Chris Offutt's Brain Food

Chris Offutt's “Brain Food” is an abstract short story that highlights the kind of question an adult could never ask. The speaker's seven-year-old son asks him, “If you eat someone's brain, will you get as smart as them?” As the story progresses, the speaker ponders the entire situation and tries to wrap his mind on how the concept of “Brain Food” would work. Although the conflict is practically without tension, the conversation does make the reader consider an impossibility in the real world, and it portrays the theme of the wisdom of children. The source of conflict in this short story arises from the father trying to analyze what his son asked him. The kind of question that considers eating brains is not heard very often in everyday situations, and it is doubtful the father woke up that morning expecting to hear such a convoluted question. He was temporarily satisfied with the answer, “If you ate someone's brain who was dumber than you, would you get dumb?”. Shortly after he reevaluated his answer and was proud of himself because he was able “to maintain the gross lie of childhood – that adults possess a superior intellect.” This is the underlying theme of the entire story. What is noticeable, however, is the fact that the speaker did eat brains before, and despite his beliefs that one
Despite the kid's youth, the son is made to seem smarter than his father. One could say that the kid had more common sense than the dad because he took the first answer, it made sense, and he moved on. The points the father made may have seemed deeper than the son could have analyzed, but the father had learned many things in life with which he could compare his thoughts. The son probably focused on thinking about more prominent questions that could be answered with more thought instead of wasting his time on a question that had one simple