Eating at a Meeting

How an Austin Woman Farman is Reshaping the Hospitality Food Supply

Anamaria Gutiérrez is 23 seasons into running Este Garden, a women-powered, one-third-acre urban farm in East Austin growing vegetables, herbs, edible flowers, and fruit and nut trees for four restaurants: Suerte, Este, Bar Toti, and Nixta Taqueria. Her path to the garden ran through a UT Austin business degree, a farmers market coordinator role, a farm fellowship, her own market food business, and a direct pitch to restaurant owners to let her build edible gardens on their properties. In this episode, Tracy talks with Anamaria about what it means to grow culturally significant food for chefs who care — going to pre-shift to discuss seeds and taste-test new harvests, running a volunteer program that passes farming knowledge forward, and keeping urban green space open and accessible to the whole community. They also get into the harder questions: what it takes for women and young farmers to access land, what cooperative models can do for food system resilience, and what event and hospitality professionals genuinely misunderstand about the people who grow their food. Farmers and event pros have more in common than most people think — long days on their feet, weather upending months of planning, needing a village to make it work. This conversation is a reminder that the best food experiences start with knowing who grew what's on the plate.

Local Ingredients Matter: Journey of Food from Farm to Event Buffet

It started as a kitchen garden. Nine acres. A favor from her husband. Today, Green Door Gourmet is 350 acres of certified organic farmland on the Cumberland River — one of the largest organic operations in Tennessee — growing 80 kinds of fruits and vegetables, 80 flower varieties, and 25 specialty herbs, including Southern heirloom varieties that most event menus have never seen. Sylvia Harrelson Ganier is its President, and Chief Farm Operator (CFO). She is also the former chef and owner of CIBO, a Nashville restaurant she built before she ever picked up a trowel. She knows both sides of the table. On this episode of Eating at a Meeting LIVE, Sylvia talks about what it takes to feed a city — and what the meetings and events industry gets wrong about food sourcing. She is a past President of Les Dames d'Escoffier International's Nashville Chapter, a member of the James Beard Foundation, Chair of the Davidson County Agricultural Extension Board, and a speaker at the USDA Women in Agriculture convening. Her farm welcomes 85,000 visitors a year, including 5,000 school children who pick strawberries for the first time. The food on your event menu has a story. This episode is where it starts.

How a FarmHER Feeds Music City: Bloomsbury Farm's Impact on Nashville Conferences & Catering

What does it actually take to grow the food that ends up on a hotel banquet table or a farm-to-table dinner menu? Lauren Palmer has spent 17 years answering that question one harvest at a time. Lauren is the owner and farmer behind Bloomsbury Farm, a USDA Certified Organic operation on more than 400 acres outside Nashville, Tennessee. She grows vegetables, fruits, sprouts, microgreens, mushrooms, edible flowers, herbs, and wheatgrass — and she supplies it all to local restaurants, grocers, CSA subscribers, and guests at the farm's own events and private dinners. In this episode, Tracy sits down with Lauren to talk about the real supply chain behind event menus: what organic certification means in practice, how seasonality shapes what's actually available to caterers and chefs, why regenerative agriculture is the next frontier, and what it means to run both a working farm and a hospitality venue under one roof. Lauren also shares her philosophy on community, food transparency, and why she believes the best thing a planner or chef can do is get to know their farmer personally. If you're designing menus, sourcing ingredients, or telling the food story of your destination — this episode is your invitation to start at the source.

Why Sustainable Event Menu Design Starts Outside the Kitchen

What if the most interesting ingredient at your next event was already growing just outside the venue? I've been thinking about this lately — and then Lotta Giesenfeld Boman introduced me to Lisen Sundgren, and honestly, she made it impossible to think about anything else. Lisen is my guest this week on Eating at a Meeting Podcast LIVE — and she is the perfect person to kick off Women's HERstory Month as our very first honoree. She is a Swedish herbalist, forager, and author based in Stockholm, but joining me from Nepal. She has spent more than 30 years teaching chefs, curious eaters, and anyone who will listen about wild edible plants — the ones that have shaped human diets forever and that most of us walk past every single day without a second glance. She has foraged for some of Stockholm's most celebrated restaurants and worked with Sigtunahöjden Hotel & Conference to weave local wild plants right into their menus. Not as a gimmick. As a genuine expression of place. And that is exactly what so many of us are chasing when we plan events, right? A menu that actually means something. Food that tells guests where they are. Lisen also leads foraging walks and forest baths as part of conferences and retreats. Fun! There is real responsibility here, too. Safe identification, sustainable harvesting, knowing what you are serving and why — Lisen takes all of that seriously, and we are going to talk about it. I promise this one will change how you look at the landscape around your next venue. 🌿

Taste of Place: How to Use Event F&B to Celebrate Local Culture

What if your event menu was the most powerful branding tool your destination has? In this episode, Tracy is joined by Erik Wolf, Founder and Executive Director of the World Food Travel Association and the pioneer behind the global "Taste of Place" movement. We talk about why food and beverage should no longer be treated as a banquet line item—but as the way destinations, hotels, and convention centers express identity, protect culture, and drive measurable economic impact. Erik shares insights from the 2026 Taste of Place Report and explains how culinary heritage, terroir, ethical eating, and storytelling are reshaping tourism—and what that means for meetings and events. If you're a: • Destination marketing organization trying to differentiate your city • Hotel or convention center leader looking to move beyond generic banquet menus • Event planner wanting your program to actually reflect where it's hosted This conversation will challenge how you think about menu design, sourcing, storytelling, and guest engagement. Because when attendees travel for a conference, they don't just want to learn. They want to understand where they are. And sometimes, the fastest way to create a sense of place… is through what's on the plate.