Busy.
In Soviet Russia, visitors write blog for you!
No but seriously, been incredibly busy this last week and it’s not going to stop for a while. Whodathunkit - what with my personal side-projects, writing for Gizmodo, being summoned in an impromptu fashion to join “girl’s night out” (you know who you are) thus cementing once and for all the fact that everybody thinks I’m gay, and all the while somehow fitting in my regular day job - I’ve found myself with fark all time to blog this week.
So, you bloody well write something. Here’s the question - and prepare to be awestruck by what can only be described as breathtaking obviousness:
What is the most disgusting food you have ever eaten?
Answers in the comments section below.
My aunt had a glass container of bourbon cherries that she kept hidden in the liqour cabinet. Every Christmas season she’d dust it off and place it on the coffee table like some kind of alcoholic holiday decoration. It became a running gag in our family to dare one another to eat one of the horrid things. The scary part was that she had been doing this with the same container of bourbon cherries since before I was born. So on the day that I decide to try one I was 18 years old. They assured me that the bourbon had preserved the cherries but as I pulled one out of the jar it began to fall apart in my fingers. I quickly jammed it in to my mouth before it could disentigrate. The taste was overwhelming. For the most part it tasted of bourbon… who’d of thought? The rotten cherry aftertaste combined with the squishy texture of the rotted out cherry hull to make me feel as if I had just eaten the worm out of the bottom of a tequilla bottle. Except instead of a worm, it was a maggot made out of cherries.
I still can’t eat too many things cherry. Cherries jubilee, cherry cough medicine, women named Sherrie.
Yong Fook’s spunk.
In all seriousness, it was my ex-girlfriend’s father’s favorite “pizza”. No one in their right mind could consider this pizza, but after hearing him talk about it for 2 hours (yea, we drove two hours to get to this damn place to eat this damn pizza). I was thinking, you know what it might be good.
We then walk into this restaurant where I see a lot of lunch school trays. Which makes most people immediately think, you know what this might not be the classiest joint I’ve ever been to. Pizza at this place apparently does not come on metal discs that are most condusive to pizza serving. They come on used bright orange plastic lunch trays. Most of them are still wet from not being properly wiped down.
On to the pizza:
The fat bastard is looking at me with the worlds widest eyes hoping for some appraisal of this horrid experience. I take a bite of the nuclear hot cracker like pizza. Immediate I try to swallow so as not to keep the crap in my mouth long and say, “That’s not mozzerella cheese is it?”
With the most pleased look on his face he says, “No, it’s AMERICAN!”
Needless to say it tasted like crap. Big dog feces spread on an oily cracker. I took one bite, went to the bathroom threw up what had gone in and said I didn’t feel well.
hmm can’t think of anything REALLY bad,ate something that tasted of vomit once. The strange thing was it was only in combination…chicken crisps and tropical ‘capri-sun’ drink, it had the flavour exact of real vomit. That was pretty rough.
I spent one of my student years living with a hateful mature student who was also a vegetarian, and she used to eat all of these bizarre fake meat products and ‘tofu spots’ and the like. One day she had a tin of something called ‘Mock Duck’, and I, like a fool, decided to sample some of it. It was awful. It looked like duck…it smelt like duck…but when you put it in your mouth, your brain - expecting some duck by this point - just went haywire.
IT’S NOT DUCK IT’S NOT DUCK CHRIST WHAT IS IT OH JESUS PAUL SPIT IT OUT.
The texture and taste were so wrong, so alien…it was like Seth Brundle had put a duck in his teleporter and then canned what came out the other end.
ooo check the typo *exact flavour of
Without a doubt it was the only time I ate Tuna - the most disgusting thing I have ever tasted. I still wince at the thought if it and that was probably 40 years ago.
One time I ate some bad gazelle and I had the poops for a week. It’s best to stay away from the ones that don’t run away.
