mirror ball 5: the worst food

"The Worst Food I Ever Ate (or couldn't eat)"

Val L.: BEETS!!!!!!!!

Amelia: I grew up in Eastern Oregon and my dad is a sort of jokester; often we would spend days during the summers gathering firewood from local forests -yes there is such a thing as poaching trees, but to my knowledge he always had permission- Once in a while we would take wood from trees that had been dead for quite some time, and my father would gather up wood larvae; pack them home in a plastic container, and fry them in margarine (always gold-n-soft) and try to get us to eat them! He would eat them, and during this whole process he was completely delighted at his ability to eat disgusting things, but I don't think he ever convinced me; even though I was a gullible less than 8-year-old. For many years afterwards the smell of hot melted margarine in a cast iron pan made me sick to my stomach!

However, if one is ever stuck in the woods, and needs some food, these little creatures are edible, raw even, I think he just cooked them to try to encourage eating them. They are white/cream colored with little black heads/mouths about the diameter of a pencil and about 1 1/2" long. They exist inside of decaying wood. Yum!!!

Eve: It's got to be the carrot juice. When I was about 10 years old, my mother bought a juicer. It was 1973, and, much to my father's chagrin, mom's "health food" phase arrived too quickly on the heels of her "fine French cooking" phase. 25 pound bags of organic carrots would arrive every week, and my mom would juice them, ( sometimes with beets, more often with celery). Then she would proudly hand a tall glass to me. I couldn't stand it. I would take tiny sips that made me gag... too thick, too sweet, too vegetal, and not crunchy, as carrots should be.

I took to bringing these tall glasses of torture to my room, to drink while I "finished my homework". From there, it was easy to slip into the bathroom and pour it down the sink. Eventually, mom caught on, and one fateful day, she insisted I stay in the dining room and drink it there. Cornered and frantic, I surveyed the room... no toilet or sink. Dumping it out the window of our 5th floor apartment, past 4 neighbors windows to land on the super's patio with a huge splash seemed far to risky. Then, I spied it... The Snake Plant. My great aunt had given my mother a fifty year old snake plant as a gift. We kept it in a huge antique asian pot in the corner... the corner NOT VISIBLE from the kitchen, where mom stood preparing dinner. One gulp's worth at a time, I "watered" the plant with the carrot juice, and triumphantly handed my mother the empty glass.

I repeated this little trick pretty much every day for months. My father tried to figure out where that odd smell was coming from. The snake plant began to turn yellow and sickly, and eventually died, (proving my point in my 10 year old mind). By that time, my mother was into yogurt with wheat germ and sunflower seeds, and I rather enjoyed that.

The smell of carrot juice still makes me wretch.

The antique asian pot now lives in my living room. The bottom of the interior is discolored.

Mom went to her grave not knowing. Writing this is my confession.

I'd do it again.

Tom: I ran away to the Island of Guam many years ago. My Aunt and Uncle lived there and I had a standing offer to come visit. So, in an attempt to escape what I thought was a miserable existence, I went to ..Guam.. to find happiness (didn't work, by the way). It turns out my Aunt and Uncle didn't really view my visit as a "vacation" so they put me to work. My Uncle owned an outhouse business. There are two Military bases on Guam (Air force and Navy) and they have taken up residence on the most beautiful parts of the Island, Air force on one end, Navy on the other. But they both utilized the outhouse services that my Uncle had to offer. So, for the entire time I was on this gorgeous Island. I spent much of it on a military base with my head (and, often, entire body) in an outhouse cleaning them out and pumping out the, well, remnants.

At any rate, my Aunt and Uncle were kind enough to take me various places (when I wasn't working). One time they took me to a big party at someone's house. They had tons of food, and there were two whole pigs being cooked in a pit. I had many options to choose from, however, I am a big wimp when it comes to spicy food (I always get mild salsa and can't even look at a jalapeno). I started asking folks which foods were the least spicy and someone pointed to a vat of soup. Well, I am a big soup fan, so, I made my way to the vat. It smelled pretty good and appeared to be some kind of tomato-based soup (I love tomatos). I got a spoon and took a taste and thought it tasted fine. Since I was pretty hungry, I got myself a big bowl, filled it up, got some water and found a nice spot to sit and enjoy my soup.

