Why does it bother me when people try new things?

OK, I basically ate the same thing for every meal from birth - when I left home. My parents would serve 1. Meat (beef/pork/liver/chicken) with 2. Overboiled vegetables (usually carrots) and then 3. Starch (always potatoes, either mashed or just chunks, boiled). NO salt or pepper garnished this, and certainly no herbs. The parents were very rigid re: food and blankly refused eat any 'foreign muck', so this was all there was left. As a person who seems to spend most of the time feeling hungry and thinking about eating (or trying not to think about it), it was dismal. Having macaroni cheese at a friend's house at nine was an amazing, exotic experience for me. You can imagine what happened when I first tried indian at thirteen. Or chinese food (never allowed in our house) at sixteen. I was twenty one when I first had hummus, or tried thai food. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't even know Thai people had their own specific food until I moved to London. Or turkish food. I could go on... Every time I tried new food there was something delicious. My childhood eating habits were borne of poverty and a weird kind of family food racism. I really didn't like what we ate, mostly, and am glad I'll (hopefully) never again eat 'crab flavoured paste' on a sandwich, have a meal I boiled in a bag, or eat cheap beef at the height of the BSE panic (a girl in the year above at school died of CJD). So eating lots of different foods is a freedom and pleasure to me. I'm not sure it contributes to being any healthier (I still have a sweet tooth and neither pasta or curry is diet food). I do know that as someone who grew up poor, all the food/weight evangelising that goes on now really disgusts me. Yes yes, we should all eat organic and locally and not relish tasty food because that's lower class and uneducated and scummy, we should eat only for health. I think we've all been to that vegan cafe where everything tasted like cardboard and sand and was just a punishment, and you get the feeling the owners/patrons like it that way, it makes them feel pious. And if this is how you've experienced 'healthy eating' I don't blame you for clinging to your mashed potatoes and meatloaf, but you know what? Healthy food, vegetarian food, and vegan food an all be bloody delicious if you want it to be. You can eat healthy without being denied pleasure. And you can even allow yourself unhealthy food from time to time as part of an overall healthy diet. Being denied things for abitrary reasons like 'because it's not english' led me to believe I was being held back from being the real me, the me who decides for myself what food I do and don't like. So I've never felt like I'm betraying my core identity by trying new things (in fact, the more new experiences I have the closer I get to revealing myself). If you've internalised these foods as anchors of your identity, I can see how it would be unnerving. But you should know that all of your actions and choices are authentically 'you'.

It's not really about the food, is it? Maybe your feeling has to do with devaluation. That is if you do different things, like different things, move on to different things, it's as if the original things are then somehow less valuable. Put in an extreme way, that the person you were who did/liked the old things (and the people who still do) are also therefore lesser than?

You mention in your previous questions that you're 27. For me, that was around the time when all of the people I went to high school and college with seemed to have turned into adults, not just overgrown teenagers with incomes. They had somehow developed careers and goals and complex opinions and other adult things, and I realized I wasn't anywhere near that grown-up. I think the late twenties are when a lot of people first start to fully appreciate the passage of time and the evolution of the people and places around you. It can be unsettling, because you feel like you haven't changed and perhaps you're afraid of doing so, and because the things and people you assumed were constant are now moving away from you. It could be quinoa, or skinny jeans, or the next trendy social network, and so on. People trying new things can imply that the old things are disappearing, and not only is there a chance you might lose a source of familiarity and comfort, but there's a chance you might become out of touch. Also - not to freak you out - but 27 marked the age when I started to lose several family members I assumed would be around forever, and that really shook me. I think it's fairly common for people in their mid-to-late twenties to be confronted with mortality for the first time. Possibly you're afraid of the idea of people rejecting what they've learned from their parents because you're afraid of losing yours?

Do you feel some sense of nostalgia or perhaps a sense of a chasm opening up between you and your family or your past when you make changes? But being an adult is about establishing your own identity which can include choosing to do things differently from the past and not following expected norms. Could you be finding that disconcerting? Choice can be a bit scary, especially if you are doing things that are quite different to your family's way or expectations. Also, you are making assumptions about others that may not be true. My parents used to make their own tofu and bake their own bread every day and give me a glass of freshly squeezed juice every morning. So now when I do those sorts of things, it reaffirms my childhood, not dismisses it. I am fairly certain I was never served meatloaf as a child.

