I heart Boston (A Boston Vegetarian Food Festival Recap)

What a fun weekend in Boston!

The Boston Vegetarian Society puts on an amazing food festival! They are estimating 18,000 – 20,000 people walked through the busy (oh-so-busy) festival area over two days. I basically lost my voice after two days of talking to thousands of people at the Attune Foods table and we gave away so many samples of cereal (we could have given away double, had we had it!) so I believe it.

I arrived in Boston Friday, late afternoon, and checked in to a lovely bed and breakfast.

I stayed on the top floor of the red house, which featured this to-die-for bathtub.

and I enjoyed wonderful, vegan breakfast each morning in the grey house.

Saturday morning I had homemade granola, quinoa with maple syrup and fresh blackberries. Sunday I enjoyed the wheat berries with pears and the tofu scramble.

I had some fun B&B mates at the Taylor House for a couple of days, including a super-nice couple from Arizona (hi!) and fellow Veg Fest presenters: Ginny Messina, John Pierre and Kerrie Saunders.

Right down the street from the B&B, on Centre Street, you can find some great vegan options. City Feed and Supply is a grocery store that carries vegan goodies, vegan deli items and even vegan wine. Two restaurants, The Purple Cactus (didn’t make it there) and the Centre Street Cafe.  I went to the grocery store and dined at Centre Street Cafe twice (I had the warm kale salad and the mushroom potato entrée Friday night and a raw salad and peanut sesame noodles with tofu Saturday night – the noodles were the real winner).

The Attune Foods table was swamped for two days.

The quiet before the second day storm…

We were principal sponsors of the event (our brand featured on 800+ subway and bus signs throughout the city!) so our table was at the entryway. The first morning we felt like we were staffing the first water station at the Boston Marathon. People grabbed our cereal and ran! We were conveniently located next to Vermont Soy so we sent folks over to them to get a splash of soy milk in their cereal sample cup. Genius! 

We had fun on social media, asking visitors to our table to tag us on Instagram or Twitter (#attune) to be eligible for random drawings both days – the winner got an awesome eco bag filled with our cereal, a cereal-go-bowl, an Attune hat and a Plant-Based Diet Made Easy brochure/coupon.

So much fun!

I did a cooking demo / presentation Saturday: Healthy Food Preparation for the Busy, Non-Cook. There were about 200 people in the room and they were so receptive! I had a group a top-notch volunteers prepare soup in advance, plus prep all ingredients, because I literally walked from my Attune Foods table up to the room to present. No time to prepare! Volunteers actually made both recipes (my kind of demo…I didn’t have to cook!) and they were great. I had a blast talking to audience members later, back at the Attune table the rest of the day, as well as Sunday.

Ginny gave three presentations over the weekend. We both went through our copies of Vegan for Her pretty quickly so we found ourselves with only one copy remaining on Sunday. After Ginny did a spectacular presentation on veganism and weight (meaning, she doesn’t sell vegan = skinny) I auctioned off our one and only copy to the audience. The winner’s $25 donation (hi, Katherine!) for the book went to Our Hen House – an organization in the  midst of a donor challenge so it actually is $50 for their mission to change the world for animals! (You can donate now and your gift will be doubled!)

Oh, I should mention that I did get a chance to do a little shopping on the second day of the festival, before the doors opened, and picked up a few items from Herbivore Clothing and Ecolissa.

At the end of the day Sunday I was exhausted. My B&B buddies took off for the airport but I stayed another night because I needed to break down my Attune Foods display and, frankly, Colorado Springs is a little tricky to get to from Boston. I actually welcomed a chill night of no talking and just being still.

I walked around the neighborhood a bit, to enjoy the New England fall, which is so different from fall in the Springs,

before drawing a hot soak in that fabulous bathtub, re-heating delicious eats from Centre Street Cafe, and enjoying a lovely, vegan pinot noir under a pile of blankets in bed.

This festival is put on by volunteers and they do a bang-up job. I want to give a special thanks to Evelyn Kimber and Robin Adams, both of whom did an excellent job of planning and executing the festival – and they inspire every single person they encounter. Congratulations to them.

Boston, thank you so much for loving our Attune Foods cereals and for being so supportive of my presentation, me, and my message: vegan food is easy to prepare and is awesome and being vegan for the animals is even more awesome.

Tags: boston vegetarian food festival recap

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