What is the most disgusting thing you have ever tasted?

In My Humble Opinion
101

Interestingly enough, both of mine are seafoods;

Lobster Tomalley, the lobster’s liver, a green mushy paste, the saltiest thing I ever tasted, and I once ate a heaping bowl of salt… it’s supposed to be a “delicacy”, I can only assume that those people who consider the mushy cooked remains of a lobster’s blood filtration organ a “delicacy” are clinically insane, the rest of the lobster is fine, and in fact I love it, the Tomalley is beyond disgusting, and I’ve been a lifelong Seacoastal New Englander

Uni; sea urchin sushi, once again, saltiness to the point of no other flavor, and the consistency of partially congealed Jell-O, tastes like what I’d imagine vomit would taste like if it was put in a blender and reduced to a slurry

Oh and I’ll go on record that liver, any liver, is EVIL, first off, you’re eating something designed to filter waste products out of the blood, you’re eating a filter, and secondly, it has the worst, mealiest, mushiest texture of any meat I’ve had the misfortune to ingest

102

Uni can be a bit odd, but I never thought of it as salty. It’s slightly briny, but more nutty, creamy, with a bit of iodine and ocean breeze, if that makes any sense. Then again, it is somewhat similar to tomalley, so if you find that obnoxiously salty, I can’t argue with that–I just don’t taste it.

But it sounds like you haven’t had well-prepared liver. (Not that I think you would like it, anyway.) Not all livers are mushy or mealy.

103

A couple of years ago (in June, coincidentally, becuase that’s THE month for fresh lychees) my son and I were enjoying lychees I had just purchased. A good lychee is really heavenly - think of a muscat grape with a wonderful crunch and yummy juice. After our fifth or sixth lychee, my son bit into a bad one. It was so rancid and horrible that I actually smelled it from two feet away! (the look on my son’s face was priceless, though - I couldn’t help laughing!) It really ruined my son’s tastebuds for future lychees.

104

Beeman’s Clove gum. Gad! what a horrible prank to play on kid’s palates.

As an adult I’ve tried all kinds of apparently disgusting food, but squid, raw squid, aka calimarri sushi, is THE instant gag reflex for me.

Can’t believe no one has mentioned the partiers’ worst swill: Bong Water
One night of too many Old Styles, incredibly potent sinsemilla, and raging cotton mouth when I came to. Through one bloodshot eye it sure looked like a red plastic glass of H2O, instead it…well, worst wretched taste ever to pass my lips before or since. I still shudder at the thought.

105

I’m a Western American, raised with a “refined midwestern” palette. In other words, if it had any flavor whatsoever, I didn’t like it. I hated seafood in general, oriental in general (in fact, foreign in general), and “spicy” food was when someone ELSE was eating a “mild” dish next to me. I had never bothered to try anything even remotely adventurous.

And then I went on a business trip. To Taiwan. For multiple weeks. It quickly became clear that unless I accepted food that I had not before, I was going to be very hungry, not to mention a pain and burden for the nice people and companies hosting me, who were really very sweet. So I sucked it up and tried it. All of it.

By the end of my time there, I had come to eat and enjoy many things that would have made me turn green at the thought just weeks previous. Examples: Hundred Year Eggs, quail egg on a stick, duck’s blood (congealed blood cooked in a pot, somewhat like a fondue pot. The result is like a meat-flavored pudding), the Chinese kimchi, Ox tendon (the best! Meat-flavored caramel!), crab eggs, and several other things I’ve forgotten the names of. There were many things I tried that I didn’t like, too: I still loathe squid, I find octopus too rubbery, I’m just not fond of tripe, and escargot is like chewing a buttered tire.

But of all of the things I tried (and some was quite raunchy), I just COULD NOT force myself to try the Stinky Tofu. You can smell the stuff from 2 blocks away. If Limburger is old gym socks, stinky tofu is old gym socks that someone puked in and then left in the sun for a few days. Fresh cow pies would be a GREAT change of odor when you’re passing one of the stinky tofu vendors.

But since I technically didn’t eat it, it doesn’t count for the OP. So instead I’ll have to give this little gem:

  1. raw squid, ie sashimi calamari. I had already been eating other sashimi that day, but the squid tasted pretty much just like they look: slimy, rubbery, and gross. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part was that when I bit down, >something< inside it “popped”, and out oozed more of >something<. To this day I don’t know what, but it made the idea of eating snot palatable by comparison.

  2. Aside from the odd fly or mosquito as any real outdoorsman has had fly into his mouth at the wrong time, the worst was probably when my wife and I were doing the long-distance relationship thing with me off at a job and she wrapping up college. I was visiting, and she had some Arizona tea on the counter, and I, not being a tea fan, figured I’d try it just to see. Little did I know that this was no longer tea, but rather a mold experiment. To this day, I have never tried a real Arizona tea.

But as nasty as that was, stinky tofu smells worse. Much worse.

