Eating in America (Part 1)

Part 1 of  "Eating in America" will mainly entitle what I saw and how my brain reacted to the different things I saw. If you're looking for detailed photos/foodporn pictures of the foods I ate, here is the entry. 

First things first, we went to many different places for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and not all the restaurant menus had caloric information on it - simply ingredients, way of preparation, and a price. What I noticed more so on fast food restaurants / coffee shops was that there was a "calorie" column listed beside the "price" column. If you can't visualize what I mean, I googled some pictures. These were similar things I would witness when I was waiting in line for the occasional Iced Americano or Chicken snack wrap at the airport.

Starbucks 

McDonald

As you can clearly see, both columns are listed. I was quite surprised when I saw this at first. I thought, ``wow! How convenient! This will help me reflect upon which would be more worthy of my calories (a 380 calorie chicken snack wrap vs a 470 calorie chicken sandwich).``

It made me feel that the health department (or whichever monitors these fast food chains) is ACTUALLY trying to do something to bring to people`s attention of the actual number of calories they`re consuming PRIOR to them order rather than looking it up afterwards. 

Of course, McDonalds and Starbucks aren`t probably the best places to eat from, but there are situations where you are on the go or you just need something to eat on your way to your destination. I think this will help people make better choices - example, a bacon, cheese, and egg bagel from McDonalds may seem to be less calorie dense and less fatty for you, but when you only look at the number of calories, there is actually 140 calories less in the BCE biscuit than the bagel. 

When it comes to sit-down dining restaurants, say The Cheesecake Factory for example in this case, they did have caloric information listed on their menu 

I think this is a great thing, and I would highly advocate it. Sure, it doesn`t break down all the macros and nutrients for you, but at least it`s a place to start. Maybe one would consider choosing a lower calorie option, splitting the dish, or packing some of it to go when the caloric info starts to influence their decision making while dining. 

Unfortunately, I feel that even with this new system and providing the numbers, some people still choose to blindy eat whatever they want. And that`s okay - I guess. It`s not a fail in the system, it`s just a matter of how much that person cares. If a man`s routine is to get a supersize big mac combo every day after work, putting up caloric information may not change his decisions. There are other factors that play into their decision making. And no government system is going to plan ALL that out for their citizens. 

It`s all a matter that lie within our hands.