Sharing food is about more than just offering up a much-needed calorie or two. It can be an exchange of culture, of personal tastes, of love. Eating together is an intimate act that brings people together and reminds us of our common humanity. It's the surest way to achieve mutual enjoyment that doesn't involve removing one's clothes.
With all that said, it can be incredibly difficult to tell a friend or loved one that you can't stand their cooking or don't want to try a dish of which they are so proud. Sometimes it's easier to just say yes and swallow your pride -- plus whatever else they're serving up to you! And that can mean eating something you would much rather toss in the garbage.
These folks recently went online to share such stories. These are the worst things people have had to eat just to be polite. Dinner is served!
Photo by Agathe Marty on Unsplash
45. The things we do for love
My husband's mom made a lemon pie, but it was a “special recipe” she learned from her friend where there was no sugar and the crust was made of saltine crackers. I don’t even have words for how sour and salty it was. But you best believe I ate it all with a smile on my face because it was “delicious”.
44. It's the thought that counts, right?
43. Currying favor
42. Blueberry blew
I came home from school one day and was hungry. I told my mother and she said there were blueberry muffins. So I took one and when I took a bite it was the driest, most flavorless thing I've ever eaten. So as to not upset my mother I ate it and when I came back my mom was laughing. I asked what was funny and she told me they were a friend of her's muffins and my brother had spit them out when he tried them. So basically I got pranked by my mom.
41. A WWII vet makes sushi
40. What's your poison?
When my sister was 5, she had my mom, friend and I sit for her tea party. She made us drinks. After taking a sip, I asked her what she had given us and she said it was water and sparkle perfume.
Thanks for the poison, sis.
39. Now that is how you parent
I am actually the one who made the horrible meal. When I was around 8, I decided I wanted my Mom to relax while I cooked her dinner and did the dishes. I made way over-cooked spaghetti with a plain can of diced tomatoes that I added water to because I thought that is how sauce worked. Finished it off with every seasoning herb we owned plus some ketchup because the sauce looked a little too much like water and oh, heck some mustard, mayo and any sauce I saw in the fridge because she liked all those things!
My Mom took her first bite, smiled through it, told me how much she enjoyed not having to cook then ate every freaking bite on her plate. She told me much later on that she ate the dinner I made her because she didn't want to discourage me from taking initiative and trying new things. She also later told me it was the most god awful thing she had ever eaten in her life.
Apparently I wrote a recipe to go with this fabulous dinner that I called "Good Spaghetti." Pretty hilarious. Also, after this episode my Mom made a point to actually teach me how to cook. I think she taught me pretty well...or maybe she is still lying to me to make me feel better...
38. I hear 'worms,' I pass
Was working in China. They had a big celebratory banquet for us. They served a local delicacy - “sea worms.” It was a white tube that when immersed in near freezing water essentially dissolved into a gelatinous lump. Think fish-flavored jello, with just a hint of residual gristle. Ugh. Had to eat several servings while downing shots of maotai.
37. Egg on your face
36. My intestines don't want your intestines
Chitlins (chitterlings) is the worst thing I've ever tried. If you don't know, they're made from the intestines of pigs or other animals. My husband begged me to try it. It’s his favorite dish. I tried a small bite. It tasted like straight crap. Straight fermented crap.
I told my friend about my experience and she insisted it just wasn’t prepared right and I needed to try hers. I went to her house and saw that she prepares hers with green peppers and onions. I was reluctant but hopeful. I took a bite. It tasted like straight fermented crap with a side of green peppers and onions. I was nice and I took TWO bites but I couldn’t stomach any more.
35. The only blameless person cleans up the mess
My ex-sister in law's spinach casserole. My daughter puked it up into their heat vent and I had to clean it out. The vent was also full of dog hair. So… hooray!
34. Miso sorry
My husband's grandma made us a "miso soup" that was almost black from teriyaki and soy sauce in the broth. All of the vegetables in it were slimy and overcooked. It so barely resembled miso that the next day I made some regular miso for myself and she was offended that I didn't eat the "perfectly good" leftovers. I was all confused until my husband whispered to me that she thought the abomination she served us was miso soup.
I just couldn't eat it again. I had a migraine later that night from the excessive salt! She also used Chinese soy sauce instead of kikkoman so it was extra awful.