I did this two week gig at the United Nations registering delegates for some kind of meeting a few years ago. When it was over we had this staff party at a fancy hotel. It was my first party where you actually had waiters in fancy suits passing around hors d’oeuvres on silver trays and I was really excited to start trying stuff out. The first one that came passed me had these neat little balls of goat cheese. I liked feta so I figured, hey can’t go wrong.
First let me say, it had the texture of wet cement coated in molasses but tasted like spunk. It was impossibly thick but I couldn’t just spit it out (I mean this was a pretty nice gathering and it would be grossly inappropriate). I couldn’t even order a drink to wash it down because my entire mouth was glued shut. My only choice was to swallow it as quickly and demurely as possible.
Vile. Truly vile.
A christmas dish that my dad’s girlfriend makes always interested me until I had the stupidity to ask what it was. I thought it was some type of noodle served cold in a vinegar sauce like sunimono salad. “Noodle? Stupid white boy! It’s jellyfish”, she would say. No joke, pickled jellyfish is hands down the most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten: Even veal thymus sounds appetizing compared to pickled jellyfish.
spicy pickled mangos at a nepalese curry restaurant in Chiba.
“spicy pickled mangos at a nepalese curry restaurant in Chiba.”
I second the spicy pickled mangos.
One time there was this waterbug, and you know, waterbugs are usually like black and kinda green or something, but I decided to try a RED one instead. Damn. Don’t eat the red ones.
foie gras. ]:
i had some bad shu mai once. i shall never eat shu mai again. ecch. blehblehbleh.
One word: Uni
Orange/brown colored sushi, with the consistency of snot and a truly nasty fishy/mediciney flavor. People tell me it should just be orange and I have must have had a bad batch…. I don’t care, I’ll never touch the stuff, again!
Isn’t it all the more galling when you actually have to PAY for the crap you eat? Ho-ho with a monocle on. Let me share with you all the story of the shite i got for FREE (w00t)!
This happened roughly 3 years ago when I was “serving my nation” doing my 2.5 years of conscripted service in the army. When out on field camp, we had to eat combat rations, the most putrid of which being the glorious culinary miracle that is chestnut rice with chicken. It comes in a olive green foil pouch and has been so pumped full of artificial preservatives and whatnot that it could arguably hold sentient life. What can you say about something that has a shelf life of 2 FUCKING YEARS. At ROOM TEMPERATURE. In TROPICAL HEAT.
You don’t eat it with utensils, you sort of tear a hole at the top and squeeze it through, like eating a bar of chocolate. This is due to it being a rectangular solid-y liquid-y mass with all the rice and stuff stuck together. Imagine a glutinous rice dumpling but with none of the redeeming taste qualities.
So! I cracked it open and the first thought I had was that someone had threw up in it. I swear, in my life up to that point I’ve never smelt anything so putrid without it being infested with maggots. Imagine my surprise when my instructors told me it was SUPPOSED to smell that way. I’ve heard this story a friend told me of him throwing it to the stray dogs but they just sniffed it and turned away.
About a week after I first started working here in Japan, I had come home late from work and hadn’t had dinner yet. It was about 10pm and the only places that were open in my tiny little suburb were McDonald’s (fail), a ice cream/crepes parlour (nice, but I wanted something dinner-ish) and this small shop whose kanji I couldn’t read but who seemed to be selling balls-on-a-stick.
Ok, I thought, I can try some balls-on-a-stick. I thought they were curry or pork balls or something. I ordered three.
When I bit into the bloody thing, my mouth curled up into a whimpering little chasm of pain and disgust. Then I looked into what I had just bitten into…
There was a BABY TENTACLE there, sticking out of the ball! A little tentacle with all it’s little suckers plainly visible, waving at me! My disgust and pain turned into blind, numbing horror.
The little bastard then lashed out of it’s deep-fried home, with a splurk, to rape me, orally and elsewhere, along with all of it’s other baby tentacle friends.
This, I thought, was revenge for hanging out in the basements of Akihabara, freaking out the fat, sweaty otaku that were there trying to read their hentai in peace, while some gaijin girl was grinning at them like the Cheshire Cat.
