Cereal and Raw Mushroom

I don’t like cereal.

Well, I did have developed some sort of passion for it during my stay in Edinburgh. I had it at breakfast, sometimes lunch, and very occasionally dinner (when I didn’t feel like eating raw veggie salad prepared by the host). At that time, I did believe that I liked cereal. It’s crunchy, tasty, nutritious. It made a good meal anytime of a day. And I wondered why I had never discovered how wonderful it was before.

When I got back to Hong Kong after those two months, I wanted to maintain my healthy breakfast routine (instead of washing down bananas with pots of green tea) and thus bought a big box of the cereal I used to love in Scotland. It was left untouched after I had the first bite.

So now I wash down bananas with green tea at breakfast every day.

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I didn’t like raw mushroom.

Well, I didn’t even know that I could eat it raw until I was offered it as a salad during my stay in Edinburgh. Actually, I hate eating raw veggies (especially carrot and celery…yuck…) but when it is the only plate on your dining table (did I mention Edinburgh? Where everything closes at 5 pm?), you have to have it. If eating raw carrot and celery made me sick, eating a mushroom raw was the most freakish salad eating experience I had ever had.

However, something mystical happened after I got back to Hong Kong. I had raw mushroom salad flashback from time to time. And I actually missed it. Yes, I missed raw mushroom salad.

So now I have raw mushroom in my sandwich at lunch almost every day.

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If I were to stay in Scotland for the rest of my life, I would be a cereal lover and raw mushroom hater. However, the fact is it was just a very short phase in life.

The trouble is, sometimes human emotions work like taste buds that you never know whether something/someone is cereal or raw mushroom until you grow out of a phase and sometimes a phase can last long enough for you to believe that it's actually part of your inherent traits.

Our behaviours and emotions are conditioned by our environment (a-predisposedly-religious-person-end-up-being-a-Catholic-in-the-Philippines-or-a-Buddhist-in-Tibet-or-a-Muslim-in-Pakinstan sort of argument). I wonder if we ever truly like something because of what it is instead of what others are or where we are. Do we like something/someone in absolute terms or relative ones?

My passion for cereal was so real that I've lost confidence in my judgment.