As I was eating, I noticed all kinds of different colors and things in the soup. I wasn't exactly sure what they were, but I figured it couldn't be too bad...I mean it was soup, after all! I ate every last drop in the bowl. I was pretty satisfied and started wandering around talking to people and looking at all the other food options. At some point, I found my Aunt. She asked if I was having a good time and if I had found something to eat. I told her "yes" on both counts. I let her know how impressed I was with the tomato soup they had there. She said she wasn't sure what I was talking about and asked me to show her. When I did, she got kind of a funny smile on her face. She told me the soup was very popular on Guam (I can't think of the name now), but that she didn't like to eat it herself. When I asked her why, she said that Pig innards boiled in pigs blood was something she just couldn't enjoy. I think my face must have turned green. She asked me if I was ok and kind of laughed at me. I wandered off, trying not to think about what I had just consumed. I was able to rationalize that it must be ok to eat as it was a favorite food among the people of Guam and it really didn't taste bad (in fact, it tasted pretty good). I was able to get through the rest of the day without having the food come up the way it went in, after all, when you clean outhouses for a living, you develop a pretty strong stomach, but I didn't eat any more that day. And, for the rest of the trip, before I ate anything I would always ask "What's in that?"

Garrett: The worst food I EVER ate was a "spinach pie" made by none other than my dear mother Marylou when I was thirteen years old. It tasted so incredibly nasty that I refused to eat it and began complaining bitterly at the dinner table. My father was so pissed off at my disrespect for my mother's fine home cooking that he not only forced me to eat the piece I had been served, but also made me eat a second piece as punishment. I was totally disgusted and gastrointestinally distressed. After dinner I ran over to my friend Brian O'Hara's house and promptly vomited in the gutter.

The END.

Anonymous: When I was seven, my older brother who is a year older and a prankster, told me that he saved some candy in the fridge for me. I excitedly ran and opened the fridge. I found these purple, cylindrical, yummy looking stuff wrapped in individual foil.
I gulped one and it was the most horribly bitter thing I've ever tasted.
It turned out, they were suppositories.

Celeste: my mom's sunday pot roasts.

Growing up, I was a vegetarian - I'm talking when I was 4 until college. Not because I had a concern about the slaughter of animals, but because my mother was the worst cook of meat.

In my experience, pot roasts were bland, dry, and lifeless - a small morsel of meat had to be chewed more than 32 times, at least.

I thought this was the norm. I thought everybody turned the oven on, put a roast in a pan, threw some salt and pepper on it, put it in the oven, and left the house for church (which was a good 45 minute drive away).

I've never told her my true feelings about her pot roasts. It doesn't really matter anyway...she pretty much stopped making them in the 80's (thank god).

Brian: undoubtedly....Gazpacho. When I was living with family in Spain, I felt it important to eat at least, most of the food that they served me whether I liked it or not. I don't eat tomatoes and 10 years ago I was even more intolerant of them than I am right how. Regardless, I pretended it was the most refreshing cold soup I'd ever tasted then spent the rest of the evening trying not to vomit.

Steve: In Italy--- Little whole, plucked birds (sparrows?), lying on their backs, heads still on, bulgy eyes closed, with some sort of brown sauce or gravy all over them, presented as a delicacy but also with the amused awareness that the Americans would probably be disturbed.... which I was, to the point of nausea. Couldn't eat them.

Dave: We were at a wedding in Greece in the 70s, The kind of affair where it would be insulting not to eat what was on offer. A perfectly good meal with loads of retsina to wash it down. Then came the cheese (or so we thought). Now I'm a huge fan of feta, and when it arrived, I was already stuffed but not wishing to offend, etc.etc. The first mouthful was weird but retsina can do that. The next got weirder and the residual retsina could no longer be blamed. We looked at each other with exactly the same thought in our eyes. 'This is not cheese'. To this day, I have no idea what it was (maybe anyone out there with Greek relatives can give me a clue). I can only describe it as looking exactly like feta but tasting like a slice of pork lard. 20 heart attacks on a tea plate. We ate the lot. In those days, tourists were hanged for less. This sticks in the mind, and on some days, I still feel a little sticks in the throat. The moral of the story? Beware of Greeks bearing gifts (as much as I love those people).

Chris D: The very first thing that sprang to mind was exactly the incident that Dave has written about, although there is a slight gap in his memory. Yes, dutifully, we did eat most of it because people were looking at us but when they turned away, we squashed the remainder between two plates. We thought we'd got away with it but, on seeing our empty plate, other guests most generously replenished our supply and watched while we ate.