Have You Rejected Something Because of School Canteen Trauma?

I used to hate spinach with all my heart when I was a child. It often appeared on our school canteen menu as all the experts said kids should be eating spinach. They served it in the form of a brownish green sludge that tasted like misery. Given the choice between this and going hungry, I often chose to go hungry.

When I first tried spinach as an adult I couldn’t believe it was more or less the same dish. Even when cooked, it still had a leafy texture and vivid green color. My roommate seasoned it with salt and garlic that went with it perfectly. In just one day I went from a lifelong spinach hater to a huge spinach fan.

Every now and then I still discover another dish that got ruined for me in school. My husband jokingly says this is school canteen trauma. If my family never cooked something at home, the school canteen was my only reference point for how it should taste like. If they messed it up, I had no idea it could be so much better.

It was my husband who first convinced me that boiled carrots and sunny side up eggs are something worth trying. I only had my first great brussels sprouts a few years ago on a yoga retreat. I’m still yet to find a version of green peas that tastes good, but at least now I’m open to such possibility.

I don’t blame the cooks in our school for ruining these dishes for me. The school canteen lunches were impossibly cheap, and they always had to make a few hundred portions at once. You can’t serve 300 sunny side up fried eggs in an hour without making them all in advance, and they’ll inevitably go dry and stale while reheating.

But knowing how much I hated spinach and brussels sprouts, and how delicious they can be when done skilfully, I often wonder what other great things I must have rejected for only knowing the worst version of them. The church I grew up in had me wallowing in guilt, shame, and self-hatred, could there be more nourishing Christian churches somewhere? Might the law of attraction point to something real that I’ve only seen very poorly described? Could newspaper horoscopes be just the school canteen version of something much deeper? What other things have I rejected thinking that they were dumb and not worth of my time?

I don’t know how many dishes, ideas, tools, or techniques I’ve dismissed that might actually be life-changing for me. Different things work for different people, and I’ll never have enough time to explore every crazy idea I hear. But if eating spinach sounded like a crazy idea to me once, then maybe I don’t have to fully trust my first judgement about all the things that keep showing up in my conversations. If my friends seem to enjoy something that makes no sense to me, it’s possible I’ve only encountered the school canteen version of something much better.