Diary of a Green Wedding #2: How much is that organic wedding cake in the window?

When John mentioned the idea of an organic wedding cake, I admit I rolled my eyes.  I'm a bit, shall we say, fiscally conservative, to begin with, and never really had the girlish daydreams about a big wedding (certainly far less than he does!) so the first thing I thought was, how much more is this dratted cake going to cost now?  I'd seen the cakes in the bakery windows and instinctively guessed that, like the dress, anything that single-use was going to be expensive.  Yes.  Top Hat Cakes, the first Soil Association approved wedding cake maker, charges £60 for their simplest 30 serving, and it goes up to £800 for their most elaborate 200 serving cake.  As I complained about the dress, I could get quite a nice new MacBook Pro for that price.  I am sure it is fabulous, life-changing cake.  I am not casting aspersions on those of you who feel a wedding is important enough to merit £800 for one cake alone.  But I did have to think about it for a while before I came around to believing it was indeed a good idea - not just the cake, but doing all the food with organics.

I have a whole raft of chemical sensitivities and food intolerances - so many that I often just give up on observing them and take my lumps, because the hassle involved in avoidance often seems (though never truly is) comparable to the illness provoked by exposure. My wedding day is a day where I enter into a life-altering contract and I should be clear-headed for the experience. While this applies especially to me, I think it has general meaning as well. We don't know what subtle effects a lot of chemicals and processed foods have on our characters - unless we cut them out and see what happens. The wedding day is about change and renewal; there is no better day to make the extra effort to go clean, especially now, with organics increasingly available. Hang the extra expense; you only get married once (or twice, in my case). [GT]

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