Universal Studios

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 :)