You know how you’re enjoying sunflower seeds in the shell, pop, crack, tongue the seed, push out the shell, munch, repeat…and they are tiny, delightful hits of nutty, salty, almost bacon-like notes of deliciousness…when suddenly you bite down on a nasty crumbling packet of bitter, poisonous foulness that explodes in your mouth, spoiling everythiing?
i can’t think of any other food that does that… Is just delightful for bite after bite, then you hit a bite that is unbelievably nasty. Not even other nuts and seeds…it’s a special sunflower-seeds-only kind of “screw you”.
No fun.
I opened a Brazil nut one time that was so rotten, the room immediately filled with the scent of poop-filled socks being set on fire. Good thing the smell hit my nose before I popped that bad boy into my mouth. I would have hurled, for sure.
I almost never find with other foods that the bad ones make it all the way to my mouth, because they are bigger and I see it before I put it in my mouth. But with sunflower seeds, they are so small and you don’t know what you have until you have already put it in your mouth to get to it.
Well, I for one am glad that I never learned the fine art of eating sunflower seeds in the shell, since I do love me some sunflower seeds and something like that would just ruin the heck out of my day.
Shrimp or crawfish, if you’re partial to them–if one’s gone bad, it’s unbelievably foul. It may put you off them for life, not just ruin them for the day.
Brazil nuts, as BobArrgh says, can also be horrible, but you usually have some warning with them, as it takes 3 hours in a well-equipped workshop to get one of out of its shell.