You > What's the worst thing you've ever eaten?
I believe that would have to be the hot dog I ate in Australia. I really like hot dogs, too, so this made me especially sad. It had an extremely thick casing which was pretty much impossible to bite through, which I now understand was the manufacturer's attempt to get you to stop trying to eat this hot dog. Inside was not a good color--brownish, grayish, possibly a little green? I have no idea from what animal the meat inside was made. I don't even really remember how it tasted because I think I blocked it out. It was real, real bad.
Interesting that your worst food was also from a foreign country. Clearly AMERICA IS THE BEST.
Molly
A cheese pizza from a chevron across from my old job. I described it like this to my coworker when I got back: Tomato soup spread thinly on a very heavily salted saltine cracker crust, with some cheese whiz on top. Horrible.
Summer Anne
American cheese.
I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT.
Anna
My Chilean Married Boyfriend (CMB) took me out for ice cream once because he knew I liked ice cream so much that he called me Miss Ice Cream (he was one of those creative-types). What he failed to understand is that I like good ice cream, or heck, even decent ice cream, which Chile had much of, but he chose to bring me to this shit-ass "ice cream" stand in the middle of a stupid mall.
The ladies who worked there made it from a powder which they mixed with water, then put it through this machine which hadn't been cleaned since the Spanish colonized South America, and out came this sticky, foamy, cold neon stuff parading as "gelato." To make matters worse, he ordered us lucuma flavor, which added insult to injury. Lucuma is a fruit with the consistency of an avocado but the taste of a mango. It does not make a good neon powder ice cream flavor.
The next day I had to wake up at 5, take an airplane, then a ferry, then a series of buses to get to some island near Antarctica, and I was puking the entire time.
mari
I know I ate a lot of really fucking gross food in London. We stayed at this hotel and ate lunch there every day because we had already paid for it. It was a buffet and everything tasted like play dough or dirt. It didn't even look like food. I think I only mildly enjoyed the cake from that buffet. I also had a vending machine sandwich in a foreign country. I think it was in France at the train station. It was egg salad I think. I ate no more than 2 bites of it and then on the train, combined with being embarrassingly hungover, vomited a lot.
Carrie
my mom made polish hot dogs once, i was like 10 at the time, and as soon as i bit into them i wondered if my mom was suffering from munchausen by proxy, as she was surely trying to poison us with these industrial-cleaner-tasting horror dongs. i think for this reason, along with the mysterious hardchewy things in chicken mcnuggets, i have been a vegetarian for over half my life.
lindsay
I've surely eaten a huge number of disgusting things over the course of my lifetime, as have we all, but the experience I am going to relate is as nonspecific as it is traumatic. I'd like to discuss every elementary school cafeteria meal I encountered over the course of my childhood (three, if my memory serves me), which were all identically and reliably horrific.
It is no exaggeration to say that as a child certain family members of mine were wont to say, somewhat inappropriately, that Anna and I looked like Holocaust victims because we were so thin. It is also no exaggeration to say that part of this was due to the free school lunch of which we were required to partake-- because it was free, of course. Colorless, flavorless, mealy, mucky, gloppy, sticky, congealed, and utterly repulsive in every imaginable respect. I did not, could not, eat that food. I was so hungry! All day!! For years.
Aimee
Sometimes when I try to go back and remember when it was, exactly, that I started caring so darn much about food, I recall that I resolutely turned my nose up to elementary school lunch. And the breakfast! Remember the breakfast?
Jesus.
Anna
Oh, I remember the breakfast all right. The pancakes were essentially brown, rubbery plastic sponges; the syrup was somehow completely tasteless and the consistency of dishwater, despite being entirely comprised of processed sugar; the "sausage links" looked like giant coils of mouse feces and didn't taste much better. Even the little cartons of milk always tasted slightly rancid.
It's all pretty inhumane, when you think about it.
Aimee
Man, on the rare days in high school when, by some strange twist of fate, I got there before first period started, I was happy because of this one cafeteria breakfast item. It was just a huge piece of Texas toast with American cheese melted on it (sorry, Anna) and it was incredible. In retrospect, it was sort of gross and a lot like plastic, but those mornings it always confirmed for me that breakfast was the only reason to wake up in time for first period. I loved it.
Sarah
Here's some things to inspire you: the Volcano Burrito at Taco Bell, vending machine sandwiches, blueberry coffee, undersalted cooked green beans, cow stomach by accident, Mountain Dew, tamarindo sno cones, your mom's least appealing dish, scrambled eggs with ketchup on them, soggy onion rings, foie gras, curry chicken sandwiches from the refrigerated case by the register at the train station grocery store in Zurich, Switzerland.