I was at an office shindig when a colleague happened to mention the worst food he has ever eaten (pizza with tuna and peas on it, at a pub in England). That got me thinking:
What is the worst food I have ever eaten?
What is the worst food you have ever eaten?
It’s a tough choice. The average person eats about 1,000 meals a year, more or less. Multiply that by your age and it turns out you’ve had an awful lot of meals to choose from.
For me, it is quite possibly the pizzaburgers served in the Cincinnati Public Schools. They resembled neither a pizza nor a burger, and could barely qualify as food. Half of a hamburger bun was topped with a substance that was probably meant to be ground beef, which in turn was covered with a tomato sauce that was somewhat less than ketchup, topped with a slice of something the approximate color of cheese.
Either that or a bowl of vaguely brown water claiming to be chili at a café in Alma, Mich., in the late 1960s.
I put the question — what is the worst food you have ever eaten — out onto social media and was rewarded with a deluge of responses. I also asked what is the best food you have ever eaten, and will get to those answers next week.
But first, the worst. And I should explain that most of these came from Facebook, which means I know almost all of the respondents. The answers may actually say more about my taste in friends than they do about food.
The most common answers were Vegemite and Marmite, those sharp-flavored yeast-based toppings that are inexplicably popular in Australia and the British Isles. Hannah, whose husband is English, said her worst food was Marmite on toast, adding, “crazy Brits!” Natalie said, “Don’t get it.” Cristina agreed. Amy R. said the worst was a tie between Vegemite and mayonnaise.
Mayonnaise? She seems so reasonable in other respects.
Julie hates okra, which she says is “essentially a nostril.” Trish and Tom both despise chicken feet. Crys dislikes boiled peanuts (they’re a South Carolina thing, and they’re worse than they sound), “chopped liver at my grandmother’s house” and oysters.
But the very worst thing she ever had, Crys said, was in China: chicken aortas in a hot pot, served with congealed duck blood. I can’t argue with that.
Frank has a three-way tie for the worst food he ever ate: C ration canned turkey loaf, C ration canned lima beans and ham, and “almost anything served in an Army mess hall on weekends from 1968-1971.”
My cousin Kim answered “Canned asparagus. Why is this even a thing?” Writing in response, her sister Stephanie reminded her of a time when their mother served canned spinach. Neither one could eat it. Their mother finally got tired of waiting for them to finish it and went into the other room. That’s when they fed it to their dog, Heidi.
“She scarfed it right up. I don’t think mom knew what we’d done at the time, but we never had to eat spinach again,” Stephanie said.
For Lee, the worst food will always be sweet potatoes. “I once ate an alive earthworm on a dare, and it was not as bad as a sweet potato,” he said.
Charlie’s worst food was calf’s spleen, and I can’t imagine what induced him to try it. The same goes for Carol, who tried monkey brains. Food writer Veruska said the worst thing she has eaten is a Korean dish called gaebul, which is also called “penis fish.” She helpfully attached a photo to explain the nickname.
Susie’s worst food was “the fermented squid guts I just had (not on purpose) while on vacation in Japan.” For Bo, it was the squid chili he had in Chicago.
Judy and Sheila both despise blood pudding, a British sausage made with animal blood, pork fat and a grain such as oatmeal.
Joe, who sounds as if he speaks from experience, said, the worst thing is “making a good sandwich, taking a bite and finding that the bread has mold on it that you didn’t see.”
Mary Louise is a retired minister, and she knows what she is talking about, too: “Swiss steak made in large quantities for fundraising. Ugh.”
Mark said the spaghetti served at the old Denver Hilton “sticks in my mind, and craw, 43 years later. Chef Boy-Ar-Dee would’ve chucked it into the garbage.”
Rex bought an omelet to-go at a diner many years ago.
“The dish literally stank. I suppose the eggs had spoiled. They were infused with a sticky, gelatinous substance resembling mucilage that kids used to glue model airplanes back then.
“I was home when I noticed the problem, and didn’t want to go back to the restaurant. Somehow, I told myself the omelet wasn’t all that bad. I was really, really hungry, and I ate it. I got really, really sick,” he said.
Priscilla had much the same physical reaction when she was 5 and her father cooked a rabbit and squirrel stew over an open fire. “I was … appalled at the whole idea, but forced to eat it,” she said.
Gail mistranslated a menu in Beaune, France, and ordered a vegetable terrine with what she thought was a mushroom on top. It was “bumpy and rubbery” and turned out to be a cockscomb, the red crown on the top of rooster heads.
“I’ll never know how I got it down. I mean, who puts that thing on top of a vegetable dish?” she said.
What is worse, she paid extra for it.
I’m not the only one to have a bad school cafeteria experience. Kate said her worst dish was dorm food at Indiana University. Michelle hated the Texas hash at her high school. Stuart, who went to grade school with me, said his worst food was the creamed chipped beef at our cafeteria.
Personally, I had blissfully forgotten the creamed chipped beef — and the shingle.
