Sam is a college student who only ate foods from the paler end of the color spectrum for the first nineteen years of his life.  These included bread, pasta, sugar, rice and milk.  For protein, he might have added chicken.  The greens, reds, oranges and browns were not consumed.  As his parents, we were initially alarmed and willing to fight to get a vegetable or fruit onto his plate.  However, he was a third child, and we were relatively older parents and, as far as battles worth fighting go, our stamina did not match his stubbornness.

We sent him off to college happy that his diet was possibly the worst of his defects.  We hoped he might learn to diversify his diet just a little bit before he graduated.  Little did we imagine that he would return home after just one semester a changed person.  He blew out our food budget by requesting salmon and swordfish.  He asked for sushi at lunch.  For breakfast, he turned down chocolate chip pancakes, much to my dismay, in favor of crepes.

When we suggested dinner at a standard chain restaurant one evening, he pled for Indian buffet and then regaled us at length with the relative merits of tandoori chicken versus curried lamb.  When he craved take-out from the Turkish place in town, we knew something had happened, but what?  He certainly could not be pregnant.

It turns out that Sam has a girfriend named Bonnie.  Bonnie is
Korean.  As far as she knows, Sam has always been an open-minded gourmand and he told us he would not mind if we did not emphasize his true history too much when we met her.  She brought kimchi and sea-weed with her as a gift and he pled with his eyes, figuratively, at least, for us to shut up and chow down.  We did, with mixed results.  Now my wife sometimes chooses to snack on sea-weed.  I still stick with the potato chips.

Anyway, Sam got his comeuppance at New Years.  He was invited to Bonnie’s house for a family dinner and she asked him what he would like her mother to make.  Instead of naming a favorite he said that Bonnie’s mom could make something “interesting.”  Hmmm… that may have been a mistake.  She chose to make a highly seasoned octopus.  Our son dutifully ate, so besot with affection was he.  Then he came home after midnight and consumed the biggest bowl of Cheerios I have ever seen.

The traditional assumption is that the way to a man’s hearrt is through his stomach.  In Sam’s case, however, the way to his stomach may be through his heart.