The first false assumption you're making is that everyone had roughly the same childhood as you. Not everyone grows up on meatloaf and mashed potatoes. The second one is that all our traditions and wants and likes originate with our parents, or that they aren't constantly changing even while we're still kids. But those are all only tangential to the question of why does the idea of people changing bother you; everyone's getting hung up on your food example but that doesn't really seem to be what you're asking about. I can't tell why it bothers you. I mean, I could guess that it's because you're young enough not to have gone through many major changes in personality or view or to have ventured very far into "adult" life but old enough that some of your friends have started doing so, or that you're otherwise starting to be confronted with the reality that things are going to change, and change is always intimidating. But that would be just a guess. I can tell you why it shouldn't bother you, though. The older I get the more I realize that I am a completely different person from who I was five years ago, or ten years or twenty or, god, thirty. Not that I have different tastes or habits, but that I am literally not the same person. If I were magically transported back into the body I had when I was twenty, and the lifestyle I had when I was twenty, I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to play along. I'm not that guy anymore. I wouldn't want to be that guy anymore. The way my parents ran their household had a huge influence on me when I lived there, and for a little while afterwards -- but by this point it's more or less completely irrelevant. It would be weird if it were still a strong influence: I've spent more time not living there than I ever spent living there. It's not that we spend childhood growing up, and then we're adults who stay that way until we turn into old people. Nobody is that static; we continue changing and learning and growing and being influenced by our environment all the way through. That's a good thing. It'd be impossibly boring otherwise.

I frequently feel the same way, and it's always because somewhere deep down I feel (just like likeso's answer) a rejection of me and my ways. Like, mac and cheese is good enough for me, why do you think you're so much better that you need quinoa? It's stupid. I know it's stupid, but it doesn't stop me. Maybe look to see if it something about rejection or a personal criticism?

That's something you probably want to think more about in terms of where it comes from. It isn't a thought I've ever had myself, so I can't offer any personal insights. In fact, I was just having almost the opposite conversation with my husband tonight as we were enjoying onion pakoras. "I had these for the first time when I was 18," I said, and we started reminiscing about all the new-to-us foods we had first enjoyed in our teens and twenties: sushi, burritos, pad Thai, papayas, injera, so many favorites. Not that I don't enjoy meatloaf and mashed potatoes, too! But to keep to a limited range of foods just because that was what you had when you were a child seems like denying yourself pleasure (and nutrition!) for no reason.

Because I imagine she grew up on mash potatoes and meatloaf, not quinoa salad and red snapper. I know this is just something you gave as an example, but how many of these instances of change/discomfort are based on assumptions like this? Because this is a really weird assumption! (I never once ate mashed potatoes and meat loaf growing up, and today I'd only eat it to be polite, but as a kid my mom made me things like fish with grains from the health food store all the time. And I know I'm not alone.) Could it be that at least part of what's freaking you out about this is not that these other people have changed, but that you're realizing your own experience is far from universal?

When you try new things, do you feel guilty or uncomfortable, or as though you are somehow deviating from a norm? Did you find your parents very "traditional" or set in their ways? Do you generally dislike change? Do you prefer the familiar? Did you really like your childhood or your parents and want to emulate them? Do you feel disrespectful if you do something very differently? These are a few rhetorical questions that you can ask yourself to try and get some insight on your reactions here. On a more personal level, I think the folks focusing on the specific foods in the question are missing the point and getting caught up in the wrong details; I read that as being a general example to try and describe how the OP's feeling, not a specific assumption that everyone literally grew up on meatloaf- if I'm wrong, please let me know, OP! If I'm right, though, I think I can see where you're coming from- many people get a certain idea in their heads of "how the world is" at a certain age, and things that interfere with or dismiss or disrupt that idea can feel uncomfortable, strange, or even slightly threatning or upsetting. For a lot of people, that bewildering or upsetting change is price fluctuations. For others, it's governmental or regulatory changes. For me, personally, it's old buildings being torn down. For others, it's changes in music or fashion (music doesnt get banned for being offensive, it usually gets banned for being a new kind of offensive. There's been awful, offensive music all along). We don't necessarily reject those changes- though sometimes we do- but we have trouble parsing them. There are certain items that serve to anchor us into a sense that we understand how things are. We don't necessarily recognise them as such, but that's what they are. As we get older, for many of us, the changes that we have trouble understanding increase, and the number of people who can understand and relate at least somewhat to our idea of "how the world is", who can identify and connect with the same cultural referents that we can, decreases. The idea we have about how the world is becomes gradually less and less valid and less similar to anyone else's until it's essentially obsolete and we spend more time talking about how things were and what we remember than how things are now or will be. Some people are more aware of this happening than others and it happens more to some than others. So I think that may play a part in this experience for you, OP- you might be noticing the things that affect how you view the world and wondering why those changes don't effect others the same way. The only answer I can think of to that is that different people have different anchors, and their anchors are not yours. Also, who's to say that after they write their food articles, they don't go home to mashed potatos and meatloaf, you know?