33. Read your recipes carefully, folks!
Girlfriend in college wanted to be nice to my roommate and me because she often ate over at our apartment, so she was to cook dinner one night. Teriyaki steak. Delicious. What could go wrong?
Somewhere along the line, she got tbsp and cup mixed up, and added 3/4 cup of salt. Pretty sure we were nearing the LD50 of salt for a human, but I ate as much as I could, and drank as much water as I could for the next few days...
32. It's all Greek to me
It was a meal comprised of undercooked potato, garlic, feta, and chopped meat -- all packaged in aluminium foil and not baked fro nearly long enough. It was supposed to be a Greek dish, we were told. We all got violently sick.
31. Drown your sorrows (and your cake)
This one's actually kinda funny.
My grandma died right before Christmas. We all got together for the holiday and my aunt was understandably still taking it really hard. She'd made something she called "vanilla angel food pudding cake."
It was in a shallow casserole dish. Top layer was whipped cream and cookie crumble. Middle layer was vanilla pudding. Bottom layer was crumbled angel food cake... soaked to the top in a massive pool of bourbon. The cake was floating in the stuff. We'd later found out she'd mixed even more into the pudding layer.
She didn't tell anyone it was in there, so we all got scoops assuming it was a syrup or something. My cousin was the first to bite into it and had to run to the trash can to vomit as soon as it got in her mouth. Another person got a forkful near their nose and freaked out and yelled in shock.
Cue my aunt beginning to completely melt down about how she's trying so hard and she got the recipe from a friend and it's not THAT bad and grandma was such a good cook she would've helped her -- like full-blown about to lose it. The cousin that vomited tried to claim it was something else while the yeller tried to play off that they saw a bug across the room.
Everyone else was sufficiently guilted into eating at least some of what they'd scooped onto their plates. That stuff was physically painful to eat. Everything burned. Looking around the table you would've thought we were all downing spoonfuls of wasabi. I was 19 but I guess my parents were more worried about my aunt than me getting underaged sloshed on pudding.
But about halfway through my portion, they found a discreet way to dump my plate. The whole place reeked a couple minutes after we dug into the "pudding" too, so it was this awful inescapable sensory overload.
30. The final boss of bad meals
I know this is a horrible thing to say but because I was physically forced into eating my food as a child, I can eat pretty much anything no matter how much I don't like it. But my in-laws' god awful Thanksgiving dinners tried me to the limit. I quit going to their Thanksgivings because of how nasty it was. And for me to say that, it means the food was NASTY.
Not a one of them knows how to cook and I think they subsist entirely on cheap microwave dinners. Grandma can "cook" supposedly. They got a pre-cooked turkey and dried it out further in the oven. That wasn't too bad. Super generic box mac and cheese made the night before, stuck in the microwave and heated to lukewarmness. I could live with that. Super generic instant mashed potatoes that had the consistency of grit. Okay I'll choke it down.
Then we have the cornbread dressing. Which was like they just took cornmeal and made it into a paste with water and heated it up. I positively loathe cornmeal dressing yet I managed a bite or two.
But the crowning glory of nastiness was granny's famous trademark casserole that everyone revered like it was the casserole of the gods. Some concoction of asparagus, boiled eggs, crushed cornflakes and god knows what all. It was vile. I choked down a serving of it. God knows how. It looked like green vomit covered with boiled egg slices and it stank.
To make all this stuff ten times worse, the pervasive stench of raw sewage permeates the house from their unpumped septic tank that leaks into the yard. (Still smelled better than the boiled egg and asparagus horror.)
I can't do it anymore. These people burned out my ability to eat nasty food with a smile.
29. Passing the ball
28. Pun for the whole family
Sea snails with my Vietnamese friend. I paid for it when I tried to pull it out with my teeth instead of using the little toothpick. Since it is in a spiral inside the shell, it snapped out of the shell and sprung forth, bouncing off my face and onto the table, leaving my face covered in fishy smelling, briny sea water. I would have run straight to the bathroom, but I was temporarily brineded.
27. Save a soup, eat a cowboy
Cowboy stew. Sounds pretty cool huh? It's not for cowboys. It's not made by cowboys. It's not stew. It's spaghetti-o's ground beef, and Worcestershire sauce. Girlfriends’ mother made it while we were dating in high school. 0/10.
