Seattle, Washington - Bastyr University - 19th Annual Herb and Food Fair

In June 2017, I will be starting my Secretary position with Dietitian Integrative Functional Medicine and I had a excellent opportunity to go to Seattle, Washington for a very important leadership meeting. While I was there I had the chance to go the 19th Annual Herb and Food Fair at Bastyr University. This a free festival that brings thousands of visitors and the theme for this year's event is "Plant as Partners: grow, adapt, transform.”

Some of the festival activities included educational speaker, workshops, cooking demonstrations from nutrition and botanical medicine experts, nutritious and delicious homemade food, tours of the Medicinal Herb Garden, guided walks through the surrounding woods, plant sale with medicinal and culinary plant starts from Bastyr's organic garden, live music and entertainment.

This fair is run by student-run fair, local entrepreneurs and experts in health, wellness, farm-to-table food, and natural medicine will offer wisdom and hands-on learning activities.

After going to the Annual Herb and Food Fair, I also had a chance to go to the Poppy's restaurant later that night.

It is a new style of dining where Thali,” a platter served to each guest holding a variety of small dishes with highlighting seasonal ingredients, fresh herbs, and spices. Thali is an Indian-style meal, made up of a selection of various dishes, served on a platter. The 'thali' style serving is also popular in Nepal and Bangladesh. It simply means a round platter used to serve food. The idea behind a Thali is to offer all the 6 different flavors of sweet, salt, bitter, sour, astringent and spicy on one single plate (although the latter two flavors are actually forms of chemesthesis). According to Indian food serving customs, a proper meal should be a perfect balance of all these 6 flavors. (Thali - From Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thali).