Stress? Yes, I do suffer with some too now and then especially as this last year has been rather shouty and chaotic with exam stress in our household. Thankfully, it was not in vain, as my daughter received her GCSE results last week and she passed all of them!! Woo hoo! She’s into Sixth Form and ready to conquer the world and we are now all feeling a sense of relief.
This summer has certainly been one for the memory bank. Our family embarked on a trip to America (for business and pleasure) stopping off in New York for a week to spend with my brother plus a couple of business meetings and then onto Florida for some much needed R n R (despite the several knuckle-whitening roller coaster rides my son dragged me on to at Universal Studios – there’s nothing like a jolly good scream to clear out the built up stress).
I found New York a wonderful city to explore and was really impressed with the restaurants approach to listing calories on their menus (something EIRE already does but the UK has yet to adopt as a legal requirement) plus highlighting whether or not poultry was “antibiotic free” or cattle was “grass fed”. Something you do not see very often in the UK. They also boasted about these features during adverts on the television. In previous years when visiting we had struggled to find “healthy options” for eating out and generally came back feeling rather bloated and overindulged on hot dogs and burgers. Salads were also avoided due to the possibility of picking up bugs through unwashed produce or contaminated water. Now, as a family I carry and administer my Gisol from Nutri Advanced, a health supplement that contains Saccharomyces boulardii, a non-pathogenic yeast which has been shown to support a healthy balance of flora in the gut and a great travel buddy I recoomend to my clients.
One place we loved was the Chelsea Market, a block long and a block wide and just a short walk from the Hudson River in the area of Manhattan known as the Meatpacking District, Chelsea Market has become in just fifteen years one of the greatest indoor food halls of the world, with more than thirty-five vendors purveying everything from soup to nuts, wine to coffee, cheese to cheesecake. Attracting 6 million national and international visitors annually, it is one of the most trafficked, and written-about, destinations of any kind in New York City. Chelsea Market is a neighbourhood market with a global perspective [taken from Chelsea Market website].
Food Outlet Directory
“The area has always been the locus of food in the city, beginning with the Algonquin Indians, who traded their game and crops on the banks of the Hudson River at this same spot. The trains of the High Line once served the wholesale butchers who lined the streets beneath the tracks and cooled their provisions with blocks of Hudson River ice, and the National Biscuit Company established its factory—now reclaimed as the Chelsea Market—here to take advantage of the butchers’ lard in the nineteenth century. This long history—and the stripped-down brick architecture of the building—gives the Market a unique character. For foodies and even casual tourists, it is possible to enter the Market at one end in the morning and not exit the other until lunchtime, without ever growing bored—and certainly without ever going hungry”.
Herb and Spices at Chelsea Market
Variety of tea
There were plenty of different food outlets to choose from including a burger joint which boasted their “farm to tray” offerings – now you will never see that in McDonalds!
Walk on the High Line
After lunch we ventured outside into the heatwave of the city and tackled the “High Line” a wonderful way to see the city from the beauty of walking along an old disused railway. This is where the city really offers a treat for the tourists like us and enabled us to “walk off” our delicious lunch. With temperatures into the nineties we were sure to fill up our cool water bottles and take shade where possible to avoid dehydration.
I would like to thank the lovely Viktoria Vamosi, a friend who I met years ago when studying for my Nutritional Therapy degree and now a resident of New York. Her introduction to this wonderful place was much appreciated and the guided tour of downtown Manhattan.