Worst Food Experience?

My first ever taste of spinach was overcooked. I took a spoonful, it melted, slimy and slick in my mouth.

Just the sight of cooked spinach makes my jaw ache. I can't. I just can't.

Interestingly, I like the raw stuff in salads.

I was from a lower-middle class household, and so were all my friends, until I met my best friend. Her family was pretty wealthy, and her house bigger than anything I'd ever seen. She invited me to her house for a sleepover, and that evening her mom decided to order pizza. I was questioned quite thoroughly on whether or not I was allowed to have pizza (I was 13 or 14 at this point), and what toppings were okay. Pizza being something we commonly ate at home, I was totally bewildered. It turns out it was Good Friday, and she just wanted to make sure not to order a meat pizza if it was part of my belief not to eat meat during Lent. I'd never celebrated Lent, didn't even know what it was, so I just thought she was weird.

Pizza arrives, we head to the table, and I notice her parents are using forks and knives on theirs. My family was more the 'use your hands and stuff it in your face' type, so I was confused again, and extremely uncomfortable. I felt like a total hoosier. But it got worse.

For desert, her mom diced some fruit. She asked if I liked cantaloupe and honeydew. I'd never had it, but I didn't want to make myself look even more stupid so I said I would try it. I picked up a piece of cantaloupe, popped it in my mouth, and froze. It was the most disgusting thing I'd ever tasted. I didn't want to be rude and spit it out, so I tried to just eat it, and started gagging. They kept telling me it was okay if I didn't like it, but there were two pieces of each fruit on my plate and I was determined to eat them. I had the same reaction to the honeydew. I sat there and gagged my way through all four pieces. It was absolutely awful.

As a side note, she's still my best friend, and there's mutual adoration between her parents and I. They are amused by my consistently crazy reactions when I'm in their higher-class world.

Blood sausage in Gijon, Spain. The wonderful lady who was hosting us asked if we wanted to try the local traditional foods one night. Well, of course we did!

It was simply clotted, congealed blood in an intestine with some spices added. She stood at the side of the table, watching us and wringing her hands, hoping we liked it. It had to be eaten. I could simply not hurt this wonderful woman. I did it. But even today, thinking on it more than ten years later, the gorge rises as I feel again the texture of that edible scab on my tongue.

I have eaten cow tongue, fried crickets, sheep testicles, anonymous roasted jungle rodent...nothing will ever win the trophy over the Asturian blood sausage.

Melon in a small desert outpost in western China.
The melon itself was fine. It was very refreshing.
Sadly, the price I paid was two days in a hotel room unwilling to move more than five feet from the bathroom.
I had forgotten the cardinal rule. Never eat melon in China. They sell them by weight. To make them heavier, vendors bodge pinholes in them and drop them in the town ditch to absorb more 'water'.
It took several days on Immodium to put me right. We had to leave the woman who bought the melon for the tour group behind. She was so ill she ended up in the hospital in Kashgar with a cardboard box to use as a bed pan.

A bologna sandwich in Rikers Island

Wayne K said:

A bologna sandwich in Rikers Island

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LMAO. You win.

I worked in a high-end restaurant for about 7 years, and got to taste some pretty expensive food. Since I was always willing to try something new, the cooks were always pushing me to taste stuff.

One summer, they told me they got new oysters. Since I knew I already liked oysters, I wanted to try them. I had no idea that "Rocky Mountain Oysters" were bull testicles.

No matter how you fix them, they're awful. Just awful.

In Mexico City our hotel served clams in the shell on the breakfast buffet. I can't eat meat on the bone or any kind of animal if I've seen what it looked like in it's alive form. Seeing cold clams on the buffet made me want to gag. The friends I was there with decided to try them so at our table I tried to advert my eyes from their plates and focus on my plate of fruit... until one of them put salt on the clam and it shriveled up like it was hurting. They were all amused and got more clams to see if they all did it. They did. (We were 16-17 at the time on a school trip. Immaturity levels were running high.)

I didn't eat for the rest of the day. To this day I still can't eat clams or shell fish because of that particular memory.

Not mine, but my Dad's. In the mid sixties we were stationed in South Korea. Dad was a semi muckety muck with the AF. There was a party with the USAF guys and their Korean counterparts. Dad's friend Blackie brought this thing over on a toothpick and told Dad: "You have to try this". Dad stupidly opened his mouth and Blackie popped the little thing in. A whole clove of pickled garlic! Koreans are big on garlic and pickled anything. As has been mentioned above, he had no choice but to swallow it. He has never again accepted any food item without knowing what it was.

MM

One of the first times I ever made dinner at home, I sent my parents to bed for an entire weekend with (a luckily mild case of) food poisoning.

