I sort of feel sorry for you, but I think your best bet is to comp their room service.
That about covers it.
Maybe if I win Powerball.
I’m going to have to disagree on this. French fries are much more labor intensive and messy. Plus I thought there were various reasons on the list @Czarcasm needed to avoid fried food.
My misunderstanding on the buffet idea. I swear I saw it mentioned upthread. The OP says Green Room so maybe I just got the idea of having an area with food set up on a table/s for people to self-serve and read that as buffet.
This doesn’t seem that awful.
Severe allergies are limited to shellfish/seafood, capsicum, and nuts. Best to not have any dishes that use these ingredients at all, and avoid fresh cut flowers.
More typical eating allergies look to be mint, artificial sweeteners, MSG, dairy, olives, gluten, squash, bananas, eggs, raw tomatoes. This can be handled by robust food labeling, including if a dish is vegetarian, vegan, dairy free or gluten free.
Cheese tray, bagels and cream cheese, hummus, cold cut tray with rolls and gluten free wraps / breads, crackers and GF crackers, fruit salad, that’s a pretty good start I think.
I believe I also mentioned, more than once, having access to just a suite and an adjoining room.
So it sounds like only foods that can be kept at room temp. I didn’t get that. Nevermind.
I have coolers for drinks, a pot for coffee and a pot for tea/water, and a hotel-sized microwave.
Cooking a mass of baked potatoes that take several minutes in a microwave and much longer in an oven, and keeping them hot is the hard part; agree re mess of deep fryers or equivalent, etc.
Considering MSG is naturally found in fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, cheeses, soy sauce, and many processed foods, I’d say you can safely ignore that request.
I see no reason not to have chips and salsa. The person(s) who can’t eat capsicum and the person who can’t eat tomato can surely avoid dipping their chips in the salsa - they’ve got to know it contains tomatoes and hot pepper. Not every food item has to be acceptable for every participant.
As an aside, how many people were presented with this questionnaire? What proportion of the guests don’t have any dietary restrictions at all?
These were my responses
| Restriction | N |
|---|---|
| None | 61+20† |
| Vegetarian | 21 |
| Vegan | 6 |
| Gluten free | 8 |
| Halal | 3 |
| Allergy/Sensitivity | 13 |
| Other | 4 |
†I’m adding the 20 non-responses to “None”, because if you do have a restriction, you are probably much more likely to respond.
| Allergy | N |
|---|---|
| Dairy/Lactose | 3 |
| Peppers | 1 |
| Nuts | 4 |
| Seafood | 2 |
| Quinoa | 1 |
| Onions/sulfur | 1 |
Some that are preferences are not listed. I binned all the nuts. (ETA: I really didn’t intend that last sentence to be a joke, but on reading it back, yeah. “Binned” is the stats term for grouping similar responses, and “nuts” are, well, nuts, like pecans and stuff.)
| Others | N |
|---|---|
| Dairy/Lactose | 2 |
| Red meat | 2 |
I’m not sure what the difference is between “Others” dairy and “Allergy” dairy.
Some people don’t eat dairy for other reasons than allergies or veganism.
I don’t think lactose intolerance is an allergy, is it?
Did you provide a check-off type of list or was it fill in the blank? Because if I couldn’t eat Food X for a reason other than an allergy and it was “fill in the blank” , I’d probably say " other - Food X" so that no one was worried about cross-contamination . My husband is supposed to avoid tomatoes because of a condition involving his esophagus but no one needs to be afraid to cut the cucumbers with the same knife used for the tomatoes.
I wasn’t the one that made the questionnaire or corresponded with the pros-it was done by people assigned to keep in touch with the pros. All I have gotten was that list I posted in the OP.
It was just fill in the blank, so:
None
[…]
And people could check as many things as they wanted. So vegetarian & nut allergy would be covered. (The survey software is nice, you can check as many things as you want, except “None” can only be selected by itself.)
Mostly it’s just interesting that one person puts exactly “lactose intolerance” as an allergy/sensitivity and another person puts it under other. I don’t think either response is wrong, this was just some quick questions to help the kitchen, not a medical diagnosis questionnaire.
I just want to say that y’all have given me some good ideas as how to accommodate the needs of the pros-thank you.
There are a lot of medical reasons why it might be dangerous for one particular person to eat some particular food, while most people can eat that same food safely. Layfolks might use the word “allergy” for all of them, and allergies are one of the more common causes for such a condition, but strictly speaking they’re not all allergies. Lactose intolerance and alcohol intolerance, for instance, are due to lower levels of some enzymes (I won’t say “deficiency”, because such lack is quite common, and the people without those enzymes usually get by just fine with their own diet). And the Celiac sensitivity to gluten is another sort of thing. And of course, it’s also possible to have an actual allergy to dairy or wheat, completely independent of Celiac or lactose intolerance.
And there’s probably a lot of overlap between the sort of people who end up as guests of honor at a nerd convention, and the sort of people who nitpick the distinction between allergies and other sorts of food sensitivites.
Technically, no it isn’t, but it’s easiest to explain it that way, so people would be less likely to sneak something in “because I didn’t think you’d notice”. The same thing can be said for people who, for whatever reason, must avoid gluten.
Oh, and diabetes is not an allergy to sugar. It just isn’t.