Either. I say it’s spinach and the hell with it.
What’s wrong with spinach? 
Heh, I actually like spinach…unless it’s cooked to death.
I’ll happily eat Chef Boyardee ravioli, spaghetti, or Spaghetti-O’s (which I think are technically Campbell’s) straight out of the can. Shake the can well before opening to ensure everything is mixed well.
What I don’t like:
I find almost all alcohol nasty – spirits, cocktails, beer, wine. None of it appeals to me. I can drink Guinness without gagging but it’s not something I enjoy.
Raw tomatoes. Obviously those are very popular as they are standard accoutrements on burgers and sandwiches. I’ve hated them since I was a kid. Same with onions: raw onions make me gag. Interestingly, both tomatoes and onions are fine cooked. Indeed, a burger isn’t a burger without some caramelized onions on it.
Cheesecake. While it’s not up there with raw onions on the barf-o-meter, it isn’t something I’ve ever liked.
Cinnamon buns. As a kid the dessert for my mom was a Cinnabon cinnamon bun. To me it’s just white bread with cinnamon sugar glaze on it. Is it supposed to be something more? What’s the appeal? I don’t dislike cinnamon but a cinnamon bun seems much ado about nothing.
Most seafood (except for tuna and halibut) is disgusting to me. Shrimp, oysters, crab, lobster… all gross. I live an hour from the ocean and the only real “seafood” that I’ll order from a restaurant on the coast is clam chowder. Otherwise it’s fish and chips, halibut for the fish please.
Now, all of the above are actual food items that a large percentage of people have agreed are, indeed, food items – enough people, anyway, that said items are marketed as such and have a demand such that they are continuously being offered. My wife’s family, however, makes a “food” that I’m convinced was invented by sadistic prison wardens as a punishment for unruly inmates:
Every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas my MIL cooks a ham. She cooks said ham by putting it a large stock pot, adding a few inches of water, covering, and boiling it until it’s heated through. I’m not sure how traditional this is – I learned to cook a ham in an oven – but whatever, the ham comes out pretty yummy. But it’s afterwards where the nightmare begins and my hope for the future of humanity is destroyed. While the ham is cooking my MIL will pull out her largest crock pot and fill it with dried egg noodles. Just cheap egg noodles from the grocery store, nothing fancy (or even good). When it’s full she flattens the dried noodles with her hand, breaking them up into small pieces. Then she repeats this process until the crock pot is filled with little bits of dried noodles. When the ham is done she takes the juices from the pan and pours them into the crock pot, effectively filling all the voids between the little bits of shattered noodle. She then adds a massive dose of salt to the already salty ham juice, gives it a stir, urns on the crock pot and… waits. And waits. And waits. As she’s busy preparing the rest of the meal (and she’s not much of a cook so “preparing a holiday meal” means building a charcuterie board and microwaving various pre-made things) this… concoction… of ham juice and dried noodles s…l…o…w…l…y… becomes this… stuff. Disparate ingredients that are individually recognizable as food combine to become this gastronomical Frankenstein’s Monster. Part wallpaper paste, part dissolved salt lick, all revolting. It has the consistency of wet cement the color of rotting mayonnaise. I tried it exactly once: the first year my wife and I were dating. I put a scoop on my plate to be polite and oh my holy God it was the most nasty, nauseating, vile garbage I’ve ever tried to eat. Apparently this is one of those Depression-era recipes that’s been passed down through the family as Good Eats and, like a lot of Depression-era family recipes, only the family that makes it thinks it’s good. My wife and her immediate family absolutely love it and for the life of me I cannot understand the appeal. Nobody else who ever comes to dinner can stand it. My kids think its garbage – literally. It’s not food. It might be building insulation or asphalt repair or industrial-strength insecticide or the basis of a new exotic biological weapons program but it’s not food. It looks like pus, it smells like wet flour and poverty, and tastes like Satan’s diarrhea. I get sick just thinking about it. And my wife eats this garbage reheated the next day. Excuse me while I go barf.
While my initial reactions was also one of revulsion upon reflection I can see how that combination of ingredients might actually work.
