The worst food-thing I ever ate was a Korean snack food called a “choon”. I don’t know the correct English spelling, but it was pronounced “choon”. Some sort of semi-dried pickled cherry or some such. Truly ghastly. And I’ve eaten local poor villager “cuisine” on several continents. If anyone knows what “choons” actually are, please enlighten us; I’m afraid to Google.
The worst non-food thing ever was automotive brake fluid. I wasn’t trying to drink it, since it’s serious poison. I was just trying to pipette a little out of a reservoir by mouth. And I over-suctioned. I only ended up with a fraction of a teaspoon in my mouth & none swallowed. It was truly awful. I tried several things, up to and including liquid dish soap, to get the taste out. Nothing worked at all and the flavor took hours to finally fade.
Do not EVER pipette toxins or even relatively benign petroleum products by mouth.
Most disgusting-tasting thing that’s supposed to be ingested? The question makes no sense. If I find that something tastes disgusting, it goes on the other list.
Oysters are on that list, and I cannot comprehend the fact that a second person ever put one into his mouth.
While I can’t vouch for oysters as the tastiest shellfish I’ve ever eaten, I find nothing wrong with them. My six-year-old brother didn’t agree; after everyone else had left the table I spent a half hour with him trying to convince him to eat one. He finally did, but so far as I know in the 45 years since then he has never eaten another one.
I qualified for the Honor Society in high school, and we attended a dinner at a nice little French restaurant. Before we were served the regular food we had to eat a snail. I did, but I’ll never do that again!
Meant to be eaten:
I love steamed clams, but I once ate one that had a large amount of some kind of gritty, disgusting substance that had the mouthfeel of sandy mud. As for the taste, I’d like to think I know what feces actually tastes like now. I’m not sure if the clam was bad or what, but I couldn’t eat clams for about 6 months after that. Now I am sure to check every single clam thoroughly before depositing it into my gullet.
Not meant to be eaten:
In the late 80’s, Diet Coke was sold in short, squat glass bottles. I would often go into my older brother’s room when he wasn’t there because he was older and had more interesting things to look at than I did in my room.
Anyway, I’m drinking a cold Diet Coke from one of these bottles and placed it on his dresser. I’m absentmindedly looking through one of his comic books when, without looking, I took the bottle and drank.
The first thing I noticed was that the Coke was oddly warm, since I had just taken it out of the fridge. Once that hit me, I immediately noticed it didn’t taste like Coke at all, but rather… warm, earthy tobacco.
I ran to the bathroom, spit it out, and washed my mouth out for 5 minutes. My brother used to dip, and he would spit his tobacco juice into an empty Diet Coke bottle. I had placed my fresh Coke next to his full bottle of weeks-old dip spit. I want to vomit now just thinking about it. Oddly enough, I didn’t vomit then.
What a stupid, evil thing for that someone to do, if that was on purpose! This reminds me of a huge Chinese dollar store here that had hundreds of bottles of cleaner on the shelves, in different colors. The bottles were soda-bottle shaped, and anyone could have bought some thinking, ‘fruit punch’ or ‘orangeade’.
That happened to me with steamed mussels in the shell, in a garlic wine sauce. It was delicious until nasty poop sand. I tried to recover, and kept eating…there was ANOTHER one like that. :smack: I think it was at a chinese buffet. Anyway, I seem to remember looking it up later and finding out that it could be dangerous to eat that due to some sort of pathogen, but I don’t remember what.
Also vile: sea urchin or roe and nuoc nam fish sauce (at least by itself). As for inedibles, I have to say steroid cream is pretty bad. Have also drank the ashtray as others have mentioned.
Every restaurant inspection report lists Chinese buffet violations, paragraphs long. Paragraphs. I suppose with all those different foods requiring proper temperatures, it’s no surprise there are violations. I have eaten there several times (the family insists on going there on special occasions) and on two occasions gone home to be very very sick. But all that lovely seafood spread out for the taking, for $15! Can’t resist! Where else would you get all that for so cheap? (I have learned to avoid mussels and oysters and clams, though.)
I don’t know if they still do this, but years ago it was common for beer to be sold in returnable bottles; when you were done with your case of beer, you brought the empties back to the store for a credit of maybe a couple of bucks. Instead of being melted down and molded into new bottles, these returned bottles would be sent back to the brewery where they were washed and reused.
Summer '91, I had a case of such beer that had been sitting in my kitchen at room temperature for quite a while. Unbeknownst to me, one of these reused bottles had a chip in the lip, so when the lid was installed at the brewery, it never completely sealed. When I finally got around to opening it, it didn’t make the classic FSSST sound as I popped the cap off. For some reason I disregarded that little detail and took a big swig straight from the bottle, and then spent the next couple of minutes at the kitchen sink trying to wash out the most horribly taste I had ever tasted. I then poured the rest of the beer into a glass, and observed a large mass of…floating material, which I assume was some sort of bacterial/fungal colony. Gads, makes me shudder just thinking about it.
I enjoy a lot of the foods people hate. Asian upbringing I guess. I’ve had balut, 100 year eggs, stinky tofu, various parts of ducks and chickens, and odd parts of fish and shellfish and like them all.