26. Mr. Bean
Back in the late 1970s, I was sent from California to a rural Maryland town for a 6 month job assignment. I was used to the wide variety of very fresh vegetables grown within a couple of hours of my city. In that rural Maryland town, I rarely saw what I would consider good fresh vegetables, except for a very short season when farmers markets had local produce. I really missed my good veggies.
I rented part of a house that had been converted to apartments. The nice elderly couple next door had a huge vegetable garden, consisting primarily of green beans. I used to lust after those beans.
One day, Mrs. Neighbor saw me outside and invited me to join them later in the day for a barbecue. "We are going to have the first of our own green beans." I could hardly wait. I was so-o-o looking forward to those beans.
Mr. Neighbor barbecued and Mrs. Neighbor plated the food in the kitchen. With great pride, she handed me a plate containing an incinerated steak and a bunch of gray tubes. "We like our green beans best after they've been canned."
Yep. She had home-canned the green beans, then cooked them, Southern style, for a hour or so with a chunk of ham. I looked at my plate. I looked over at all those crisp, vibrant beans still on the plants. I looked back at my plate.
I never knew I possessed such good acting ability.
25. To eat or not to eat
The plate.
I was in India and was presented with this incredible pile of food on a palm leaf. There were no knives or forks. And someone told me to 'Just use your fingers, like it's a tortilla'.
So I assumed you wrapped up the food like a tortilla and ate the whole thing.
You don't. He meant just eat with your fingers. Not like a tortilla.
24. Sweeter than the soup she makes
I have a very sweet neighbor, she's an elderly Armenian lady who lives with her son. Sometimes when he is out of town she asks me to help with little things. One day I went over to set up her Wi-Fi. She gave me an Armenian soft drink that was tarragon flavored. Ummm, wasn't expecting that. I was very polite and said "mmm!" Encouraged by this, she then gave me some soup. I don't know what it was called but it was hella sweet, kind of like a fruit roll up.
I finished all of it because she's such a sweet woman, but, oh boy.
23. Ashed potatoes
I was visiting my boyfriend's family for the first time, a Thanksgiving holiday from my freshman year of college.
His aunts were cooking the meal all day, smoking all the way through.
I took a bite of mashed potatoes that had ash in it and almost vomited in my mouth, but couldn't figure out how to politely get it out of my mouth without pointing out what had happened and embarrassing her, so I just swallowed.
22. Bakin' bacon
Pretty near raw bacon. One of my college roommates was just figuring out how to cook. He made an elaborate breakfast of eggs, toast, and bacon - the bacon being prepared by waving it at the stovetop from a safe distance. He insisted it was perfectly cooked and, not wanting to be rude, I ate it all. It didn't taste all that bad, but it had the mouthfeel of warmed over rubber bands dipped in peanut oil.
21. By definition not a surprise
My aunt's dish that she brings to every family get-together:
"Lime jello, marshmallow, cottage cheese surprise."
Everyone hates the dish but loves her - so, I eat some so as not to hurt her feelings.
20. Holy cow
Grass that is turning into poop.
No seriously, it is called "niu bie"(牛瘪) and you gotta feed the cow with grass, then butcher it and get the grass in its stomach and intestine out, squeeze the juice out of it, and boil it with beef and vegetables. Would never try this again.
19. If it's still moving, it's not food
Still-moving raw octopus tentacles.
When someone looks you in the eye and says, "You must chew many times or you die," then you 'might' not be eating the best dish in the world.
This was in Korea - during my first tour here. I was with a bunch of other people having a get-together with some locals and we all got SUPER hammered on soju at this giant "BBQ." Anyway, once everyone was good and sloshed, they brought out this plate of something out of my nightmares. These things were still wiggling around and because of the specific purpose of this get-together, I had to indulge our hosts... Anyway, I don't really remember fine details, just that I chewed for probably two minutes straight out of sheer terror, then swallowed. I don't really remember a specific taste. After that, we were hanging out of the windows of our car on the way home vomiting on the highway.
No more tentacles for this guy.
