I spent the week at this year’s Glastonbury photographing everything I ate for the Guardian – but sizzled halloumi and mango jus still come second to the music

My first festival food experience was as a teenager at Reading festival, when my friends and I decided to buy some chips. While chomping them down, I discovered one that was rock solid: not a chip, but a small bone. It turned out that there were quite a few of these distributed throughout our lunch, and, once I got to the bottom, I found that it had all been served on a bed of dried grass.

That set the bar pretty low as far as festival food was concerned. But it was a decade ago: nowadays, I don’t think you could find a meal that bleak at a festival if you (perversely) tried.

During my time at Glastonbury, I was asked to keep a photo diary of everything I ate, which, apart from making me feel like a tragically bewildered foodie Instagrammer (obsessively taking pictures of a crushed Twix etc), also meant that I thought about festival food quite a lot over the weekend – not just how much it had changed from the chip/bone/grass melange, but also how eating itself fitted into the festival experience.

Much like the music, food at Glastonbury is mainly for stumbling upon, although I did go deliberately to a couple of places on recommendations. One was Seth Troxler’s Smokey Tails – a Glastonbury outpost for the DJ’s BBQ-themed Hackney restaurant, where I ate a phenomenally tasty pulled pork bun. I also visited the Greenpeace farmers’ market, and had, while sitting on a mud-caked bit of wood, what was without a doubt the most pretentious meal of my life: a “taster plate” consisting of summer pea pakora, beetroot bomblet, horseradish creme fraiche, bulgar, slaw, harissa, mango jus and sizzled halloumi. (At Glastonbury, you are never more than 6ft from a slice of halloumi, very probably being sizzled.)

It did strike me, though, that something feels unavoidably off about eating food this luxurious when you’re supposed to be roughing it – and not because it was expensive (in fact, everything seemed to be a similar price: £8). Maybe it’s just the irony of being able to eat mango jus but not being able to shower for four days. Or perhaps it’s because Glastonbury feels like it’s meant to be about giving yourself over to the crowds and the chaos, not being a bore with a street-food fetish, continually on the hunt for photogenic meat.

In general, though, there is little time for nerding over food at the festival. Thanks to the walking, the mud, the camping, the sheer amount of people to navigate, and the carrying really heavy things on your back while walking (in the blazing sunshine), Glastonbury can sometimes resemble a hugely oversubscribed bootcamp. In that context, food is a very necessary fuel, and for much of the time, I felt both like I was constantly eating and struggling to eat enough. It can make eating feel a bit like a chore, something you have to make yourself do with dead-eyed determination (desperately overtired, at one point I had to literally force some fries down by basically knocking them back with water).

For the food itself to actually be depressing, though, you’d have to bring your own – in what now seems like self-inflicted cruelty, the only sustenance I brought with me were a pack of Coco Pops cereal bars: pointlessly low in calories and – after about six in a row – with just about the most nauseatingly synthetic taste in the world.

Before I went to Glastonbury, somebody told me the most impressive things about the festival was the food. Although perhaps there will come a time when 200,000 people will decamp to a field in England to lose themselves in a vast street food festival, Glastonbury is not in danger of becoming a foodie conference just yet. It’s still an ecstatic week-long party, just with decent catering to keep you alive through it all.