From The Editor

"What should I fix him for lunch?" I asked as Mara headed out the door. She just laughed. "He’ll tell you what he wants," she said. "And when he wants it, too."

Really? At two-and-a-half? At that age, my children were plopped into high chairs around noon—two hours after a mid-morning snack—and served something easy but nutritious. But Alan, who is a cheerful little advertisement for the virtues of a child-rearing style called "attachment parenting," which includes sleeping in your parents’ bed and setting your own schedule, dines in a different style.

He did accept my offer of bananas and hard-boiled eggs for breakfast—as long as he got to peel all the eggshell off himself—but a few hours after that, he led me back to the kitchen, where he grasped the refrigerator door handle and chanted, "Pull, pull, pull!" Finally, he managed to swing the door open; then, puffing and panting, he ran across the room to his little table and chair and dragged the chair over to the refrigerator.

He carefully positioned it in front of the open door, then sat down and surveyed the shelves. Eventually—Mara tells me he sometimes sits there until his lips begin to tremble from the cold—he pointed to a container of yogurt and said, "How about that?" After he polished off the yogurt, it was back to the chair for more deliberation and a second course of string cheese.

That’s how every lunch all weekend was assembled—when he didn’t see what he wanted in the refrigerator, I had to lift him up to look inside the cupboards. But shocking as it was at first, I ended up seeing that it made perfect sense. He happily ate everything he chose, and since Mara and Matt keep mostly healthy food on hand, it was just as nutritious as the sandwiches and warmed-up leftovers I used to make for my children.

I remember skipping home from grade school in our little Illinois town every day for lunch, usually a steaming bowl of Campbell’s Scotch broth soup and chocolate pudding, served by a smiling mother in a 1950s-style apron. Alan’s memories of ripping the paper off string cheese or nibbling on strawberries while chatting with his smiling mother (dressed in yoga pants and a hoodie—no aprons in that house) will probably be just as comforting to him.

Since our city attracts people from all over the world, our collective food memories are richer and more varied than many. I asked some Sarasotans from near and far about the food they loved most as children.