I found this and was wondering if they'd ever be theoretically useful if translated into Esperanto. Considering how easy it is to learn and make decent sentences with a bit of effort, combined with it being unlikely you'd be in a place where you'd need to communicate the fact in Esperanto outside of being a house guest...

Thoughts?

It doesn't look overly useful to me. As you said, being a house guest would be the main situation when you might want this (and presumably you could have contacted your host ahead of time to give your restrictions, if they're severe).

However, it would be useful to bring with you such a card in the language of the place you're visiting. At Esperanto events the people serving the food at a cafeteria or a food stand are likely to be locals and not Esperanto speakers, and I have personally witnessed vegan Esperantists trying to make themselves understood, to ask the contents of the food and determine what they can eat (in places in Eastern Europe that aren't used to encountering vegetarians, let alone vegans).

erinja:It doesn't look overly useful to me. As you said, being a house guest would be the main situation when you might want this (and presumably you could have contacted your host ahead of time to give your restrictions, if they're severe).

However, it would be useful to bring with you such a card in the language of the place you're visiting. At Esperanto events the people serving the food at a cafeteria or a food stand are likely to be locals and not Esperanto speakers, and I have personally witnessed vegan Esperantists trying to make themselves understood, to ask the contents of the food and determine what they can eat (in places in Eastern Europe that aren't used to encountering vegetarians, let alone vegans).

of course, in Bulgaria and Romania (and parts of eastern Slovakia and eastern Poland) you can say you eat like it was Lent all year 'round..........

Yeah, unless you're going someplace where you know for certain that the food is going to be served by Esperantists I think it would make more sense to carry a card that describes your dietary restrictions in pictures. One woman of my acquaintance carries a card with a picture of a mushroom with the international "not" symbol placed over it. She has apparently had some mushroom mishaps at Chinese restaurants in the San Francisco bay area, so I think she's also added the Chinese characters for "no mushrooms" to the card.

Granted, it might be hard to depict "kosher" or "halal" or "no alcohol" this way, and you might have to resort to a whole series of "cow+not", "pig+not", "chicken+not" etc. symbols to make your vegan wishes known.