Photo: Bogdan Sonjachnyj / Shutterstock; Reddit
The best way to save money on catering for your wedding is not having to pay the guests' hospital bills after they get food poisoning.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on May 31, 2023
A woman on Reddit had an argument to settle with her mother, so she posted to the site’s “r/AmItheA--hole” (AITA) forum to see if she was wrong for causing a fuss about her mom’s idea of “saving money” catering food at her own daughter’s wedding.
The 26-year-old woman revealed that when she and her now-husband had gotten married eight months ago, her mom had a bright idea about what to do about the leftover food they had — she froze it, kept it for eight months, and served it to her daughter’s wedding eight months later.
She got into a fight with her mom about serving the 8-month-old food at her sister’s wedding.
After her large wedding eight months ago, she and her husband had a ton of food left over. She claims that this was because her husband’s side of the family is massive, but that many people decided not to go and so they had to have a plan for all of the food they’d have left.
They decided that they would donate all of the leftovers to a soup kitchen that they sometimes worked with — instead, her mother went behind her back and decided to take the food and put it in her garage freezer for safekeeping.
Photo: Dovzhykov Andriy / Shutterstock
“I didn't really know what happened to the food. Until now,” she wrote in the Reddit post. “The ceremony was beautiful, but it was when the buffet was revealed that I noticed something odd. The food looked eerily familiar. Like, identical to what I had for my wedding except for a little more dried out and sad.”
They had opted to let their mom do all of the wedding planning stuff, but she didn’t expect her to bring out 8-month-old food from one daughter’s wedding to her other daughter’s wedding.
“I found an opening and went to ask my mom about it where she happily told me she ‘saved a fortune’ by unfreezing the food from my wedding to serve to the guests now,” she explains. “I was horrified and immediately voiced my concerns about safety.”
Her mom told her that she was being a snob, arguing that the food would have gone to waste if it weren’t for her, but her daughter argued back that it wasn’t going to go to waste — it would have gone to a soup kitchen.
Photo: Ground Picture / Shutterstock
She immediately warned her sister about the 8-month-old food when she found out.
“I didn't want to make a scene, but was worried about people getting sick so snuck off to see my sister,” she continued. “She was horribly embarrassed — mentioned that mom said something about saving money but didn't question it because she didn't want to foot the bill [as] I had. She told me not to eat the food and thanked me for the warning.”
From then on, she and her husband decided to go around the wedding warning people to be wary about the food and claimed that the rest of the night went on without a problem. That is, until after the ceremony.
“My mom caught some flack for being cheap, but I've also been catching heat,” she writes. “Some of our relatives have been saying that I intentionally made my family look bad and that the food was fine as it was frozen and then defrosted for the wedding.”
Photo: LElik83 / Shutterstock
But as one comment intelligently pointed out, this was highly dangerous and could have harmed many of the guests at the wedding.
“It's not that it was stored frozen for eight months; it's that it sat on a buffet table for god knows how long at your wedding, then in your mother's car, before it was frozen,” they wrote. “This is not only tacky but super dangerous.”
It’s safe to say that most people on Reddit agreed that she was not in the wrong and only did what she thought was best for the guests at her sister’s wedding — if only her mother and the rest of her family could see it that way.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.