Yeah, that sounds disgusting.
I used to operate printing presses. We used Fedron, a really strong ink dissolver, to clean the presses between jobs. It came in 5-gallon containers, and I’d pour it into an old Mountain Dew bottle and put it on the work table… where I put my Mountain Dew bottles that had soda in them.
One day, I took a giant swig, and it was the Fedron bottle. It reacted immediately with the saliva in my mouth. I realized my error and spat it out, but it had already turned my gums into sandpaper. I rushed over to the pharmacy and bought gum medicine. That was a unique experience I never want to have again.
On a combat training exercise in the military. Part of the web gear we carried were two ammo pouches. Along with the ammo magazines, I had stuffed in an open package of jerky to snack along the hike into the training area. At a rest spot, we all shucked our gear off, and ten minutes later slung it back on to keep going.
Fast forward about 20 minutes when I grabbed a jerky piece out of the pouch and started eating it. I almost immediately felt a sting on my tongue. I looked at the jerky and it was swarming with ants. Maybe they were Army ants.
That’s why God made full face helmets.
Oh, yeah, I forgot one.
A local orchard here sells queen pluots in season, which are a heavenly delicious stone fruit. I had bought a few, and while we were out for a drive, I grabbed one and bit into it. The first bite was delicious. The second bite, nearer the pit, tasted weird and acrid. I stopped and looked at the pluot, and out of a blackened hole near the pit crawled a huge earwig - right out onto my hand.
I flung the pluot, the napkin, and the earwig out the open window of the car, and spat and puked out the mouthful of bug-pissy fruit in the same direction. My husband (not having observed the earwig event) looked at me like I was nuts.
Gah. That was five years ago, and I can still taste that horrible mouthful.
That reminded me of an experience I had at Basic Training. It was a cold, rainy day in the field; the day we did Claymore mine training (“I see the light!”). Come lunch time everyone was cold and cranky and ready to eat. This was a “catered hot lunch in the field” day rather than MREs, so bonus.
And even brownies for dessert! Fudge brownies with rice crispies. A rare treat for sure. Except when one of the soldiers, who was picking out the rice crispies and discovered they had tiny eye spots. And were maggots. Now, these were not squirming gooshy maggots, but nicely cooked crunchy maggots. And you know what? Those brownies were so damn good we just went ahead and ate them anyway. Crispy dried maggots and all.
It’s not in the same league as flies or slugs or tobacco spit, but …
I came home from school once when I was a wee lad, and was excited to open the fridge and see some wedges of canned pineapple left on a plate. I love pineapple!
Needless to say, they weren’t pineapple.
Technically, wedges of cold rutabaga won’t hurt you. Technically.
This reminds me of that old joke - what’s worse than finding a worm in the apple you are eating?
Finding half a worm ….
I cannot, for the life of me, remember why (probably just chronic absentmindedness), but one time a few years ago I was handling raw chicken in the kitchen and I wound up sticking my finger in my mouth.
I was horrified. I immediately dropped everything and rinsed my mouth out, then brushed my teeth. Luckily I had no ill after-effects, so I was lucky. Or maybe I’m just over-cautious about such things.
Bird poop. One of our cockatiels had been flying around and I didn’t notice what was in my mug of tea until it was too late.
My aunt and uncle were dining on the patio of a restaurant when a bird passing overhead shat on their pizza. Fortunately they noticed it before anyone took a bite.
One better. I remember as a very young child, maybe 3 or 4, my mother had some caramel candies, you know, the cubes wrapped in cellophane? I loved them. Every so often, there would be one wrapped in foil, which were fudge instead of caramel. Those were the best! Well, one day I was looking through the cabinets (I must have been on a chair) and I found two bottles of bullion cubes, one of beef and one of chicken. The bullion cubes were wrapped in foil, the beef in silver foil with red writing and the chicken in gold foil with green letters. Anyway, I thought I had hit the mother lode! I knew the chicken wasn’t right (the ones I liked were in silver foil), so I took one of the silver ones out of the jar, unwrapped it, and popped it in my mouth.
That was the nastiest thing I think I have ever tasted. It made such an imprint on my young mind that I still remember the little foil cubes down to the color of the writing on them. And, I have done the cigarette butt, spit jar, whatever, in a beer can, but while those were pretty gross, the nastiness of the bullion when the young me was expecting sweet, chewy fudge has not been matched.
Yeah the beer can and cigarette butt thing once at a party.
Also, I got stung on the inside of my mouth by a bee, or wasp, hiding in my beer bottle.
Apart from that I can’t think of anything else. My little brother and I once discovered a stash of unsweetened baker’s chocolate and scoffed it all down. It wasn’t very tasty, but we ate it anyway. We were probably about 8 and 6 years old at the time. Mum was not happy!
I had severe asthma as a child. In addition to the wheezing, this involved a lot of phlegm, of many kinds. During one particularly bad asthma attack, I was spitting up all sorts of lung goo into a cup of milk on the little table by the side of my chair, while my mother is helping me out.
Then my little brother wanders in, and instead of being a reasonably responsible 8 or 9 year old child, he decides to pester my mother, “I want a drink! Get me a drink!”
He got a drink. It was the cup of milk. And lung goo. It was really an exceptional quantity and variety, even compared to other asthma attacks that I was thinking “damn, that’s gross” before he drank it.
I am now queasy from writing this.
That reminds me… There’s a hiking trail near where I live that passes through an old olive orchard. I was hiking there one day and noticed a tree that was still producing olives. So I had the brilliant idea that I’d try a fresh, ripe olive, right off the tree. What I didn’t know at the time was that olives need to be cured in something like brine or wine before they’re edible. That was the most bitter thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. I was worried that it was actually some poisonous fruit and not an olive until I learned about curing olives.
When I was a kid, we went to someone’s house for dinner. On the table, was a plate with white blocks of what I assumed were vanilla ice cream. I speared one and popped what turned out to be a block of cream cheese into my mouth, which I immediately spat out, much to my parents’ embarrassment. I didn’t try cream cheese again until I was well into adulthood.
I’ve done that on purpose. 99% cocoa bars exist for a reason.
:eek:
Can I assume that spoiled the mood?
I brushed my teeth with Brylcreem.
Probably my son’s vomit, though I knew I was drinking it. When he was in the hospital after having a stroke, he projectile vomited across the room and it went directly into the coffee mug I was holding. I wiped off what I could from the top, and drank it anyway. It was full of wine, not coffee. Worst Christmas Eve of my life.