Dear Richard,
Our teenage daughter has gone vegan. I respect her right to make that choice, and I understand her reasons for making it, but it has come with a side order of moralising preachiness, garnished with plenty of eye-rolling and tuts whenever my husband and I eat meat or dairy.
I realise this isn’t a cookery column – and I know a couple of vegan Asian-inspired dishes, and a few pasta staples – but my husband and I don’t wish to join our daughter in her blanket ban on all things non-plant-based. And we rather resent being made to feel as though we are personally responsible for imminent planetary collapse whenever we tuck into a sausage in our daughter’s presence. What can we do to make this situation work? (Our daughter’s cookery skills are negligible, by the way – plus it’s a smallish kitchen and I would not relish having to share it every evening.)
— Mary, via telegraph.co.uk
Dear Mary,
Personally, I would see this as a golden opportunity to teach your daughter one of life’s most important guiding principles: ‘live and let live’. (Which is pretty much what’s at the core of veganism anyway, isn’t it?) Of course, it’s any self-respecting, stroppy, angst-ridden and self righteous adolescent’s duty to sneer at and judge their parents.
I can see you have a nicely grounded sense of humour about that and you mustn’t lose it, Mary, whatever the provocation. Teenagers can’t help themselves: it’s a rite of passage. I blush now to remember the things that I contemptuously told my own father about his Brylcreemed short-back-and-sides, when I was a trendily hirsute 16-year-old. So I have no intention of providing you with a suggested ‘blended’ nightly family menu that covers all vegan and non-vegan bases.
Your daughter is simply going to have to accept she lives in a meat-eating house. No one’s stopping her from making her own choices, but she has no right to inflict them on you or deliver eye-rolling moral judgment. Tell her she’s being a bore and if she tries that on in her friends’ homes or when she’s at uni, she’ll get very short shrift indeed.
I have an in-law who is a life-long vegetarian and when she joins us for big family Christmas dinners I’m happy to cook her a separate lunch. But I’d be extremely displeased if the rest of us were given grief for tucking into our turkey while she tackled her tofu. And she wouldn’t dream of doing it. If your daughter finds any of the above hard to swallow – pun intended – tell her to make her own dinner. If her cooking skills are negligible, this is a chance for her to improve them, isn’t it? Good luck!
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