Later, after recounting my experience to some friends, they said “Ah. Takoyaki” and nodded knowledgebly like they had all been through the same tentacle rape. WHY WASN’T I WARNED?? WHY??
Appearance: Deceptive. There are many (mostly) edible balls-on-a-stick foods in Japan. I thought this was another one. 3/5
Taste/Smell: Urk. Urrrk urk blergh mmph umph umf! 0/5
Fear Factor: I promise I will never mock tentacle porn ever again. 5/5
Health Implications: I think I may be pregnant. 0/5
Overall: oh gods don’t let me relive it again please no…
Pig’s (I guess?) intestine at a Korean BBQ in Azabu-whatsit in Tokyo. Not bad, but I couldn’t get the thought that “This once had pig shit in it” out of my head. Totally recommend the restaurant, especially the “fire-bowl” thingy. Sorry, I was three sheets to the wind that night ;)
P.S So you’re in demand; good work fella.
i was at a friend’s barbeque about 6 years ago. my friend (not so much now that i think of it), said she was sent this special tau pok(soyabean fermented thing) from Hong Kong. It fucking smelt like shit-soaked garbage. but she kept insisting it tasted fabulous, depite the smell. i am not one to back down from a food challenge, so i took a bite and promptly spat out the offensive piece of crap-tasting soya whatever and spent the rest of a good half-hour gagging and hocking chow into a toilet.
people who tell you that ass-smelling food is tasty are out of their fucking minds.
I once worked in a restaurant as a kitchenhand/dishbitch. I was the only vegetarian who worked there, and one day the first year apprentice was given the task of making the staffie (staff meal). Being the lazy turd that he was, he decided to make a stir fry, because it’s a) dead easy, b) stupidly fast and c) easy to make for a vegetarian when you can’t get over the whole “But how can ANYONE not eat meat?”
It was quite literally the most revolting thing I’ve ever eaten, and I remember the taste of cat food biscuits from when I was dared to eat them as a kid. Because he’d made it an hour or so before I finished, and the METHOD he used to cook it (almost stewing it in the wok) it was the texture of mucousy vomit, and he’d added so much fish sauce (a particularly nice touch- it contains fish and seafood- neither of which I eat) that it was salty and bitter enough to make my tongue shrivel.
I’m amazed I didn’t vomit, and fortunately the other chefs saw this revolting concoction and let me make myself something edible from what was in the fridges.
Chicken gizzards. In Malaysia they like to serve these things either boiled to bits or stir-fried, and drowned in sesame-oil (which in of itself, is rather tasty). But taste cannot overcome texture and the thought of biting into a perfectly shaped miniature set of heart and lungs…
I’ll eat the livers, but not the heart and lungs!! Nor the kidneys, those ropey-intestines, or those pig’s ears and trotters they have in the windows of chinese butcher shops and… —yeargh—
So, I guess the same goes for chicken-feet - all rubbery with their many little bits of bone (chicken knuckles! Where do they scratch!? Oh GOD), snails (rubbery garlicky butterballs), raw oysters (teh exploding slimy made me retch), and tripe/intestine - which tasted okay but the sight of all those little villi making it look like a rubber-mat with taste-buds on it, nevermind having the same thought as HP mentioned earlier, about how this thing had bile/digested food/shit passing through and allover it.
Zadie? Is that YOU!?!? X3
And egg-nog with not-so-fresh-but-still-’okay’ eggs.
‘Coz the egg-whites are then somewhat gloopy and coagulated and hidden very well so you don’t know it’s there until the stretchy gelatinous glob of protein hits the back of your throat making you gag and swallow half of it, and then choke as you realise what’s going on and what the fuck it is only to have to swallow the rest of it because mate, that’s the way it’s already headed!!
gizzard isn’t heart or lung…
hehe- Tigris it is indeedy me. ^_~ One of the joys of having been vegetarian for so long is that I’ve got to miss out on the eating food that has formerly had an unpleasant bodily function. Although- before I went vegetarian, I did actually eat some Donkey salami, and it was homemade. So the skin would have been the intestines. At least it was spicy so it tasted ok.
