Hi everyone!
I hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing Christmas and New Year's!
This Christmas break my husband and I decided to pay a visit
to Los Angeles. Where we really wanted to go was Hawaii or Japan, but the holiday
pricing changed our minds. Fortunately there is a lot to see and do in LA, so
it wasn’t really a bad choice in the end. Also, we have been meaning to visit
Universal Studios for a while now, and this would be our chance to go.
Universal Studios was a nice place, the rides were awesome
and the actual studios were very interesting to see and experience. It wasn't perhaps the best day to go, as the place was packed and anything you wanted to do required waiting, including eating.
Eating proved to be the most challenging activity at Universal Studios as the food choices there were pretty poor. Being a vegetarian didn’t make things
easier either, as almost every dish had meat in it. Thus, we had to resort to
eating popcorn, churro, cheese pizza (horrendously greasy) and cinnabon. These items do give you energy in the form of calories, but close to zero nutrients, like vitamins and minerals. The
little “restaurant” we had lunch in advertised that it offers salads – this was
the reason we chose the place as we thought we could get something healthy to
eat. Well, they had two salads (enough to advertise the salads in plural), one
of which contained 90% pasta (not the kind of salad I was looking for) and the
only other option was a Caesar salad, whose dressing contained anchovies and
hence was non-vegetarian. Cheese pizza it was then. I couldn’t quite finish it,
but I made an effort since one has to eat something, right? At that point we were
starving and had to wait for almost a half an hour to order, so we didn’t
really have it in us to go find something better either.
We were at the Studios for the whole day and thus having
only a slice of cheese pizza and some popcorn was not enough to keep us going
the whole day. We were trying to figure out a snack to have in the evening and
as there wasn’t much variety in the options, we went for cinnabon, at least it
is vegetarian. Wow – one cinnabon contains 800 calories! Two cinnabons would
cover my daily calorie need in an instant! Our plan of buying two was quickly
reduced to just one cinnamon roll.
Luckily Los Angeles is a very forward thinking city and we
were able to find lots of healthy things to eat during the rest of our trip. We
ate at three different vegan restaurants, each of which was superb. The food in
these places tasted amazing and was usually organic and locally produced. The
night after Universal Studios we had vegan carrot cake for dessert at one of
these vegan eateries: I still had the cinnabon fresh in my memory and compared
to that, the carrot cake was like a colored movie to a black-and-white film, I
could really taste the difference.
I sincerely hope that Universal Studios will improve their
food selection and add a stand or two that sell fresh fruit and items like
Greek yoghurt, whole grain sandwiches and granola bars. Otherwise, if you plan
to visit the place, be sure to pack plenty of healthy snacks! The problem seems
to be that people allow themselves to eat badly that one day they go to
Universal Studios and the Studios is simply satisfying the demand.
Unfortunately, more people have to ask for healthier food before anything will
change. But wouldn’t it be good for their image if they made the amusement park
healthier, especially with all those kids hanging around? I dare say it would. What do you think?
Thanks for reading!
Anna-Kaisa
PS. Comments or questions are highly appreciated :)
