A little while back, I was in one of our local independent markets, and a little boy of perhaps three or four years old started to wail with abandon. The man who was with the boy practiced a minute or so of what I thought of as model parenting skills, and succeeded in talking the child down from the heights of his frenzy.

The market is small enough that everyone in it could not help but see and hear the drama that had taken place, so the man felt called upon to let everyone know what had caused it. He said his son had learned the market didn’t have any Brussels sprouts that day.

That’s right, I didn’t say chocolate. I said Brussels sprouts.

Eventually the father left the market with his purchases and with the little boy reassured there would be Brussels sprouts in his near future.

This encounter sent me to the internet to confirm my sense that Brussels sprouts were among the foods most disliked by kids. I found a number of studies which verified that fact. I also found a whole sub-genre of children’s literature dealing with kids’ hatred of Brussels sprouts.

So how come the little boy in the market so loves a food that inspires the opposite emotion in so many other children? To get that answer, I tried to locate the father, but no luck.

My next move was to seek out an expert who might help me account for a child’s passion for sprouts. I didn’t have to look very far. Professor Alissa Nolden of the University of Massachusetts Department of Food Science is a researcher whose areas of expertise include “individual differences in responses to foods.” Fortunately for me, Professor Nolden is not only an accomplished scholar, but someone willing to try to shoehorn her considerable knowledge into a layperson’s brain.

I told her the story of the boy in the market, and she confirmed the degree of his ardor for Brussels sprouts was “pretty rare” in a child, at least in these parts. She said a number of factors could be at play, including genetics and how the Brussels sprouts were prepared.

This reference to food preparation reminded me that in my online Brussels sprouts research, I found a number of recipes, such as: “Try tossing steamed or fried Brussels sprouts in a mustard vinaigrette, with sliced apples and roasted or candied nuts.” Surely such a preparation could come into play in a child’s attitude toward Brussels sprouts, perhaps a classic case of “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down in a most delightful way.”

Whatever the causality of that child’s love of a food a good number of children will eat only under duress, you might wonder why, in a world of so many ponderous happenings, I would dedicate my monthly column to such a subject.

Well, firstly, I’ll offer the sheer unusualness of it. Most anyone who has taken a journalism course is familiar with the axiom “when a dog bites a man, it is not news, but if a man bites a dog, it is.” (Disgusting news, but news nonetheless.)

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I thought what happened in the market was column-worthy because it was a case in point that there is no absolute uniformity, no invariability, about what human beings find to like and love on this earth. And all the better if what one finds to love is, as generations of parents have told their children about Brussels sprouts, “good for you.”

I’ll end by wishing you a holiday season that includes oodles and oodles of Brussels sprouts as part of your festive meals, and may each and every sprout get all the love it deserves.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.