I have relatives in Sudan, and when I went there when I was young they offered us um-fitfit, which is raw stomach and small intestine of a sheep, with sheep’s bile, for breakfast. I could only take one bite, it was disgusting!
When I was a little girl, I spent two months in Korea, travelling, visting obscure relatives that would marvel at the fact that I was American. I had to buy a new wardrobe to avoid being stoned in the street, or summat like that.
I think we were somewhere outside of Pusan, but I can’t say for sure. We were eating sushi/sashimi in some hole in the wall restaurant. I was never one for seafood and the texture of raw fish particularly squicked me. I was more than happy to stick with the cooked stuff. My father, however, insisted that I try this one glorious thing. I think it was sea urchin.
It managed to be both slimy and crunchy at the same time and tasted like ass. There was no bathroom so I ran out onto the street and spat it into the gutter. I returned and had 3 glasses of water. Ugh. I hate sea urchin.
Escargo - salty, slimy, ickypoo.
I pretty much eat anything, including the infamous Korean stewed dog… but this ONE got me, really. Even Jae’s raw food experience was pretty mild ~ I’ve tried the sea urchin she mentioned, and I must say it was pretty good… Once you get past the idea of what it looks like.
Was doing a job in Chile, and with a weekend off. So who could resist going all out to try the local food right? So I rocked up to the local Mercado Central (market), not knowing what to order, and picked the most exotic sounding dish.
“Hmm… XXX lingua (tongue) sounds exotic! I’ll have me one of those!”
I’ve tried baked ox-tongue you see, and it was excellent! Hence that didn’t sound grotesque AT ALL. Little did I know until I saw the dish before me… Four letters mate… four letters ~ F.U.C.K.
Platter + slices of RAW, smooth, slitthery morsels of ox tongue + two pieces of lemon and salt…
I came, I tried, I reordered.
*The half a bit which I tried evidently got spit out.
in that order.
BBQ Rat’s Tail from vietnam, I swear it taste of rat shiatz, ammonia and petroleum all into one.
I had to stay in hospital for 3 days and something shafted up my a-hole.
Screw Rats
3 things …
My cousin can’t cook … she abso-fuckin-lutely can’t cook. She uses a timer to boil water and frequently burns out the bottom of the pan. Her meatloaf is everything that is left over in the refrigerator…really, mushed up boiled & then baked. I swear to Gawd, it tasted like dead road kill. I puked for 3 days…
A malasian meal in a discount restaurant in the Chinese section of London - tasted VERY similar to my cousins meat loaf…
DURIAN - that bloated porcupine looking fruit? that smells like & tastes like (to me anyway) natto. UGH!!!!
my first uni was like licking the arse of the ocean, but no doubt, it was cheap as shit and uni mustn’t ever be cheap; since then, i can assure any uni haters, good uni is fucking amazing, its the generous vaginal mucus of venus herself, a gorgeous head-job on your tongue. to give up after one bad experience would be to do the same for sex. i really hated mentaiko too until it stopped coming from convenience stores.
that said, there are food dimensions i can’t return to after the first fucked try: the thought of long thin silver 7 cm fishies eaten whole was never appealing, definitely because you’d be eating their shitty bums along with the rest of them, but when you`ve just broken your vegetarian clamps and in a stupor of drunken daringness take it on for your japanese friends, who can’t get enough, then find the back half of the fish in your hands contains half a belly full of eggs, and that this is the beauty of the dish, that all those fishies in front of you were hand picked for their pregnantness, you don’t realise you’ll be feeling insanely nauseous for the next week.
and then there’s shirako, no so much like giving oral sex as just simply eating a fish’s vagina. i got a table of avoiding-the-question silence, and then a descreet under the table explanation by way of my girlfriend’s own hairpie, upon asking after the coily white stuff on the grill in front of me. but hey why Not try it, i like vaginas don’t i? its not so much that it tastes bad, but its a grilled fish’s vagina, and its creamy like white sauce, its a warm white grilled fish’s vagina, and that creamy stuff isn’t going away like bechemel does, that creamy fish vagina is sticking around, getting everywhere in your mouth just like, well, just like cum must.
