It’s amazing how much talk of vegan weddings Chelsea Clinton’s non-vegan wedding generated.

Since The New York Times, Gawker, Jezebel, Feministe and Vegansaurus! gave their respective takes, a lot of people have been asking me “What does Let Them Eat Meat think about vegan weddings?” Well, the blog has changed over time so I can’t speak for the entire thing, but I can tell you what it thinks now.  

Let them be vegan!

Sure, if I’m at a wedding, I’d rather the reception have meat. But if two vegans are getting married, I expect it won’t. And I can understand why it wouldn’t. 

As a young vegan with Hollywood dreams, I thought I’d force my cast and crew to eat vegan food while they were on set. Of course I expected to have a vegan wedding. Realistically I might have compromised if I’d married an omni, but it would have been a major issue for me. 

Now that I eat meat I can see the other side of it. Vegans believe “vegan food is for everyone” because few people have serious moral qualms with fruits and vegetables. To vegan thinking, then, meat is divisive while vegan food is inclusive. Vegans expect meat eaters to enjoy vegan food as much as they do, not realizing that Morningstar Farms and Daiya have aided and abetted a collapse in their culinary standards. Go to NYC’s Veggie Conquest if you want to see how easy to please vegans are. It’s more of a challenge to appreciate “yummy vegan goodness” when you’re used to animal products and have no moral hang-ups. 

Vegans compare snippy omnivores at a vegan wedding to gentiles complaining about the lack of pork and shellfish at a kosher wedding. That’s not a fair comparison because the kosher wedding can still have chicken, fish, lamb or beef. Going without pork for a celebratory meal is not the same as going without meat all together. Sorry tempeh, tofu, TVP and seitan, but meat is tastier and more satisfying. 

On the other hand, vegans think meat is slavery! Yet meat eaters want vegans to cater to their immoral craving for dead animal chunks? Would you expect abolitionists getting married in the pre-Civil War South to have a few slaves working the reception just to appease their demanding racist relatives? Of course it’s an outrageous comparison, but that’s how many ethical vegans see it (your eyes can open to some truly offensive comparisons once you accept anti-speciesist logic). What upset meat eating guests at vegan weddings need to understand is that vegans think meat is evil. Not all of them would put it that way, but at the very least most vegans would classify meat as “very bad.” Why should they taint their joyous occasion because you think lasagna tastes better with a layer of ground up sentient beings? 

Ethical vegans are morally opposed to contributing to the death of animals. If they have a wedding and serve meat, well, they’re as blood-drenched as Carrie on prom night. Now that I think about it, I’d feel kind of bad if I went to a wedding between two vegans and there was meat. No doubt I’d eat it, but I wouldn’t like that the bride and groom were probably feeling like they’d let the animals down on their big day.   

Vegans rightly point out that it’s only one damn meal without meat. But then that logic backfires when meat eaters choose not to have a vegetarian option at their wedding. Except for vegans it’s worse, since that means one damn meal without food at all. Granted, in both scenarios it’s the vegans causing trouble in some way (to themselves in the case of the omnivore wedding and to omnivores in the case of their vegan wedding). So in a sense it’s always the vegans’ fault. 

Plus the “only one meal” argument does downplay how dreadful weddings can be if you have nothing to look forward to at the reception. Nobody really cares that two people are promising to stay together forever. Okay, if it’s your close friends or family members you do. But for many of the guests, weddings are nothing without food and alcohol. As the wedding approaches, they’re mostly thinking about gorging themselves and getting drunk. I know there are exceptions because I am one, but come on. Bad food is much worse at wedding.

Still. When vegans are getting married, you’ve got to let their morals come first. 

The last wedding I went to was a vegan wedding. I expected this because the two people getting married were vegan. However, they never at any point said “all the food would be vegan.” There was no talk of food at all beforehand. My guess was that it would be vegan, but I couldn’t be sure that their parents hadn’t pulled a meaty coup.

I was excited about the wedding no matter what, but the slight hope that there might be meat made me look forward to it even more. It was only once I got into the buffet line that I learned corpses hadn’t made the cut. I was disappointed, but there was a decent salad and I got full enough. It was about half an hour of meatless eating and then it was time to dance. 

The worst thing about a vegan wedding for meat eaters is all the time spent anticipating a lackluster meal. So vegans, keep your weddings vegan. Just don’t tell us beforehand.