Being a Smart Shopper at the Mall Food Court
‘Tis the week to shop till you drop and then, exhausted and famished, grab a pick-me-up at the mall food court. After carefully selecting all those holiday gifts, you figure you deserve three slices of pepperoni pizza and a large soft drink.
“People might spend hours developing their shopping lists,” said Felicia Busch, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Assn. But when it comes to choosing a snack between purchases, they “just dart into the closest place without a lot of forethought.”
But planning ahead on food purchases shouldn’t be difficult, as those noisy, neon, fast-fuel eateries are serving more healthful options nowadays.
ADA-member dietitians recently surveyed the country’s 10 largest shopping malls and found that all sold bagels, made-to-order sandwiches, baked potatoes, frozen yogurt, bottled water, fruit juices, and grilled or roasted chicken.
Half the malls had whole fresh fruit, six sold vegetables and veggie burgers and seven offered nonfat milk, popcorn and nonfat or low-fat muffins.
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As part of the survey, ADA dietitians also interviewed a small number of shoppers about whether they eat at the mall, what they eat and what foods they would like to buy that aren’t currently offered.
Out of the 100 shoppers questioned, 52 said they were at the mall to both shop and eat, 35 were there to just shop and nine to just eat. (Four were there for reasons other than shopping or eating.)
If you extend that to the nation’s shopping centers, that’s a lot of eating. An estimated 185 million adults shop at the nation’s 42,000 shopping centers each month, and more than 10 million Americans are employed at them, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers.
As for shopping-and-eating strategies, Busch suggested that people map out their trips by thinking about when they will eat and where. For hard-core shoppers who get to the mall when it opens, Busch proposed a snack at 10 a.m.
To “bypass the crowds,” she scheduled lunch at 11:30 a.m. or 1:30 p.m. To avoid pulling into a fast-food restaurant on the way home from the mall, she recommended a light snack at 4 p.m. She also suggested packing snacks for the kids.
Dietitian Edee Hogan always keeps snacks in her car, including wheat crackers, trail mix, apples and aseptic boxes of fruit juice.
As for what to choose, Busch said, “You can pretty much eat in any place in the food court so long as you think ‘plain’: plain hamburger, plain baked potato with low-fat topping, plain cheese pizza, plain white rice and a plain bagel with jam or light cream cheese.”