Manflesh. Snoogins.
first: raw pig intestine. never, never again.
second: fish ovum. ugh.
i don’t care, the ’sauce’ does NOT make anything like the above taste good…
Well..it’s gotta be the fish semen sack my Japanese girlfriend and her Mum made me eat when out at a pretty posh restaurant..
Some kind of perverted gaijin joke you’d think.. but they were eating it too!
I knew it was somethin disgusting, yet all they told me was “It’s very delicious… try! try! It’s straight from the fish.. very fresh!..”
Luckily I’d been drinking Kirin by the long-neck..
Looked like a bunch of tiny white sacks in a small decorative bowl.
Kinda dissolved in my mouth with a chilled ‘ramune’ candy type of feeling (if you know what I mean!). Slimey too. But kinda like you didn’t need to swallow!
I didn’t find out what it was until weeks later.. Felt like puking for days after
BE CAREFUL!!
OI. DON’T PICK ON THE DURIANS.
Jon, we invited you out because as much fun as “girl’s night out” sounds, by the end of happy hour, chicks just want to get laid. Moreover, you were the only penis (yeah I said it, that’s what men are to us) in the vicinity that didn’t have a buzz cut or a navy tattoo. And when I say buzz cut, I mean head, not penis. Don’t bother reiterating to us once again that your man in the pink helmet is whiskerless.
While I’m here, the most disgusting thing I’ve consumed would have to be these two different forms of tea: 1. Yak butter tea. I don’t know who those Tibetan nomads are kidding, it’s Yak urine tea as far as I’m concerned. 2. Chong cha (bug tea). There are different variations of bug tea but the kind I had was made out of moth feces.
Unfortunately, in both circumstances I was in extremely remote areas with no running water so my only hope for an immediate chaser would be to wash it down with my own piss. As wrong as that may sound, both teas were so revolting I was compelled to at least gargle with it.
Boarding school dinners.
1) Soggy,limp,impotent taugeh (beansprouts) the cooks were tring to pass off for a stir-fry.
2) barely cleaned fish that must have been dropped and boiled whole, head,guts,bones and all into a boiling vat a bland ,watery, tumeric coloured broth.
3) anchovies,(normally quite nice when fried to a golden crisp), of a fossilized rock hard consistency that made your gums bleed afterwards if you were stupid enough to actually eat them.
But hey, it was take it or leave it.
1 Uni.
No other comment necessary.
2 Oysters; aka Sea Boogers
Alright, yongfook is no longer allowed to complain about not getting laid. He was the single cock in a penis-hungry group of drunk half-lesbians sick of manly men and other girls. For shame. With proper notice I could have gotten to Tokyo in half a day’s time.
Pigs blood. In a cute little cube.
Oh MAN…
And Fuckstress is right. Durian tastes ok what. just hold your nose.
YongFook’s knuckle children…tastes like white caviar.
Mincemeat pie. If you combine the taste of fetid garbage with the texture of wet sand, you’ll come close.
I was in Korea in February. I was freezing cold, and I noticed a small cart selling what looked like a steaming stew. I had no idea what it was but bought a cup. After a few bites, I tossed this disgusting shit. Later, reading the food section of my guidebook, I realized that I’d eaten silkworms.
natto.
and having to go “mmmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMM!” complete with the o-my-dear-god-this-is-drop-dead-heavenly-big-eyed look cos i couldn’t bear to break my pretty jap host’s heart.
and then having more cos she asked me to.
i am too bloody nice.
cum
I had Durian Ice-Cream once. I don’t know who the fuck eats this shit, or how they can get past the smell, but its something akin to hot garbage and vomit, mixed with placenta.
