vegan

Successful campaign: Amtrak to offer vegan meals on the dining car!

72 Comments / Animal rights, Nonviolent Communication, Sustainable Transportation, Travel, Veganism / By / July 23, 2015 / , ,

Santa Barbara train station at dusk

Well, we did it!! Yesterday, I spoke on the phone with Tom Hall, Amtrak’s VP of Customer Service, and Gary Gunderson, head of their Food and Beverage Services department. Mr. Hall had received helpful letters from a number of you, and was willing to commit to adding vegan menu options to all dining cars in their next menu-change cycle. Their Culinary Advisory Team meets once a year, in October, and develops the two menus for the next year: one spring/summer menu and one fall/winter menu, and this coming October they will be sure to add vegan options for next year.

Here is an excerpt from the follow-up email I received from Mr. Hall after our phone call:

“As I outlined, our immediate plans to improve our vegan offerings are to introduce the Vegan Burger on our Long Distance Dining Menus in our next menu change. This has been a successful item in our lounge/café service and should transition well to the dining car. In addition our spring/summer dining car menu change will include an Entrée Salad that will allow the meat and cheese to be ordered separately which in turn will make the base salad vegan compliant and a much heartier portion than our current side salad. We will continue to search out new options for our dinner service offering. As I committed, we will be tasking several of our Amtrak Culinary Advisory Team (ACAT) members with developing vegan dinner options at our upcoming fall ideation session. Any new items designed in the course of that event will be introduced with our spring/summer 2016 dining car menu. As we discussed it would be extremely helpful if you were to forward me some of your suggested items which I will pass on to the culinary team. We will certainly be looking at how we can leverage the vegan offerings as “Healthy Options” as you suggested, the Healthy Option category that we currently offer has been favorably received and fairly successful.”

So, if any of you have further ideas for menu items that would be easy to prepare and store in their small kitchen spaces on board the trains, please feel free to contact me (maren@dreamintochange.com) and I will pass them along. A couple of logistical things to keep in mind, if you do want to make such suggestions:

*Items should not need to be fried, because each car has only one surface for frying, and they want to be respectful by not potentially “contaminating” vegan food items by cooking them on the same surface with meat.

*Anything that would appeal equally to non-vegans and vegans alike would be great; in the past, the vegan options they tried were not ordered enough to avoid spoilage. Potential for spoilage must be kept to a minimum in order for these new menu options to succeed.

Thanks again to all of you who followed this campaign, signed the petition, shared it via social media, and/or wrote personal letters to Amtrak staff offering encouragement and support. We approached this campaign in a persistent, positive, respectful, and collaborative way, and I am absolutely thrilled about this outcome. And, I’m already dreaming up some trips to take on the train next year!

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Portland workshop: Effective communication skills for vegans & vegetarians

2 Comments / Animal rights, Life coaching for a better world, Nonviolent Communication, Uncategorized, Veganism, Workshops / By / November 17, 2014 / , , , , ,

Vegetarian-Thanxgiving-dinnerThe fall and winter holiday season is upon us.

Vegan/vegetarian advocacy (or even simple social “defense”) can be challenging throughout the year. But when turkey and ham dinners with family, friends, or coworkers start happening, it can be especially stressful and frustrating.

Whether you expect to be dodging snide remarks or jokes from relatives around the turkey, or you’d like to talk persuasively about veg*anism to your co-celebrants to encourage others to give it a try, this workshop can help. We’ll be talking about using NonViolent Communication (NVC)* tools to build connection, rather than divisiveness, when talking about these charged topics.

We won’t be talking about fact-based, point-by-point rebuttals to anti-veg*n statements, since there are plenty of online resources for that. We’ll be talking instead about how to get in touch with our own feelings and needs around animal rights, environmental concerns, and/or health, and conveying them–if and when we choose to–in a way that is more likely to encourage openness in our listeners, rather than argument or defensiveness. The goal of the workshop is to increase the potential effectiveness of our persuasive conversations, while also decreasing our risk for the anger, bitterness, depression, and burnout that sometimes go along with living by a certain set of beliefs that many of our loved ones may not share.

The venue is small, so attendance will be capped at six participants.  There are two events: November 22 and December 13.

*Disclaimer: I am not a certified NVC instructor. However, I have been involved in studying, using, and facilitating the learning of NVC for the past twelve years, in a variety of online and in-person capacities.