The Weddening Part Two: Food

This is the second and last part of the "I GOT MARRIED" posts, but the food-stuff merited it's own thing... So here ya go. 

Due to concerns about allergies, we were pretty unwavering on wanting to know exactly what ingredients would be used in the foods.  We asked to meet with the chef, which is a generally normal wedding thing anyway… 

We were told “Oh, there’s no reason to be concerned!”
So we reiterated that despite that, we would feel a lot better speaking directly to the chef.

The response was, “Do you want to call other people with different allergies who ate here?”

No, we don’t.  We want to talk to the chef about the ingredients and OUR list of allergens.  Like, great that you didn’t kill a completely different person in a totally different scenario?
This went on for months.

It was a clusterfuck of upsetting.

Finally, we got a, “I gave your list to the chef, and there are some problems.  Can we do a meeting?”

The.  Fuck.  

Did I mention we didn’t like our wedding planner lady? 

Have I mentioned (a thousand times) that I’m recovering from a food phobia and I am pretty damn delicate about not wanting to be poisoned from my many REAL allergies?

Just picking the menu was a bigger hassle than it should have been.  She told us to circle everything we could possibly want on the menu, to then edit down later.  

So we did that.  

She panicked and said, “You chose a lot of stuff guys…”  Right.  Like you said.  We were not intending to actually eat all that.  (Also, take the fucking chocolate fountain off of the list for the tenth time, you lunatic.)

The first chef wasn’t a bad guy, and I’d like to say he made great food, but I’ll never know.  

He insisted he would only make a special plate, instead of altering his recipes for the people paying him to cook.  “So yours will be terrible and tasteless”   

 …Right.  

That tasting was a lot of everyone around me explaining how I can’t eat ANYTHING and must be SO MISERABLE ALL THE TIME.  Mind you, I did this to myself in one regard.  

When I listed off my food allergies, I included things that will straight up kill me if ingested, right along with stuff I’m just intolerant to, like things that make me a little physically uncomfortable, thinking that I’d rather not run to the bathroom at my own wedding.  

I included soy on this list though it probably shouldn't have been there.  I used to have a HUGE PROBLEM with soy way back in the day.  Not a hive-gonna-die reaction, but a running-to-the-bathroom-and-praying reaction.  Now, I can generally eat things that contain soy.  I really can.  REALLY, I can.  

I’m still not going to eat a brick of tofu any time soon, but if something is made with soybean oil, I’m totally fine. 

But, yeah.    

I didn’t correct anyone when this was treated like my actually dangerous allergies, because it was a matter of principle and trust.

If I now let this go, what else would they think was okay?  

See, again, we weren’t originally even going to get a tasting of any kind, because we didn’t count as important. 

  

This woman even said OUT LOUD, “We aren’t making the margins that we typically do.”  Like… did she… Did she think we don’t know what that means? 

  

What?

So that first chef, what we have is a super-hip know-it-all who apparently isn’t actually that talented if he CAN make separate food just for me special, but can’t figure out how to make it delicious, so I’ll get a special plate.  

I didn’t want a special plate.  I wanted to feel normal.  For one damn day of my life.  I wanted hope that I might have that feeling more than once.  

I had been dealing with this food phobia for over three years.  

I just wanted to feel like a normal person during my own goddamn wedding.  I just wanted to feel safe AND be able to eat what everyone else was eating without fear.  We didn’t understand why we couldn’t just have what he put in front of me for everyone else. 

We were eventually asked to do a 2^nd meeting with no further explanation where we were introduced to the NEW chef who had no problem making the entire menu without using anything off the allergen list.

And the desserts!  Trying to find a nut-free cake was a giant pain in the ass.  Every place we found that said “nut free” was also everything-else free, and so would wind up using other things that make me sick, if not could kill me.   

Totally unhelpful.   

A lot of those places also seemed to be doing that out of a fad-thing rather than with allergies actually in mind.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Finally, I found a freaking “Living With Allergies” help board online, which led to finding a woman in the area who works right out of her kitchen.   

She was able to provide us with a nut-free cake (bottom layer was chocolate with strawberry filling, the middle was a yellow cake with Oreo filling, and the top was chocolate with a mixture of the two fillings).  

Of course, we were meant to pick up and drive this cake to the wedding, so admittedly that was harrowing.  It was a lot of screaming and “WHY IS THE ROAD BUMPY??” but the cake was perfectly fine.  

Given that this cake was a post-apocalyptic cake… with flowers?  We were a little confused when we first picked it up.  

But I love the topsy turvy shape, and that’s all that really mattered to me in the end. 

This same woman was able to make vegan cupcakes, gluten free cupcakes, AND sugar free cookies for all our guest’s dietary needs. 

 

We had the place make special labels for each item, both here and for the buffet.   

They stated what the item is and what ingredients were used.   Super useful right?  

Except for that one where they totally failed.  

Not entirely getting the point led to our planner-lady interrupting me while I was getting food to say, “OH you don’t want that!”   

At first I was like, “Is this bitch calling me fat on my goddamn wedding day???”  Turn out, there was a last minute change to the menu, and one item had… something? 

Dude, if you can’t do what I asked you to do, just cut it out.  DO NOT endanger people by having the once useful sign now functionally worthless.  

Given my food-phobias that I was really super determined not to freak out about that particular day *BREATHES* I was furious, and scared.  I managed to still eat macaroni, but I didn’t actually eat anything else.  Anything.  Because she ruined it.  She burned my hard earned trust away.  It was gone.

…

Okay, “ruined” might take it a bit far.  The party was still awesome and continues to be talked about as, “The Best Wedding Ever” so suck it!
We even got to dress the bartenders up as mad scientists!  Did I mention that?

Every wedding has those oh-my-god-no moments, and ours went pretty well by the end.

Sooo I would still recommend the venue, warts and all.