Probably couldn't have avoided it, there must have been something wrong with the can of tomato sauce I used. I didn't take any sauce and didn't get ill.

But boy, was that embarrassing.

AbielleRose said:

I didn't eat for the rest of the day. To this day I still can't eat clams or shell fish because of that particular memory.

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I would feel the same way. I've been vegetarian since like 10 or so. In middle school my friend dared me to eat a large chunk of tomato whole. She'd slipped some ham into it when I wasn't looking. Some friend.

Deep fried squid in peanut sauce ordered by someone who considered themselves quite the gourmand, to share at a Chinese dinner. It was virtually indistinguishable from fishy rubber bands dipped in peanut butter. I couldn't look at peanut butter or rubber bands for months. Truly awful. In fact worse than the lutefisk a Scandehoovian neighbour used to share with us at Christmas. Fish soaked in lye for weeks, til it's a gelatinous amorphous blob, really is as bad as it sounds (imagine that) - but not as bad as the squid. *shudder*

Hillbilly stew.

I was maybe nine, and we went as a family camping. It ended up raining, and the tent had several holes in it. We spent a few hours in the local laundromat drying out all of our clothes instead of fishing for our meal.

Mom and dad brought us to this local grocery. They bought baked beans, incredibly fatty hamburger, sausage, more baked beans and more baked beans, and maraschino cherries. When we got back to the camp site, they cooked all of this in a pan over the fire.

Mom called it Hillbilly Stew.

It rained again that night and the five of us spent the night sleeping inside the station wagon. Everyone of us had gas.

When I was a kid, I loved shrimp. It was one of my favorite treats. Then one day I got an undercooked batch and got sick. Okay, it sucked, but it happens. I brushed it off, but the very next time I had shrimp, I got sick again. My mom convinced me it was just really bad luck; we'd be super careful the next time we made some and it would all be okay.

Meanwhile, my dad had gotten a new job and decided we would all go out to dinner at this super popular Thai restaurant to celebrate. I was scared of spicy foods back then, but agreed to try something mild. I picked the shrimp curry, thinking at least the shrimp would be good and I could definitely trust a restaurant to cook it properly.

Of course, I got horribly sick. For the third time in a row. I've never eaten shrimp again - the smell alone is enough to turn my stomach these days - and despite eventually coming around to spicy foods, I've never eaten curry again either. Every once in a while I think I should give it just one more go, but I've never actually had the courage to try.

I ordered dinner in England

My sister in law cannot cook to save her life. My mother is a frightening individual and she always wants to impress her.

We gathered for a traditional Southern meal.
Rubbery chicken,unseasoned collards and a Betty Crocker cake(THE HORROR as no Southern cook would make a cake from a box.)

Then came the chitlins. If you don't clean them right,it can be quite a smelly experience. I don't know if any of y'all have ever smelled them,but she brought them to the table and the smell was,well,like uncleaned chitlins.

By the end of the dinner,my stomach ached,my sister in law was in tears and my mother sat there with that smug expression that all mother in law's have aka "you can't feed my baby boy properly and he will always need MY cooking."

Another memorable experience was when I worked at a hotel and we had International Day. My coworkers came from all over the globe. I didn't want to hurt their feelings by refusing their respective cuisines.

I ate a fried grasshopper. The crunching sound. The fact that I had an insect in my mouth.
An effing grasshopper! Even now,my stomach clenches.

Being obligated by my heritage, as a kid, to try lutefisk, and not to retch.

caw

robjvargas said:

My first ever taste of spinach was overcooked. I took a spoonful, it melted, slimy and slick in my mouth.

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Spinach is about the easiest thing to overcook that I can think of. Spinach leaves are very thin and delicate. The only way to cook them properly is to toss them in whatever you're cooking at the very last moments. Do this right, and they are actually quite delightful. But I almost never cook them by themselves; I add them to things like pasta and rice dishes and cheesy sauces.

A couple of less delicate greens that are great spinach substitutes for cooking are swiss chard and kale. Give those a try, if you can.

caw

Kitty27 said:

My coworkers came from all over the globe. I didn't want to hurt their feelings by refusing their respective cuisines.

I ate a fried grasshopper. The crunching sound. The fact that I had an insect in my mouth.
An effing grasshopper! Even now,my stomach clenches.

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Hehehe. Reminds me of when my friend "made" potatoes of some kind. No idea what they might be called other than "raw diced potatoes", but, having to swallow when I wanted to gag and having to smile "It's good" when I wanted to say "For crying out loud, why didn't you cook them?!" was really, really difficult. It wasn't as bad as a grasshopper though, lol.

