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This past weekend, besides seeing Rodrigo Y Gabriela, I also caught a film at the Gasparilla International Film Festival. I’ll be reviewing the film, “Let’s Rob The Cheese Shop“, later this week, but for now I wanted to write about something movie-theater related that has been meandering through my melon for a few years.

I’m talking about food at the movies.

The Gasparilla International Film Festival was held at Tampa’s CineBistro, a small, up-scale theater that also features a gourmet restaurant. Customers order food or drinks prior to the film and the waitstaff brings it out before the movie starts. A bit high-priced and not something I would do all the time, but a fun experience nonetheless.

CineBistro is not the only place in Tampa that does the food-movie thing. Other theaters in town feature full bars, pizza, and of course, the normal array of candy, popcorn, and soda.

What I have yet to see, however, is any food offered for the health conscious among us. Those who don’t want to nosh on nougat or munch on Milkduds are out of luck at the theater. With our health food craze entering its second or third decade, I am flabbergasted as to why no one has done this yet.

I don’t think it would be too difficult to for a smoothie place to affiliate themselves with a local cinema. Instead of candy, why not offer protein bars or trail mix? Even the head of Sony Pictures, Michael Lynton, recently suggested theaters should offer a healther menu, with items such as “fruit cups, vegetables with dip, yogurt, granola bars, baked chips and unbuttered, air-popped popcorn”.

As writer Rosecrans Baldwin writes in his recent commentary about the evils of popcorn, “a medium popcorn at a Regal-chain movie theater contains 1,200 calories and 60 grams of saturated fat” . That’s preposterous.

Yet no one has offered an alternative. It should not be that difficult. If I can get a margarita, I should be able to get a strawberry-banana smoothie with a heaping scoop of ginseng, ginko biloba, amino acids, protein, or whatever else I want in there.

Come on movie theater people, I want smoothies at my movies.