The generational gap in my family isn't really about tofu or tempeh — it's about who earned the right to change without apology and who still owes the world an explanation.
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Last Thursday, my six-year-old grandson asked me to pass the nutritional yeast at dinner — casually, the way you'd ask someone to pass the salt. He sprinkled it over his pasta like he'd been doing it his whole life, because he has. His older sister was already halfway through her second helping of the lentil bolognese I make every week, talking about something that happened at school, not even registering the meal as unusual. To them, this is just what food looks like at Grandma's house. There's no label on it. No disclaimer. No asterisk.
Two days later, I went out to lunch with my daughter. We were at a restaurant — one of those places with a menu the size of a novella — and when I asked the server about the vegan options, my daughter jumped in before he could answer. "My mom's vegan," she said, with that particular tone I know too well. Half explanation, half apology. As if I'd just announced I was about to do something mildly embarrassing and she wanted to get ahead of it.
I didn't say anything. I ordered the roasted vegetable plate and a side salad, no cheese. But I sat with that moment for the rest of the afternoon. I'm still sitting with it now.
The Apology That Isn't Really About Food
Here's what I've learned after being vegan for several years now — and after writing about my decision to go vegan at 68 — the food is never really the issue. The food is the visible thing, the tangible thing, the thing people can point to and negotiate around. But underneath the menu substitutions and the "Is there dairy in this?" questions, there's something much deeper happening. There's a negotiation about identity. About permission. About who in the family gets to become someone new and who has to keep explaining why.
My daughter loves me. I know this in my bones. She calls every Sunday. She sends photos of the kids. She drove fourteen hours to be with me after my second knee replacement. But when we're in public and the subject of my eating comes up, something shifts. She becomes the translator between me and the world, smoothing over my choices as if they're a quirk to be managed rather than a decision to be respected.
And here's the thing — she doesn't do this with her children. When her youngest announced he didn't want to eat animals anymore last year, she researched plant-based nutrition for kids, bought him a cookbook, and told the school cafeteria. No apology. No explanation beyond the practical. Just action.
The difference isn't the food. The difference is the direction of the change. Children are expected to become. Mothers — especially mothers my age — are expected to have already become. We're supposed to be finished.
Who Gets Permission to Change
There's a concept in family systems psychology that I stumbled across during one of those late-night reading spirals — research on family homeostasis published in the Journal of Family Therapy — that describes how families unconsciously resist change in any member because it threatens the stability of the whole system. When one person shifts, everyone else has to recalibrate. And the person who changed? They become the disruptor, even if the change is quiet, personal, and entirely about their own plate.
I think about this every time my daughter uses that apologetic tone. She's not embarrassed by veganism itself — she serves her kids plant-based meals half the week. She's embarrassed, or maybe unsettled, by the fact that I changed. That the mother she mapped her entire emotional geography around decided to redraw the borders at seventy.
If you've ever been the only vegan or vegetarian in your family, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The way the table goes quiet for half a second when you order. The way someone always says, "Oh, right, I forgot," even though it's been years. The way your choices become a conversation topic for everyone else while you just want to eat your dinner.
But when you're the grandmother — when you're the woman who made the pot roast for thirty Thanksgivings — the disruption feels almost personal to them. As if by choosing differently now, you're retroactively criticizing every meal you ever served. You're not. You're just growing. But growth in a seventy-year-old woman apparently requires more justification than growth in a six-year-old boy.
What My Grandchildren Taught Me About Normal
My grandchildren don't know that cashew cream in pasta is unusual. They don't know that the banana bread I make on Sundays doesn't have eggs in it. They've never tasted the version with eggs, so there's no comparison, no before-and-after, no sense of loss. To them, this is simply bread. This is simply dinner. This is simply what Grandma makes.
I watch them eat without commentary, without performance, without the exhausting ritual of explanation — and I think, this is what it looks like when something is just normal. Not defended. Not justified. Not apologized for. Just lived.
Research on children's food attitude formation shows that kids develop their sense of what's "normal" food primarily through repeated household exposure, not through cultural messaging. What they eat at home becomes their baseline. Everything else is measured against it. My grandchildren's baseline includes roasted chickpeas and coconut yogurt. That's not ideology to them. It's Tuesday.
