what do you mean “of a certain age”?

The blog theKitchn is a nice resource if you don’t mind getting about twenty posts each weekday. There’s posts on recipes and posts about real-world kitchens, some of them very, very cool. Last week they published a review of Mollie Katzen’s new cookbook, The Heart of the Plate: Vegetarian Recipes for a New Generation.

That’s all well and good, of course. But what rankled me was how the review started:

For people of a certain age, Mollie Katzen’s 1970s hand-drawn and lettered cookbooks were the first place they discovered vegetarian cooking…

“Of a certain age?” I beg your pardon.

To be fair, the review actually continued, “…whether as cooks and parents in the kitchen or as children who were raised on food cooked from [Katzen’s early cookbooks].”

But still.

Actually, Molly’s work did not introduce me to vegetarian cooking. That honor fell to the first edition of Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet, which was first published in 1971, and which I bought probably in the fall of 1974. The original Moosewood Cookbook didn’t come out until 1977. (I know because I went downstairs and checked. Somehow I’ve managed to hang on to my originals of both of those.)

So I guess I’m even older than those “of a certain age” referenced in the review. Well, no matter. I’m happy to be sixty and feel good about it.

But I’m not sure that I like being referred to as being of a certain age.