The taste is worse. Imagine somebody wretching into your mouth and then you wretching back into theirs and then they wretch your re-wretched wretch into a dish and you take a bite. Kind of like that. Gross.
Wow. All I ever tried and hated was natto. And liver. And live oysters, but I like those now.
I’m assuming we’re excluding things that taste nasty because they’re spoiled. Otherwise, fermented orange juice and sour milk are right up there.
Two of my housemates are Korean and our refrigerator is filled with Korean food. To say that all of it looks gut-wrenchingly disgusting would not quite do it justice. I’m not sure what it is that they make their dishes out of or why it looks like containers full of fermaldahyde and fetuses and smells like rancid butter, but I don’t go near any of it. My roomate was cooking some kind of Korean soup yesterday and it made the house smell like a giant pile of dead fish…not to mention that it looked like a bog made out of spinach.
that anko shit that was in an otherwise delicous-looking pancake thing. blech!
Plus, that monjayaki enkai I went to in Tsukishima. A+ for the cultural experience, but fer christ’s sake… water, flour, and chopped cabbage is simply disgusting.
not a big fan of shabu-shabu dipping sauce, either.
After 3 years living in Japan I decided shopping at National Azabu & Meiji-ya were required sanity-savers, so I guess I ended up missing out on more cuisine experiences like natto, insects, etc. My last year there, First Kitchen was getting my custom with their damn good concoctions (their flavored fries were addictive).
It was at this little hole in the wall place just off of the Fukuoka University campus. We were out for beers and laughs and whatnot and we started getting hungry. One of the guys knew the owner and thus did all the ordering.
When it came out it simply looked like salami or something. It was very marbled with fat. I asked what it was. “Bashimi!” “Bashimi wa…?” “Uma.” “Uma?” “Uma no Sashimi.” Holy shit. Raw horse meat. This was the real deal.
Not being one to step down from a challenge, I happily scooped up a healthy slab. I mean, after all — I had survived natto, uni, mayo jago pizza, etc. What the hell kinda scare could I get out of raw horse?
I dropped it into my mouth and chewed it up pretty good. That’s when the horror hit me. Remember how I said it was really marbled? That’s supposed to be a sign of quality, right? Well, what it really means is that I had just picked up a big chunk of what is basically crisco and attempted to chew it. Not only that — I had chewed up enough of it that it had started working itself down my throat before I could react. I cleared as much as I could out of my mouth, but I had chunks of fat hugging my gums for 20 minutes afterwards.
Wait, you’re gonna tell me that there is a “jinx” who lived in Fukuoka, and hates basashi?
For the record, that’s not me. I enjoy chewing on crisco.
sogross. =O
everybody, say NO! to fish eyes.
whoever eats that crap, stay away. nutters!
fish testes.
“amber” covered scorpions, which were unsurprisingly crunchy.
Jellyfish. I was overseas. I figured I’d try something new.
You think Jellyfish would be squishy like jelly right? Wrong. You pick it up and it’s limp and wriggly and see thru. But when you put it in your mouth it’s suprisingly crunchy and makes you gag if you try and swallow. If you peeled a baby then ate the skin, I reckon it would be better.
vegemite
fortune?cancel pronouns saves vandalized …
Ahh.. you silly folk with your runaway train imaginations.
I’ve never compared food to anything other than food, until meeting Americans. “this tastes like shit. snot. earwax. cum. piss. sweat.” It’s fish semen, gross!! Bugs, ewww!
You guys like your food with no flavor. Unless you count oil, salt, sugar, and ketchup. No wonder you have so many health problems. You take a look at something and judge it before you taste it. Once you taste it, you only confirm what your imagination provided prior, and then write about it to your comrades, so that they may be equally closed minded in turn.
Not a very graceful people, as a whole. There are exceptions of course. The kicker is, most of you don’t see just ridiculous you appear to those not inside your sand-box. And you wonder why Americans get a bad wrap, as a culture.