A Zararan’s Cajun chicken Alfredo freezer meal…that had been in the un-freezable, non-refrigerated cabinet two weeks.

My wife…gods bless her, was trying to feed me dinner…and found that in the cabinet… after having put it there during our last grocery stock up, not realizing it required freezing. In her defense, it was a grocery order and the item was not something we ordered, so she didn’t know the particulars of it, and it wasn’t cold upon arrival.

After microwaving, she brings me the plate and a fork and I notice the smell is…unique, but me being hungry and not overly picky though “meh…Cajun seasoning…I guess” so i stir the sauce into the noodles and then lick the fork, as one does, preparing to consume.

The weirdest part, is it was fucking sour. Not sour like spoiled, sour like a million warheads sour. I stopped… looked at the stuff, looked at my wife and shuddered. “This is weird…why is it sour?” I said…still not dawning on me that my wife would attempt to poison me so obviously. She disappears and I sit there, with the offending offering on the table in front of me. “Am I brave enough to eat this? I don’t like wasting food…” goes through my head at about the same time as my wife, pale faced and trembling, rushes in and grabs it hollering “don’t eat that! It was supposed to be frozen!”

Balut

Probably not the worst, but I once ate a massive spoonful of flour thinking it was icing sugar.

Paint.

Orange to be precise.

When I was a kid, a friend of mine hosted a birthday party on a paintball range. We played for I don’t know how long, large group of us, was really fun.

One thing the instructors told us, keep your mouth shut.

You see, we wore face masks, however for us to breathe of course there’s a grill where you mouth goes.

Needless to say, I got shot right on that mouth grill, and naturally due to the shock of it I opened my mouth…

The paintball burst on the grill, and I had the whole volume of paint launched deep into my throat.

It was so… ungodly… salty. For the rest of the day all I could taste was salt (the blow occured around early afternoon). And that’s coming from someone who also on another unrelated occassion ended up with a deep mouthful of sea water.

I once got a burger from a cheap looking fast food place and my first bite was funky and cold.

Looked at the meat and it was basically still raw and partially frozen in the center.

It was a bad time.

Fresh ginger.

I sip Malört and enjoy its nuanced flavor notes. Durian tastes like paradise. Natto, however, broke me.

Salted chips without the chip. I was mindlessly eating some chips from the bag and suddenly there was this intense salt flavour quickly overpowered by way too much rotten oil flavour. When I spit it out, it looked like a clump of deep fried salt.

My girlfriend-at-the-time’s dirty, dirty ass. Thought it would be like in my fantasies, where it tastes like candyfloss and smells like a Yankee candle. Nope. Shit. Just shit.

If you’re curious, shit tastes exactly as it smells. I wish I didn’t know that. Although I’m happy that now you, too, know that.

And she had the nerve to dump me later. I deserve a Nobel peace prize for not recoiling in horror and instead just powering through in silence like a fucking GENTLEMAN.

On the bright side, it became a great way to ensure future partners were cognisant of the issue. I’d drop it into the usual “what was your ex like?” gossip sessions that come with new relationships. It’s like saying “please wash your various holes if I’m gonna go rooting around in them like an ant-fiending aardvark” without actually saying it. A cautionary fable from days of yore to guide the next generation.

P.S. I’m still pro-anilingus. Just… clean the fuckin’ thing first. I don’t need to be picking dingleberries from between my teeth, thanks.

balut

PVC pipe glue. Don’t ask.

Maggots. I’ve been chasing the high ever since. They were hiding in a pineapple flavored Swiss roll. I thought the maggots were coconut flakes at first. Pina colada is a good flavor. The maggots popping like boba didn’t set any alarm bells off. It was better than the usual coconut crunch. The maggots wriggling against my gums and tongue didn’t set any alarm bells off. It was the only time I ever chewed something that felt carbonated. The lone maggot crawling across my couch away from certain doom finally clued me in. Half of his platoon just got eaten and the other half was without a doubt up next.

The same thing happened to my mom at some point when she was a kid. For her it was an Almond Joy or Mounds, which let the maggots blend in even better. Is it a once in a lifetime thing everybody experiences or a generational curse? I feel cursed with the knowledge that maggots in the right context taste like the fuckin’ future.

I didn’t put it there but when I was in college sharing an apartment with my brother and his wife they got a dog and when they got it home the instant it got through the door it beelined for my lap and slipped it’s tongue ALL the way along the roof of my mouth. Decades ago and I can still feel it.

One time I got the bright idea to siphon the water out of my ~50gal aquatic turtle tank for some long overdue cleaning. I anchored one end of a water hose at the bottom of the tank and strung the other end out into the yard and proceeded to start the siphoning process with my mouth. Got force fed a giant gulp of whatever got sucked off the bottom of the tank.

I’ve put some nasty shit in my mouth since then and nothing comes close.

Of things that were intended to be eaten, my friend in Amsterdam had some super salty black licorice. Don’t want to yuck his yum, but that shit wasn’t fit for human consumption.