The generational gap, then, isn't between me and my grandchildren. It's between me and the middle generation — the one that remembers the pot roast, the one that carries the memory of who I used to be and can't quite reconcile it with who I am now.
The Weight of Being the One Who Remembers
I don't blame my daughter. If I'm being honest, I understand her more than she probably realizes. She grew up watching me be one person — dependable, consistent, rooted in routine. I was the mother who made the same seven dinners on rotation for fifteen years while raising two kids alone. I was the woman who never missed a parent-teacher conference, who sewed Halloween costumes at midnight, who kept the household running on fumes and sheer stubbornness. I was, for a very long time, a fixed point in her universe.
And now I'm not fixed anymore. I paint watercolors in what used to be the dining room. I'm learning Italian at seventy. I eat plants and bake bread without butter. I live in Singapore, for heaven's sake. Every one of these changes is a small earthquake in the family story she tells herself about who her mother is.
I've written before about the things adult children wish their parents would stop doing at family gatherings, and I've thought a lot about the reverse — the things parents wish their adult children understood but will never say out loud. One of them is this: we didn't stop being people when we became your parents. We just agreed to pause certain parts of ourselves for a while. And when we unpause — when we finally have the space and the courage to change — it can feel like betrayal to the people who needed us to stay still.
Apology as Control
I want to be careful here, because I don't think my daughter is being malicious. But I've come to understand that apologizing for someone — "My mom's vegan," said with that little laugh — is a form of control. It's a way of framing another person's choice before that person can frame it for themselves. It says, I know this is unusual, and I want you to know that I know. It distances the apologizer from the choice. It says, this is hers, not mine.
A study on identity-based embarrassment in close relationships found that people experience secondhand embarrassment most acutely when a loved one's behavior challenges the social identity they share. My daughter isn't embarrassed by veganism. She's navigating the social cost of having a mother who doesn't fit the expected script — and she's absorbing that cost by becoming the narrator, the explainer, the buffer between me and the world.
The thing is, I don't need a buffer. I spent thirty-two years in a high school classroom. I've survived two knee replacements, a decade of single motherhood, and the slow goodbye of watching my second husband disappear into Parkinson's disease. I can handle a waiter's momentary confusion about the menu.
The Real Gap
The generational gap in my family isn't about food. It's not about whether lentils count as a real dinner or whether nutritional yeast belongs on pasta. It's about something much more uncomfortable — the unspoken family contract that says older women are supposed to stay recognizable. Stable. Done.
My grandchildren never signed that contract. They just see me. They see the woman who makes the food they like, who paints pictures and lets them help, who reads to them before bed. They don't carry a mental file of all the versions of me that came before. They only know this one.
My daughter carries every version. And somewhere in the gap between the mother who made pot roast and the mother who orders the roasted vegetable plate, there's a grief she hasn't named yet. Not for the food — for the certainty. For the predictability. For the version of me that made her world feel stable by never changing.
I understand that grief. I felt something similar when my own mother's hands became too stiff from rheumatoid arthritis to sew, and the woman who had hemmed every dress I ever wore suddenly couldn't thread a needle. It wasn't about sewing. It was about the person I needed her to be becoming someone I didn't recognize.
But here's what I wish I could say to my daughter — really say, not in the careful way we talk around things at restaurant tables. I wish I could tell her that my changing isn't a commentary on who I was. It's an extension of who I've always been: someone trying to figure it out, meal by meal, year by year, doing the best I can with what I know now.
And what I know now is that grandparents who keep evolving — who keep learning and questioning and, yes, changing what's on their plate — aren't disrupting the family. They're showing the next generation that becoming isn't something you finish in your twenties. Or your forties. Or ever.
My grandson asked for the nutritional yeast last Thursday like it was nothing. Because to him, it is nothing. It's just dinner. And my daughter said "My mom's vegan" to a waiter like it was something that needed managing. Because to her, it is something — something she's still processing, still holding, still trying to fit into the story of us.
Both of those things are true at the same time. The gap between them isn't about food. It's about love — messy, complicated, generational love — and the slow, sometimes painful work of letting the people you love become someone new. Even when that person is your mother. Especially when that person is your mother.
