Eating Well on the Road

During this holiday travel season, eating on the road is a reality for many of us. Up until fairly recently I traveled a lot for work. Like many of you, I always viewed road trips as a free for all of fast food, junk food and too much booze. When I started travelling almost weekly for work I had to try to find a way to change my mentality and my food intake as I trekked from city to city. I got pretty good at it after a while but the temptation to eat junk, particularly in an airport was always pretty overwhelming. It’s like an airport is its own self contained bubble of “Whatever, I do what I want.”

This article got me thinking about some of the healthy,fast, alternatives you may encounter. Before we dig in to that, I just wanted to say, Detroit? really Detroit is the the healthiest airport? Color me shocked. I’m not sure I quite agree with the article’s definition of healthy but it works. Looking at the list of what is available in Detroit, I do wonder what you can get at the Heineken lounge, besides a skunky beer, that qualifies as healthy. Certainly in a larger airport you would expect to have a greater variety. Here in my local airport we have one terminal where everything is fried in batches through one machine. You want a hotdog? The bartender drops a hot dog into the hopper, presses a button and in a few minutes it drops from a chute in the bottom. Pretty awesome if you think about it but certainly not healthy. You can get a clam pack salad though.

OK so you can find something good to eat in an airport, but how about on the highways. Here in NY we have the NYS Thruway with its many lanes and frequent rest stops it is the way to travel if you are heading across a large swathe of New York State. Even with an Easy Pass, you never really want to get off of the thruway, so the rest areas are the stop of choice. There was an initiative to try to change over many of the restaurants along to way to something that might be a better, healthier alternative, but if you are stopping in scenic Sloatsburg you might be in trouble. The initiative seems to have stalled pretty badly.

At least you can get some good coffee.

If you look hard you find  some ways to make it work on the road, but if it’s not a regular thing. Go ahead have the Cinnabon