Cleveland Clinic Cafeteria

When it's meal time in a hospital (and you're not inpatient), celiacs are often relegated to the least objectionable offering from a vending machine. Never mind that it might've been there six years, somehow a six-year-old Sinckers is a more health conscious choice than the make your own salad bar - a veritable gladiator match of accidental gluten-ing. 

Anyone who knows me knows on the best of days, I have luke-warm feelings about the Cleveland Clinic. To be polite, I consider that hospital the way one considers an unwanted relative at family gatherings: a necessary evil seen only because tradition (or in my case insurance) mandates it. So you can imagine I wasn't particularly hopeful about my lunch options. 

And yes, I was nearly validated by the hamburgers and fries, the beautiful, extensive, but ultimately unsafe salad bar, the spanakopita, the pizza, and even the yogurt that, of course, contained modified food starch. I was ready to give up and go with the Snickers, when a little alcove of prepared food caught my eye....

Pre-made salads without croutons, fifteen different varieties of prepackaged sushi (vegetarian and non), precut fruit cups, cottage cheese, and prepackaged grape leaves with the ingredients on the label. 

I settled on the grape leaves and the cottage cheese, and here's the thing, it was actually good. I'm not saying that I'd run back there any time soon to get a meal and I don't think the Clinic spends much time thinking about their celiac clientele, but it is nice to know that if you're going to be at the hospital, at least one of your concerns doesn't have to be brown bagging it.