My five-year-old son had a turquoise tongue the other day. “I don’t know,” was his response to my inquiry into the cause. Must have been a marker, I thought. No problem. Crayola markers are sure to be safe for kids. I thought the same when his tongue turned up Thomas the Tank Engine recall red the next day.

On the third day, I walked barefoot in the kitchen and stepped in grit. I discovered a fine layer of green granulated sugar left over from Christmas baking covering the floor. Aha! I thought. Maybe there is some of me in him. On the outside, my son is a spitting image of his dad—blond, fair, blue-eyed with the competitive, silly personality to match. Even people who have never met my husband comment that my son must look like his dad. So, unlike anyone I know, finding a heavy dusting of green sugar spread across the kitchen floor thrilled me. My son is a sprinkle sneaker just like his mom.

I always have attributed my insatiable sweet tooth and peculiar palette to nurture rather than nature. I blame the sparse access to regular treats with binge opportunities only at holidays. My mom, a master sweet tooth in her own right, kept no treats in the house for fear of gobbling them herself. Only at holidays did we have unfettered access to candy corn, ginger bread men, chocolate covered cherries and marshmallow bunnies. Therefore, I joined the parenting school of thought that says limiting something too much makes it forbidden fruit—something to be sought after and over-consumed. My son has regular access to a wide variety of foods, including cookies, ice cream, cupcakes, candy … everything except my secret stash of sour gummy worms, Atomic Fire Balls and other delightfully immature confections.

As I swept the green sugar into the dustpan, I realized I might be wrong. Maybe it wasn’t the sparse access to treats

I had growing up. Maybe it’s genetic. Some Jacobson further down the Swedish family tree probably guzzled lingonberry jam straight from the jar or dipped her meatballs in syrup.

As seems to be the case for my son, cookie decorations served as a staple secret food of my youth, along with contraband stolen from the pantry: Jell-O, Tang, Hawaiian Punch powders by the spoonful, canned pie cherries and bowls of brown sugar and peanut butter. My son has some very unconventional food tendencies beyond his sprinkle sneaking. When he was two, I set him on a bar at a wedding. I chatted with a friend for a bit then turned to face him and found that he’d raided the bartender’s garnish bins. He grinned at me with a mouthful of maraschino cherries and lemon wedges while wiggling green olive-topped fingers.

Nowadays he’d eat his weight in parmesan cheese if I let him. He likes prunes dipped in lime juice and sprinkled with salt and cinnamon—a recipe of his own creation that is admittedly quite tasty. French fries dipped in yellow mustard. Pie dough, plain. Pasta with so much balsamic vinegar it looks like soup. Half and half straight from the little plastic cup he found floating in icy water on the table of a diner. Marshmallow fluff between peanut butter cookies.

As a child, I had my own gloriously weird repertoire of favorites. Mustard, mayonnaise and peanut butter sandwiches. Oreo cookies squirted with cheese from a can. I’d do my level best to get a hold of one of my grandma’s cinnamon rolls, but only before it hit the oven.

So it’s nice to see some of me in my son. And I know it is me. Tuna casserole, spaghetti and meatballs, and pork chops and applesauce rank top in his father’s traditional childhood favorites. These cozy dishes might have delighted my husband, but they are much too mundane for our little offbeat gourmand. His avant-garde food gene is clearly from my side of the family. He also has an innate and unwaveringly devious determination to unearth whatever his palate craves. Now I must decide, should I nurture this nature or try to steer him toward more traditional choices?

I think I’ll let my rascally sprinkle sneaker run with it. My kitchen is his to explore and enjoy. But alas, with a mother who makes her own stock, he will never know the savory delight of scraping his teeth across a beef bouillon cube.