I take pride in the fact that I try to eat a healthy, balanced diet. I'm stereotypically one of the regulars at Home Plate and Collis (even though my close friends know I have a weakness for Pavilion cookies and Food Court cupcakes). On the rare occasions when I leave the confines of our secluded campus and venture into the glittering, cosmopolitan world of Main Street, I enjoy the fact that I can introduce a little (very little) variety into my otherwise monotonous diet. Although I, on occasion, daringly order a Canoe Club crme brulee with my girlfriends, I generally attempt to maintain my healthy eating habits during my off-campus adventures. Or at least I thought I did.
During an all-too-common moment of procrastination during this pre-finals period, my friend blitzed me something shocking: the news that , according to the Boloco website, my all-time-favorite Chinese Chicken salad at Boloco has 1198.78 calories, and 103.88 grams of fat (160 percent of the suggested daily value). I can't include my response to this shocking revelation in this article because it would have to be so censored that it would lose its meaning, but suffice it to say that I was shocked -- exclamation point. Don't believe me? Look it up -- they sneakily bury their nutrition information in their website, but it's there. I proceeded to forward this information to my other friends so as to expose the travesty being committed by that dark and deceitful little chasm in a basement of my precious ivory tower.
How can it be that a little salad -- composed of some lettuce and about five chunks of chicken -- has 1198.78 calories, you ask? It's in the dressing. The salad itself has 439.7 calories (which is still shocking for a tiny salad with hardly any ingredients), and when you include the dressing, it jumps up to that whopper of a number. Speaking of whoppers, you would have to eat not one, but nearly two "whoppers" from Burger King to consume that many calories.
As you read this you may be thinking: "my, this chick is quite a calorie-obsessed little nut." But I assure you, I am not. I am simply outraged at the fact that a restaurant -- which purports to be at least slightly healthy -- would have such an item on their menu. No wonder the United States has the highest obesity rate in the world. It would serve this country well if restaurants did more to publicize their nutrition information and inform the masses about what they're really putting into their bodies. A buried section on a website is really not enough.
Let this serve as a warning to anyone who is at all cautious about a healthy diet -- the next time you're going to eat a "healthfood" like a salad, do a little research first. And if you see nutrition information pasted all over the windows of Boloco, don't tell them it was me.