Three weeks ago at the local Pizza Hut. I ordered lasagna. Turns out that they didn't use basil or oregano or marjoram. No. They used parsley. Bitter parsley that had likely bolted from too much heat. And lots of it. I had to cover it, horror of all horrors, in ketchup (I was *hungry* and here, you don't get to send food back - staff doesn't give a crap how crappy their food is). It was awful. It was easily the worst food I've had in decades. In fact, it was so awful that, given a choice between tripe and brains and liver or that lasagna, I'd take the tripe and brains and liver.

My worst food experience was in Ireland, when I was a college student. I was studying for a few months in London, and my friend Megan wanted to go to Dublin for a weekend to visit relatives. Hungry, cold, and exhausted, we were picked up from the night Holyhead ferry by her cousins.

There were three generations of Megan kin plus various neighbors turned out to meet us. If they were disappointed that the Americans were two sleepy girls in The Smiths concert T shirts, they didn't show it. Everybody charmed our socks off.

We sat down to dinner--china and silver on the table, candles burning--and the first course is a large bowl of translucent rubbery chunks devoid of sauce, spices, garnish, sans everything. Highly fibrous, no discernible taste. I kept chewing, swallowing, and hoping someone would say, "Oh, Niamh, this (blank) is always so good", or "Terza, how do you like the (blank)" but nobody talked about the food. At one point I decided that since we were near the North Sea that the chunks were whale blubber, it was probably a very special local delicacy, and I would offend my hosts by leaving any.

The next course was a dish of what appeared to be dessicated corn beef strips--again unsauced and unspiced. Once again no one discussed the menu. Our hosts were very generous as far as keeping our wine glasses full, so at this point I was basically done speculating and just cleaned my plate.

The rest of the evening was a blur. There may have been a confused look from our hostess when we said good night and I burbled effusive thanks for the whale blubber.

When we got up to the guest room, Megan--about ten times worldlier than the college age Terza--told me that the rubbery stuff was tripe and the dessicated corn beef was tongue.

That's actually the only head explodingly bad meal I've ever had over there. Irish food is usually good.

When I was young and stupid in college, I used my Texaco card for groceries quite a bit. I could get pizza and Cokes for the gang, and when the cafeteria fare was awful for the night, I could get some chips or a pop-it-in-the-microwave burrito.

One day, on my lunch break at my record store job, I bit into one of these burritos to discover that although the date on it was just fine, there was a large hunk of MOLD right in the middle of it. I knew this because I bit right into it.

That freaky chemical funk of a taste has remained with me to this day. I don't remember how many times I had to rinse my mouth out. Gah.

kikazaru said:

Deep fried squid in peanut sauce ordered by someone who considered themselves quite the gourmand, to share at a Chinese dinner. It was virtually indistinguishable from fishy rubber bands dipped in peanut butter. I couldn't look at peanut butter or rubber bands for months. Truly awful. In fact worse than the lutefisk a Scandehoovian neighbour used to share with us at Christmas. Fish soaked in lye for weeks, til it's a gelatinous amorphous blob, really is as bad as it sounds (imagine that) - but not as bad as the squid. *shudder*

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AGH! You brought back horrible memories! If someone were to ask me to describe 'calamari', 'deep fried rubber bands' would be the words I'd choose. And since my father-in-law was 1st generation American Swede, he loved surprising me with traditional Scandinavian fare. :burp:

But almost as bad: my sister-in-law had us over for a birthday dinner and one of the things on the menu was fresh spinach sauteed in butter. I didn't appreciate the sauteed stink bug in my portion - even if it did add more protein to the plate. Talk about 'pungent'!

I was a vegetarian at the time and went over to visit a friend. This friend spoke little English and was transitioning into American culture. She insisted on feeding me and went to a great deal of trouble to be hospitable and welcoming. I have no idea what she prepared, but it looked like a giant base-ball sized meatball on the plate and it consisted primarily of ground beef and various unfamiliar herbs and spices. I remember forcing a few bites down because I didn't want to insult her hospitality but I can remember the feel of the meat in my mouth. Blech. I eat meat now, but I still can't handle ground beef.

And then there was the time I drank fruit juice in Morocco. Sick as a dog for several days, visited by a French speaking physician who injected me with who-knows-what, and finally well just in time to go home. Had forgotten the important rule that juice can be made with tap water. Ugh.

Kitty27 said:

We gathered for a traditional Southern meal.
Rubbery chicken,unseasoned collards and a Betty Crocker cake(THE HORROR as no Southern cook would make a cake from a box.)

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Hahahahaha. Those are the only cakes I cook [can cook]. Sometimes. Everybody in my family practically despises box cakes; I'm the odd one out. Can't cook like that.


Worst food experience: well recently Taco Bell, 'nuff said.