No Show

Months ago, my office scheduled a guest speaker for our Tuesday meeting. She was to present a program yesterday. The speaker was one of our interns in 2008 and her sister is one of our doctors. Monday afternoon I called in a catering order for a luncheon after her presentation. Yesterday morning another of my doctors was opening his email, which he usually never does before work and saw an email from the guest speaker. She said that her son was coming down with something and she would not be able to come. Normally no one on my staff opens email in the morning. They do it midday. I called my boss and related the message about the "no show" and informed her that the catering order was probably started and it would be wrong to cancel it an hour before. The restaurant opens at 11am and the order was to be delivered at noon. We decided to have the luncheon anyway. I told my boss that when the speaker does reschedule, there will be no food served. The speaker never followed up her email with a phone call. Has social etiquette disappeared?