Sounds like the wieners-and-spaghetti dish my mom got out of the newspaper in the 50s. Nobody but our immediate family likes it. My BiL and niece and nephew won’t eat it. So, sometimes my sister makes a pot and just eats it every day until its gone.
I get cravings for it periodically.
My father liked to eat something called “pudding.” I don’t know what was in it, some kind of animal innards I’d guess, but it looked like congealed gray sand. It was disgusting. Funny thing, he was a very fastidious eater. For example, he refused to eat lebanon bologna. He told me that once when he was a teenager, he and a friend visited the Swift plant, where his friend’s father worked. “You won’t believe what they put in that stuff,” he used to say.
Have you read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair? If not, I highly recommend it.
It is, after all, what the Romans fed Jesus. 
I think the last time I was happy to be eating Chef Boyardee, my age was of the single digit kind.
Ditto. Though [hangs head in shame] I can remember thinking of various flavors of Campbell’s Spaghetti-o’s as tolerable eating during college, long after Chef Boyardee had been reclassified as dog food in my book.
Perhaps interestingly, the kid on the Chef Boyardee can was later my roommate in college for one year. His star turn in show biz ended when he was about 7, never having gotten past “Canned Ravioli Mascot Kid.”
Chef Boyardee ravioli has been mentioned here three or four times, so I must admit to a peculiar culinary oddity.
I love Italian food, but I’m really picky about things like pasta sauce – to the point that I’ve bought some allegedly high-end pasta sauces that I either didn’t enjoy or in some cases quite literally poured down the sink after tasting. My standard go-to is still the semplice sauce made in-store by a wonderful boutique Italian grocery called Pusateri’s – rich and mellow like nothing else, perhaps like nothing found outside of Italy’s best.
And yet … somehow I always like to have a few cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli around (only the ravioli, not any of the other stuff). It’s somehow in a class by itself, not trying in any way to be a good Italian dish, but just its own thing that is somehow inoffensive and even tasty when topped with lots of freshly grated Parmesan. I can’t explain why. Maybe because of some deep subconscious association with taking cans of it on canoeing expeditions in wilderness parks, and heating it up on a camp stove in the stillness of God’s country with the sound of loons in the background. But give me a jar of anything but the very best first-rate pasta sauce, and down the sink or toilet it goes!
I say without a hint of hyperbole that anything Chef Boyardee smells exactly as I’d expect a pot of boiling vomit to smell. I can’t recall the last time I’ve had to endure that (probably 30 years ago), but it’s genuinely nausea inducing, like to the point of having to leave the house for a breather. I’m aware that both vomit and parmesan cheese share an odor component, butyric acid, but I can only imagine that Chef Boyardee simply adds the chemical in large quantities to give it that authentic Italian taste.
I have half a dozen different recipes for pasta sauce that I have used and reused and perfected. I have not tried a high end Italian grocery, but it would not occur to me that you could buy a halfway decent sauce premade that comes in can, jar or bottle. Certainly not at Loblaws, a grocery store I quite like. Their sauce is a serviceable base at best, which works less well than decent canned tomatoes. This is not meant to be snobbish. It is not hard to make great sauce.
However, the good thing about Italian cooking is with a little care and a few quality ingredients you can make miracles. It need not be complicated, expensive or even take much time.
I can’t imagine choosing canned pasta routinely. Of course, if camping or hiking it might make a nice change. In university we had a tradition we would meet for a bowl of ramen noodles and a social chat every night, at a time when good ones (which include oil and spice as well as flavour) were not widely available and needed to be bought by the box in Chinatown.
Oysters. Little sacks of repugnant pus in a shell. Horrible fkn things.
believe it or not, on the boiled ham and noodles … it is based on an actual folk dish from Europe from the 1800s but its been changed so many times that the modern version is slop
Funny you should mention that. The family and I visited the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago and in the museum cafe we saw a PBJ for $13. It almost ruined the entire museum experience for me!
For me it is Islay single malt whiskies. I think I would rather drink a bottle of Lysol.
But the lion’s share of that $13 is for that “entire museum experience”. Eating a PB&J in MoMA is, for many people, priceless.