18. Ogres also have layers
The top 3 layers of it weren't that bad: toasted slivered almonds, cream cheese, candied cherries. The bottom layer? Steamed fish.
To this day I still have no idea what that was supposed to be.
17. Sometimes it really is the thought that counts
Ate with a very poor Iban family in East Malaysia. They served curry chicken (which was awesome), boiled grass, and gutter fish. I watched them walk outside and pick handfuls of grass from the side of the road and toss it in boiling water; tasted like boiled grass, surprise surprise.
The fish was caught from the gutters, also outside the house. It was a trash fish that eats sewage and trash that runs into the gutters and tasted like a port-o-potty smells. I ate the whole thing. It was all they had and I was amazed that they were willing to share.
16. We're all crying, but for different reasons
My grandfather's cousin was dating a man who died quite suddenly and left her heartbroken.
Grandfather goes to her house to support her. I go to support my Grandfather. She's a mess, but brings us two glasses of what looks like water.
It's not. It's cactus juice.
I'm not sure WHAT cactus juice is supposed to taste like, but this tastes like a handful of salt left out in the desert for a month and then strained through a sandal. The two of us sip at this horrific drink, nodding politely and trying to hide the fact that we're gagging. We finish the drinks quickly and put them down. She fills them again before asking, and here we go again!
Many tears flowed that evening.
15. Saving face
Pig's face for Christmas. Lived in a former Soviet country for awhile it's considered traditional. Just a boiled pig's head, no seasoning, mostly fat and cartilage. But once you drink enough, you'll eat the face.
14. At least she knew it was bad
My mother-in-law on one of our first meetings made a terrible meal for my wife and I to welcome me into the family. Now this woman hated cooking and took that out on the food. She was an Irish home cook who would put the vegetables in about 6 hours before the meal if left to her own devices so they'd taste of nothing come the meal. She'd then drink the water they were boiled in which, disguising as it sounds, was probably really tasty and full of nutrients and flavour that had boiled out of the veg.
Anyway this one meal was a stir fry. She didn't have a recipe for stir fry but how hard could it be? Method's in the name. So she put a bunch of veg in a frying pan. Didn't have any oriental spices but she had ginger. And then for the noodles she had some dried super noodles (if you're not in the UK think the least authentic, most anglicized version of ramen). After a while this all wasn't coming together how she wanted so she put it all in the oven and baked it. Baked stir fry.
And yeah it was foul. Crisped up instant noodles, flavourless veg and the gloopy remains of the concentrated down ginger. But I wanted to appear respectful so I tucked in to about half of it before I noticed my wife and her mum had both taken one bite and then just stopped eating. We sent out for a Chinese instead.
13. Mangoes wrong
One of my friends and her mother once made a cake from scratch for another friend's birthday. It looked awesome and sooo delicious! It had a lot of cream on top and mangos inside... Only the mangos certainly weren't edible anymore...
I took one bite and almost gagged. She and her mother ate it without problems, I have no idea how they didn't notice, and then she immediately asked us how we like it.. She looked us directly into the eyes and she seemed so excited and happy... I looked over to my friend (the one who celebrated her birthday) and could tell immediately that she fought with it too but kept her cool much better than I and we both exclaimed how delicious and great it tasted.
I then went on to store the cake in my mouth like a rodent and then excused myself to the bathroom and spit it into the toilet.
12. Old spice
My ex made some pasta with a homemade sauce. Well, it looked good, but the moment I brought it to my mouth I could sense there was something wrong. It was the strangest combination of flavors I've ever experienced. She put Chinese five spice, cinnamon, chives, cloves, garlic powder, onion power, nutmeg, basically every spice she owned, also a metric ton of salt and a bunch of hot peppers and fruits and vegetables she had lying around.
I ate as much as I could, then grabbed a drink and suggested we watch a movie to get out of finishing. I lasted thirty minutes after "dinner" before my body rejected the "food" I'd just eaten. It was torture going in and coming out. I did the dishes after I emptied my body and threw out all the left overs (she made enough to feed a small village). I told her I spilled it while I was cleaning up.
Anyway, that sauce still haunts me, the pasta was cooked nicely though, I guess she had that going for her...
