My gourmet cook grandmother catered my uncle’s college graduation party. My sister and I were going through the food line. She eyes a chocolate cake and takes a big piece. She then takes a big bite while still in line. My guess is Pate De Foie Gras does not taste very much like cake. She lost it. As a little brother, I thought is hysterical, Grandma ma did not. I just happy she was first in line or it would have been me.
My husband, who grew up in Ohio, relates the story of being on vacation in Washington DC at age 9 and eating breakfast at a Shoney’s buffet. He sees what he believes to be mashed potatoes (his favorite to this day) and gets all exited because he’s never had them for breakfast before. Took one bite, spit it out and had to endure the taunts of his older siblings. Didn’t he know what grits were? We live in Louisiana (my home state) and he can’t even watch while I eat them, which is quite often.
Mom:
If you’re gonna buy those awesome frozen cookie dough balls that come in the big plastic bag, could you please refrain from buying a big plastic bag of frozen meatballs? Because they look awfully alike!
Waffles at Gramma’s house, so I go to the fridge to get out the butter. Except it turns out that she was planning on making garlic bread later that day, and she had already mixed the spices into a tub of butter. Garlic waffles just don’t work.
Mine did the same with onions.
We’d just had a fry-up cooked breakfast complete with my favourite meat of all time: bacon. I looked on the counter and saw what I thought was left over little bits of bacon, I popped them in my mouth only to find they tasted really bad and had a very strange texture. I looked back at the counter and saw the cats dish with recently picked over cat food in it, some of which had fallen out of the dish. Mmmmmmm, cat food mmmmmmmm.
Somewhat off topic, but bound to be the most disgusting post on this thread…
When I was a teenager, my buddy Craig and I went to a kegger. Craig had just returned from Europe where he procured a two liter stein. He figured he’d have to spend way less time in the keg line, and he was right. But after two visits to the keg, he began feeling quite ill. He spent the latter part of the evening sitting in a folding chair against the wall. I’d go by and check on him now and then, and at onepoint, I noticed that he had vomited into his brand new stein and placed it under his chair. Guess he couldn’t make it to the toilet.
When I was ready to leave, I went to get Craig and we discovered that someone had stolen his stein. To this day I wonder if the thief actually tried to drink the contents.
Once as a child my folks took me to a nice Crêperie in Paris. I was used to the crepes my Grandama made - banana-rum, apple cinnamon, blueberry sour-cream - so you can just imagine my surprise when I first dug into that seafood Crêpe.
8 Years Old:
Mini-onion rings?
No.
Calamari?
Yes
Politely spit in napkin?
Yes.
Hurl when Mom informs what I actually ate?
You bet your ass.
Didja ever notice that those nice, shiny, aluminized packages of Philadelphia cream cheese – back when it was in a pliable fol wrapper and not a cardboard box – sure looked an awful lot like a vanilla ice cream Eskimo pie?
Well, I sure thought so when I was 5…
My brother is a picky eater, won’t try anything new.
One day, Mom fixed us dinner. With tofu. Brother refused to eat it until Mom gave him an ultimatum. “Eat it, or you can’t go to Derek’s house.” “But Mom, if I eat I’ll throw up!” “Eat it.” He did. And he did.
Later, since we still had tofu left, we mixed chicken and tofu into a stir-fry. Told him it was chicken stir-fry. (It was, wasn’t it?) He ate it with no untoward results
He also wouldn’t eat fried fish, so when we had “Chicken Nuggets” when we went to Grandma’s house.
I wasn’t a kid, but a waiter at my college’s faculty club. Every Wednesday, they had a prime rib buffet and salad bar. The waiters got to assemble meals at the end of the night. I took some potatoes and put a huge chunk of sour cream on them . . .
and discovered creamed horseradish for the very first time.
What’s worse, is that more than ten years later I got a baked potato in a restaurant where the cook had done the same thing!
Bleah.
I wasn’t a child, I was an adult… and a vegetarian…
I found a chunk of soggy chicken at the bottom of a chocolate milkshake at a restaurant 
It had the ultra soggy texture of “soaking in dishwater for an hour”
Picking up what I thought was my Mom’s glass of kool aid and instead it was Reunite wine.
Blech!
My favorite story involves my twerpy lil brother…
We had a pure bred poodle…(don’t ask) and he had a habit of eating grass out in the yard an throwing it up…in the house…
My mother was sure there was something terrible wrong with the dog (whose name was Bimbo…please…u really don’t want to know)
She goes to the vet and he gives her this 'lil roll of chlorophyll tablets…which looked just like a breath mint roll…
Now my parents weren’t that stupid…so they hid them in my Dad’s “junk drawer”…where Dad was also in the habit of hiding his Life Savers
My brother snuck in and started eating them…thinking he was all clever…
When my dad found out he laughed for weeks…made lil barking noises at my brother every so often…much to my delight…lol
I don’t think my brother could eat Life Savers for a long time…
When I was about 3 years old, the Sunday School teacher brought all us little nippers to the snack table, sat us down and gave us a lump of colorful stuff. Kind of thick for pudding, but I’m 3! Everything is new and mysterious!
Next thing I know I’m yanked out of the chair by my arm and have someone’s finger in my mouth trying to pull the stuff out. They were very upset with me, but I was upset with them! How am I supposed to know what to do with Play-Doh (modeling clay) the first time I’ve ever seen it, and it was handed to me at the SNACK TABLE??
Similar to that one…I found a Tupperware box in the fridge with some purple stuff in it, glistening with what sure LOOKED like sugar crystals. I figured Mother had made some sort of purple cookie dough; it was exactly the consistency of our absolute favorite snack at home – Spritz-cookie dough, which never made its way into actual Spritz cookies. And you could mix it with food coloring (and were expected to, if you were making it into cookies; the dough takes food coloring well) so none of this looked at all strange. Stuck a finger into it and stuck that into my mouth…
ACK ACK ACK salt! this is nasty! wtf?!
Turns out Mother, in her infinite wisdom and thriftiness, had decided to mix up some Play-Dough for her devoted daughter. Darn well looks just like cookie dough…grumble Fun to play with though!
Sneaking the food has a few effects that combine to heighten the shock and horror: you don’t tell or ask ahead of time, you think you’re getting away with something, and you take in huge gulps, to avoid getting caught…
Certainly this is what my sister had in mind, thinking I had made a vanilla milkshake and left it in the blender while I stepped away for a moment. I was in the other room, drinking my milkshake, having filled the blender with soap to clean and soak…
I’ve never seen anybody drink so much soap so quickly. Quickly, enough, in fact, that she actually swallowed it all before realization dawned on her.
Nor have I seen denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance moved through quite so quickly.
That would be jarbabyj.
When I was a kid, Mom would occasionally surprise me and my siblings by sprinkling fun stuff, instead of just plain sugar, on our cereal. I remember strawberry jello powder, cinnamon, and cookie sprinkles… So one day I decide to treat myself, but having no clue what came out of which jar, I just started grabbing random spice containers and sampling them all. I tried nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and alum, at which point I decided I’d let Mom do the surprising from now on.
I was not a kid when I scooped canned dog food into the puppy’s bowl. I was an adult, and a pregnant one with an overactive gag reflex at that. So I don’t know what I was thinking when I finished feeding the dog and stuck the spoon into my mouth.