106

When will parents learn to not eat food off of their babies? :smiley:

107

Bat Ray is definitely the worst thing I’ve ever tried. I caught a small one (maybe around 10 pounds, they get over 150 pounds) while fishing one day and decided to give it a shot. I split the fillets into four pieces, gave two to a friend and kept two for myself.

So I soaked one of the pieces in milk overnight, and saved the other one for later. Even the milk bath didn’t help remove the ammonia taste from the fish. Not only did it taste like piss, but it had the stringiest, and crappiest texture I’ve ever seen on a fish.

Never again.

108

  1. Pennywort drink. Purchased at an Asian market out of curiosity, it smelled like swampwater and tasted like swampwater with sugar mixed in.

  2. Perfumed wax disk. No one in my house has yet owned up to dropping it in the candy dish, but I’ll never blindly grab a handful of m&m’s again.

109

I, too, have experienced the horror that is cigarette ashes in a beverage can. I can only hope that the dramatic decrease in smoking will eliminate this menace. But I’m not optimistic - people don’t have ashtrays anymore, so the use of makeshift ashtrays is probably as common as ever.

When I was a kid, those long, boring summers with nothing to do frequently resulted in the dreaded “gross food eating contest”. I won one of these contests by ingesting a tablespoon of Liquid Smoke. That was actually worse than the cigarette ashes. Everything I ate for about the next week tasted hickory-smoked.

110

  1. Campari. My good friend (also a poster on this board) decided that since we were at an all-inclusive resort and it was free, he’d try it since he’d always read about it and never tried it. So he ordered a Campari with soda on the rocks. He took one sip, and made a face. “OMG, try it, it’s AWFUL.” And all five of the rest of us DID. I can only blame the copious amounts of other, good-tasting booze that we’d been drinking for the fact that all of us drank that crap. It tasted just like that white powdery stuff they put on balloons. Like rubber bands soaked in gasoline. I can’t believe people drink it voluntarily. It was quite the laugh, though, at the time.

  2. When I was a kid, maybe five or six years old, I read something that talked about the wonderful taste of “dandelion milk.” Having picked my share of dandelions at the time, I noticed that a milky substance seeped out of the stems. I’d tried the stuff that came out of honeysuckle flowers (delicious) so I figured this had to taste great.

It tasted like Campari. I don’t recommend trying it. Still don’t know what “dandelion milk” means.

111

OK, that’s funny.

In case you’re being serious about the dandelion milk, it’s just a term referring to the fact that the fluid looks somewhat white and milky. That’s it. The same reason that milkweed has the name it has.

112

Actually I like it too, so I probably shouldn’t have listed it here. I wish I could get malort here in town; I still have the empty bottle as a relic.

113

Not a foodstuff but something intended to be put in your mouth and swallowed; metronidazole aka Flagyl, a medication. Nastiest stuff ever. The taste lingers for hours.

114

A friend gave me a batch of radishes from his garden. I ate a couple, then bit into a bad one. It was horrible and took at least two days before the horrible taste went away. Nothing could kill the aftertaste, I tried everything I could think of.

115

A long time ago, I was partying with a group of friends. At this party was a Corona beer bottle that had a hole drilled in the side and a stem and bowl inserted. This neat Corona bong was filled with nasty old water that contained ash, drool, who knows what else. I showed up at the party with a twelve pack of, you guessed it, Corona beers. It didn’t take me long to swig the wrong bottle.

I think I died that day.

116

I’m not sure which category this falls in, since it is food, but is definitely not intended to be eaten by itself: polysorbate 60.

I saw a Google Lunch with Steve Ettlinger, who wrote a book on all of the stuff that goes into a Twinkie, and one of the things he mentioned is that polysorbate 60 is used as an emulsifier partly because it’s so sweet. In fact, according to him, if you eat just one spoonful, you’ll be unable to taste anything else for two full weeks.

117

Intended to be eaten; Probably Spam.
Not intended to be eaten; at my boyfriends house, 16 years old, hot day, really thirsty, opened a warm can of Coke, took a few drinks, go out to the garage with him to look at something with his dad, put my Coke down, pick it up a few minutes later, take a big gulp, NOT MY COKE!!!, a very old Coke with balls of maggots in it. I swallowed maggots and was unable to force myself to vomit. 18 years later and I still very much wish I could have vomited that day.

118

If they know you don’t like Spam, they’ll return you to the mainland at the Honolulu Airport. It’s BIG in Hawaii.

119

More or less “off” fish was preferred by many North Eurasian indigenous folks, like the Saami. Hey, at least it has a taste, unlike the fat-free, white, neutral fresh fish meat around here. The first hakarl in history was probably an accidentally buried shark carcass that an early Icelander in dire pangs of hunger happened upon. Food was really not that easy to come by on those Icelandic shorelines in pre-modern times.

As per the OP, I have tasted my own piss, accidentally, when climaxing with a full bladder and a skywards erection while sitting on a toilet. Not very nice.

120

Nope, not at all. Sometimes I bit on a beak or claw or something, and I spit it out.