Meet Lianne
In 2013, following a negative travel experience with her family, Lianne founded nonuttraveler.com — an advocacy website for food allergic flyers. Her goal is to increase awareness of the seriousness of life threatening food allergies with an emphasis on air travel. The site provides resources and tools so that food allergic passengers can make informed decisions in choosing airlines and mitigate their risk. Nonuttraveler.com also contains an airline petition drive with more than 90,000 signatures from people all over the world urging action.
Lianne Mandelbaum M.S. P.T. Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons is a prolific food allergy writer. Her writing has been featured in Huffington Post, The Mighty, KevinMD and Allergic Living Magazine, and to date she has published over 40 articles. Her tips for flying with a food allergy were featured in a piece for the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford. Her advocacy has been featured in the The New York Times, Forbes, Condé Nast Traveler, Allergic Living, Yahoo!, Fox NewsHQ, ABC News and CBS News. She was the recipient of the FARE 2013 Leadership Award and 2017 FARE Vision Award. No Nut Traveler was selected as one of the best allergy blogs of 2019 by Healthline.
Lianne is personally committed to raising awareness amongst airlines as well as consumers, to mitigate the risks of flying with a food allergy. She and her son have testified in front of the NJ Senate Transportation Committee. In October of 2014, she presented at the Universal Access in Airports conference sponsored by Open Doors and was able to educate those airlines, FAA, DOT and FAA and many individual airline members in attendance to the dangers of flying with a life- threatening food allergy. She designed a training module that Open Doors now uses in all its CRO (complaint resolution officers) classes specific to the food allergic passenger.
Lianne collects and shares testimonials regarding flying experiences from food allergic families on No Nut Traveler. She shares these testimonials with lawmakers, media, and food allergy advocacy groups and in doing so, hopes to influence the airlines and government to create food allergy airline policies that are fair and evenly promulgated throughout the airline industry. Most recently, her testimonials were the basis of a New York Times piece regarding traveling with a food allergy. There are also links on her site to easily connect people to the DOT (Department of Transportation) and their respective legislators.
Lianne is a member of a FARE led airline coalition formed to present a unified voice regarding the steps that the airline industry can implement to better accommodate passengers with food allergies. She is sought out to participate on advocacy panels to discuss the challenges of flying with food allergies and has served on panels for IFAAA (International Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Alliance), The Food Allergy Fund Summit, and the Mary H. Weiser Food Allergy Center at University of Michigan. She has also been tasked with discussions to stimulate investment in the food allergy research arena and the need for FDA approved treatment options for the food allergy consumer. She is frequently contacted to comment by the press on the topic of flying with a food allergy.
Most recently, Lianne has worked with Interfaith Hospitality Network of Essex County, an organization that houses homeless families in churches and synagogues to help train and educate volunteer coordinators and staff on how to host families who come into the network with food allergies. In addition to her advocacy work, Lianne also serves as the co-chair of FARE’s New York Food Allergy Ball, helping to raise funds in support of FARE’s mission.