it's very doable. The brilliant news for coeliacs and gluten-avoiders is that the cornerstone dish, the tagine, is naturally gluten-free: meat or vegetables, spices, olive oil, no flour. Grilled brochettes, harira's wheatier cousins aside, simple salads, eggs, olives and rice dishes give you a solid base to eat from.

The landmines are obvious once you know them: khobz bread arrives with everything and is used as cutlery; couscous is wheat semolina (not a safe swap, despite sounding healthy); msemen, baghrir and the pastry world — pastilla's warqa, all the honeyed sweets — are flour-based. Watch for cross-contamination too, since bread touches every plate. Ask whether a sauce is thickened with flour, and request your tagine plated without the customary bread on top.

Nut allergies demand the most vigilance, and I won't sugar-coat it. Almonds are everywhere — ground into pastilla, scattered on tagines, the base of countless sweets — and argan oil (a tree nut for allergy purposes) is drizzled on bread, stirred into amlou (the addictive almond-argan-honey spread), and used in cooking. If your allergy is anaphylactic, this needs serious advance planning: carry your epinephrine, and assume nuts unless a kitchen confirms otherwise.

My standard advice: carry an allergy card translated into Arabic and French stating exactly what you can't eat — it cuts through language gaps instantly and kitchens take it seriously. Tell me your allergies when we plan, and I'll brief your riads, camps and recommended restaurants in advance so meals are prepared safely rather than improvised on the spot. With that groundwork, allergy and coeliac travellers eat genuinely well here.