When my dad got back from the Pacific after WW2 he never ate Spam again for the rest of his life, another 58 years.
With my dad it was rice. He was a tank commander in Europe, and rice was all they could get much of the time. He's in his 80s and still won't eat rice.
Back in my batchelor days I bought a cookbook which purported to describe simple cooking. Only thing I remember it saying was never to cook a dish for company (yeah, right) which you had not tried beforehand for yourself. As evidence of the necessity of that, the author told of the experience of a woman who found a recipe and decided to serve it to guest without trying it first - and realized after she had prepared the stuff that, whatever the recipe called itself, the main dish she had just prepared was spam! And this was only one generation after WWII - if your guest list wasn't restricted to youngsters, the men would have almost certainly been veterans!