Sustainable Jewish wedding

ELISHEVA MARGULIES

Eleven months into planning our April wedding, my fiancé and I felt like we should write a book – the ultimate guide to the sustainable Jewish wedding. We dove into the world of wedding planning together, and decided to plan a wedding that would truly reflect us, with our desire to live sustainably and to also fulfil our families’ desire to have a large simchah.

Once we started on our venue search, the next question was obvious – what will we eat? For us, having a vegetarian wedding was of utmost importance. You might remember that Chelsea Clinton served meat at her wedding, although she’s a vegetarian. We fell on the other side of that debate. Why should we serve meat when we wouldn’t eat it ourselves? And along those lines, did we need to have a kosher caterer, or could we have a vegetarian-only wedding and satisfy the needs of most of our guests? But then we fretted – what about our Orthodox guests? What about the fact that it’s a wedding? Shouldn’t it be kosher?

Throughout this process, we experienced the tension between providing for what we felt our community expected, and serving food that mirrored our daily food values. As a natural foods chef, Adamah alumna, lover of local food and preacher of eating healthy cuisine, the process of planning the food for our wedding challenged all of my food values. For a split second, I even considered catering the wedding myself, but then realized that was crazy.

There’s also the cost to keep in mind. Even with a vegetarian wedding, the cost of a kosher caterer in our area was simply astronomical, not to mention complicated by the fact that we refuse to serve foods made with partially hydrogenated oil or high-fructose corn syrup.

From a logistical perspective, we even tried to figure out if we could save the food scraps from the event to compost them on my family’s farm after the wedding. I was hoping that my brother would get the hoop house up and running so that he could grow micro-greens or herbs for use at the wedding, really bringing things close to home.

While my fiancé and I keep what we consider a vegetarian kosher home, not every single item has a hechsher. I don’t check every leaf of every green for bugs, but I do love my greens. Our lifestyle poses a problem for our more religious friends who won’t necessarily eat in our home. So our daily struggle was reflected in our greater decision-making process regarding our wedding.

Ultimately, we settled on a vegan, non-kosher caterer who agreed to work with us. (We ordered a couple of hechshered meals for observant friends.) The menu included a soup and salad (complete with hemp seeds) and a seasonal risotto. We decided to forgo a wedding cake (and donated the money we would have spend to tzedakah) and, instead, had ice cream (both vegan and non).

We also debated kosher or non-kosher wine. Even if you drink non-kosher wine, do you feel that a wedding should only serve kosher wine? What if you could serve organic (but non-kosher) wine – would that change your opinion? Is supporting an organic or biodynamic vineyard more important than supporting a kosher certification?

With every decision, we debated and, in the end, we planned the wedding that my fiancé and I feel reflects us as a couple through and through. And we know our guests won’t go home hungry.

Elisheva Margulies is a natural foods chef and holistic health counselor based in St. Louis, Mo. This article originally appeared on the Jew and the Carrot (blogs.forward.com/the-jew-and-the-carrot), a partnership project of Hazon and the Jewish Daily Forward and is reprinted with permission.

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