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swiss chard + white bean grilled sammie from Sunday Morning Banana Pancakes
Recipes

Make Your Attendees Crave Lunch with these 12 Vegan Options

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Use the Vegan Lunch Ideas for Meetings to Feed Attendees Well Over the last few months I’ve gotten quite a few emails/calls from meeting planners asking me for healthy and delicious vegan lunch ideas for meetings since the hotel, convention center and/or catering companies they are working with are not making an effort to do this for them. To top the frustration I’ve heard from planners, the stories from vegan and vegetarian meeting attendees about what they were served illustrate a lack of enthusiasm from chefs to create these meals: At an awards banquet Jessie was served one – yes, one – roasted carrot. Monica was…

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Hand writing Diabetes | managing diabetes
Dietary Needs Food Service Meetings & Events

Celebrate Diabetes Awareness Month by Savoring Delicious Nutritious Foods

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Managing Diabetes at Meetings can Improve Health for all  If you follow me on social media, you may have already noticed it’s Diabetes Awareness Month. The celebration is a combined effort across U.S. government entities, medical professionals, individuals with diabetes and their friends and families, those who want to learn more, and organizations across more industries than you would think to help those managing diabetes to eat and feel better. “National Diabetes Month is observed every November so individuals, health care professionals, organizations, and communities across the country can bring attention to diabetes and its impact on millions of Americans.”…

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Lifestyle Choices

Happy Vegan Month and World Vegan Day!

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November is off to a great start and one of the reasons is that November first is World Vegan Day. I’m not promoting we all need to switch to veganism, but I am promoting more vegan dishes in our menus. Not only will be making a concerted effort to meet the needs of our custom eaters, we’ll be opening our events to a vast and surprisingly delicious world of innovative vegan dishes. With a growing number of people turning to vegetarian and vegan lifestyles, the effort to create meat-like dishes is long gone. Occasionally, we still see tofurkey, fish-like tacos,…

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Jack O' Lantern on the Halloween party
Food Allergies

Halloween: Keep Your Custom Eaters Safe from Forbidden Foods, Not Just Pesky Ghouls

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Five Ideas for Frightfully Festive Cocktail Hour Fare Halloween parties are a fun opportunity to get creative while maintaining that special balance between making everything look creepy and delicious at the same time. It’s almost an art form and the catering craft has certainly seen its share of epic wins and brutal scares. One thing that shouldn’t be scary on Halloween is knowing whether the food is safe to eat. Anyone with food allergies can attest to the difficulties inherent in eating at parties. Add to that the additional vigilance needed when meals are disguised for a theme and it…

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Dietary Needs Religious Dietary Practices

Convening Kosher – from Facilities & Destinations Magazine, Summer 2016

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Convening Kosher  Communication and knowledge are key to ensuring the F&B experience pleases all parties At a recent Tourism Ireland event, I was intrigued by a query to guest host Lady Dunleath about the menus available at Ballywalter Park, Lord and Lady Dunleath’s Northern Ireland home. A meeting planner representing a law firm in Manhattan’s financial district inquired about the availability of vegetarian, vegan and kosher meals at the estate, whose Mansion House is offered for group functions. In the ensuing conversation, the planner noted that, given the costs involved in obtaining kosher provisions, she tried to investigate if attendees…

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Dietary Needs Food Service Lifestyle Choices Meetings & Events Recipes

October: Vegetarian Awareness Month

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October is Vegetarian Awareness Month! This doesn’t mean there is a sudden call-to-action for all meat-eaters to go veggie, but it’s a great way to stop and appreciate that there are some amazing veggie dishes out there that are worth building into our main course menus. And if we were to build just a little more veggie-life into our personal weekly menus, we might find we are actually experiencing this delicious world in an even more interesting way. Quick Run-Down on Vegarians: Vegetarian Awareness Month has two purposes. One is to be aware of vegetarians and the reasons for their…

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Fresh bio-waste and compost
Duty of Care Sustainability

Prepared But Not Served – A Guest Blog by Jim Spellos

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There is growing attention being paid to food waste, which is wonderful. I’ll be speaking at IMEX next week and while you can catch me at a few sessions, Wasting Away will be a session on food waste and our bottom line on October 18th. As a prompt to help us celebrate the no waste movement, let’s all take part in World Food Day this Sunday, October 16th. You can read a general article I’ve written on why the day exists and how we can integrate more awareness into our daily lives. Below is a beautiful guest post by James Spellos.…

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Food Allergy and the ADA
Thrive! in the News

Food Allergies and the ADA

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My good friend Dr. Tyra Hilliard, PhD, JD, CMP, is a meetings industry attorney, college professor, speaker and writer. In her latest article for Plan Your Meetings, “Food Allergies and the ADA,” she explains how and why the Americans with Disabilities Act was amended in 2008 to be more inclusive and broader in scope than the original and now incorporates eating and breathing as major life activities. She and I will be talking about this together next week at IMEX America on Tuesday, October 15 at 3:00 p.m. in our session “Food, Risk & Liability: More Than Menu Planning.”

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Duty of Care

World Food Day – Take Action & End World Hunger

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World Food Day is this Sunday, October 16th and it’s not just about food. It’s also not just about recognizing that hunger exists. It’s about taking action against hunger. And there’s so much you can do. This isn’t just another hashtag. World Food Day has been observed around the world by millions of people since 1979. The idea is that every human being has a right to nutritional food that will sustain them. Not food that will keep them alive, but adequate food to be able to live with vitality, meaning each person has a right to enough food to…

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