Some of the worst things I’ve ever eaten that are supposed to be eaten are:
Durian: Hate this so much. I once bought one to just try and see what all the fuss is about. We opened it in the kitchen and took a bite and had to throw out the rest of it. It stunk up the house for hours too. Smells like toilet runoff. I accidentally also ate a free sample of durian ice cream thinking it was mango or lemon. Even frozen, that shit lingers in your mouth for a long time
I hate cilantro. I go to restaurants that put it in their noodles or whatever and I would, to this day, spend 10 minutes picking out every stem and leaf so that I won’t have to eat it.
I don’t have much food accidents like a lot of you, so the closest I came to eating something that shouldn’t be eaten (at least by humans), is goldfish food and both the dry and wet kind of dog food. I was just curious and wanted to know what they taste like. FYI, dog food, while it may smell good, has no salt and is bland as hell. Maybe I could have added some salt or something to it, but I was satisfied with the experiment already
A bottle of coconut water that had gone bad. I think.
At work we have a beverage fridge I usually drink soda or water. We were out of both, so I thought “well, lots of other people here drink this stuff” and I took one.
Short story time:
When I was a kid, we lived near a highway that went through a forest. People would frequently hit whitetail deer on this road. Usually the deer was killed instantly and was either taken by locals and turned into jerky, or was left and eventually disposed of by county road crews.
One time a deer didn’t die instantly. It staggered off into the woods and could not be found, not even by search party formed by the jerky makers.
Until a few days later, when it started to stink. It stank so bad that it wasn’t hard to find. It had made it about 500 feet into the woods and died at the base of a small limestone outcropping. When the wind blew from that direction it made our whole house smell of death. It was horrible. We couldn’t even move it because it was just falling apart in clouds of flies and miasma.
Eventually, after running out of ideas, my dad dumped kerosene all over it, covered it in branches and twigs, and incinerated it. That smell was even more horrible, but at least when it was done the stink of death was gone.
Back to the issue at hand:
This bottle of coconut water tasted as if someone had distilled all of the horrible death stink from that dead deer and put it in a bottle. A bottle that I then took a big swig out of.
Thing meant to be eaten or drank that was, but regretted: bitter as the cud sour ass milk. Drank it with the impatience of a man dying from thirst. Didn’t notice it until a few mouthfuls had gone down. I vomited exactly that same moment.
Also; perhaps unfairly: After a long and drunken houseboat party I emerged in the morning after hungover like hell, feeling pretty damn wretched. My desperate lizard brain instructs me to find water. I found a not labelled 4L bottle of not water, and lazily gulped from it. The container was my good but masochistic friend’s stash of homemade vodka that had finished somewhere in the 90% range. Blegh is what followed.
Some brilliant posts here… a fascinating read. Never ever stop testing the limits, people!
I don’t think this was mentioned, so…my kid and I were merrily eating taco chips on the sofa and our dear tabby cat came to share. She loves to grab the taco chips from our hands and she eats the salt from our fingers.
After we were done, my daughter scooped up the crumbs from the bowl and gave them to me. She’s such a sweetie for sharing. Unbeknownst to me she must have also taken the crumbs the cat dropped on the sofa and mixed in there were several grains of cat litter.
It was gritty of course, and had that aluminum or talcum powderish texture. Very drying on the tongue, but then, it’s the clumping kind. I spit it out and wiped my tongue but couldn’t get rid of the taste. And I didn’t want to think that my dear cat had just been toileting herself but naturally, why else would she be tracking cat litter around?
Now my husband watches me when I scratch behind my ears or lie down in a sunny spot…
I went to survival camp when I was about 12. We could take two matches, two sheets of aluminum foil, a canteen, some fishing line and hooks and a knife out in the woods for 2 days. Everything else we did or ate or drank was up to us. We caught some small fish but that wasn’t enough to feed even one person so we had to go hunting by hand.
Other people (not me), caught and killed a large snapping turtle and an armadillo. Turtle can be good but not this one. It tasted just like concentrated swamp mud so we moved on and cooked the armadillo oven an open fire. Roasted leprosy on the half-shell is probably the most disgusting thing I have ever bitten into. If you have ever smelled a dead armadillo in its natural habitat (face up and dead on the road), that is basically what it tastes like fresh too.
I too have accidentally taken a swig from a communal Skoal beer can and it was way worse than that.
I almost drank from spring water at Saratoga Springs State Park in New York. Now supposedly each spring has its own flavor, but my brother bottled some water from a particular spring, which was probably the wrong choice of spring, because I took a mouthful when we got back home.
It had a fairly strong sulfur taste, moreso than anything else I’ve put in my mouth. But the sulfur taste was amplified by the saltiness. Without the salt it would have tasted like off-tasting water, but with the salt it tasted like extremely rotten meat, so I instinctually ran to a sink to spit it out.
ETA: ironically the city of Saratoga Springs has great tasting tap water , even for NYS which is known for its great tasting tap water. I ordered seconds of water at a restaurant there because I liked the taste rather than for thirst.