11. She invented turkey cake
The day after Thanksgiving, my wife and my father and I went out for the day. It started getting around dinner time and we're about to head back and we pass a bbq truck. Ribs seem like a great idea. My dad calls my mom to see what she wants, but she says no, don't get ribs, she's been working in the kitchen all day on an amazing feast. So much for ribs.
We get home and find that the amazing all day meal is turkey cheesecake. Stuffing for crust. Gravy and turkey and cream cheese blended together into a slurry and baked into the stuffing crust. Let me repeat that. Baked turkey slurry. We could have had ribs.
10. I call it 'one of everything'
A person I know made, what she called "gumbo". It was every leftover in the fridge from the month dumped into a pot and cooked, them served over noodles.
When she served it, the taste was awful. She had Italian meals, Mexican meals, soups, steaks, chicken, every veggie imaginable, fruit, bread stuff, etc.
The first time I forced it down. The second time I just couldn't because I saw inside her fridge before she cooked the monstrosity. Her fridge looked like a science experiment gone wrong.
Meat (or maybe cake?), cucumber bits floating in liquid, yellowed potato and macaroni salad, something that had purple fur growing on it... I have no idea what some of the stuff was. It was so gross!
9. A taste of home?
My host mother while I was abroad thought it was really neat that I am half Chinese. One night she tried to make an Asian dish. Really sweet of her, but it was just spaghetti with soy sauce on it (extra great since it was cold soy sauce).
8. At least the pot was clean
Sweet peas my wife cooked.
She used a pot that apparently still had dishwashing soap residue on it from a new brand of soap she was trying. Apparently that particular brand has a thicker soap than others and didn't rinse off completely. Her father was over and she made his favorite meal as a surprise. Ranch spiced pork chops, buttered croissant rolls, sweet peas and garlic mashed potatoes. He and I sat down and starting eating and both noticed that the peas tasted...uh...soapy. We looked at each other as if in recognition (of the taste) and agreement (to not say a word). These peas tasted awful, but my wife can be very emotional and we weren't going to say a thing.
My wife finished making our daughter's plate, then her own and finally sat down to eat. She got probably 2 bites into the peas, said they tasted like dish soap and then asked us what we thought. We agreed with her, eyes down like scolded school children and she proceeded to ask why we were still eating them if they tasted like that. Then we felt scolded even more, on top of our blatant ignorance in her eyes. Even our daughter started to eat them, not wanting to mention the taste because mommy had been working so hard on that meal for all of us.
The peas went in the trash, and we finished the meal. Her father burst out laughing at her reaction. Still to this day, when my wife tells our daughter that we are having sweet peas, she asks if they are the soapy kind or regular.
7. Sometimes people just like to see if you'll actually eat it
There's a variation of a "delicacy" popular in my father's hometown in northwestern Greece that my mother warned me I absolutely should not touch. It's closer to haggis than anything I've otherwise eaten, though without such care taken to save you from the idea that you're eating trash organ meat wrapped in intestines.
Evidently my extended family felt it their duty to reintroduce me to my heritage, and slaughtered a suckling lamb for my homecoming. I was ultimately forced to yam a plate of oily viscera down my gob while a gaggle of unibrowed uncles chortled at my struggles. The aftertaste followed me all the way back to civilization.
6. "People inhale them"
Stayed at a friend’s place when I was in middle school. All she did was rave about how awesome her mom's banana pancakes were, and how nobody could resist them. Morning comes, and I'm served with a pancake burned to a crisp on the outside (nearly black). I took one bite into it, and come to discover not only is the mix on the inside raw and uncooked, but the mushy, pulverized banana was not ripe... at all.
I had to swallow huge bites without chewing (almost vomiting the entire time) to get through my one pancake. Later I remembered that when she told me about the pancakes she mentioned how people "inhaled them". I can only assume this is because they didn't want to be impolite and had to get it down before it could come back up.
Photo by Oleksandr Pidvalnyi from Pexels
5. So you think you can cook
My grandmother is not a good cook. Quite the opposite. But she thinks she's a gourmet chef...and she's very sensitive about her cooking.
My grandmother gave me a big bowl of soup. I took one spoonful, stopped, and insisted...that something was wrong. Too much fish? Some kind of seafood? Maybe some ingredient had gone bad?
I got yelled at. Screaming, top of the lungs, yelled at.
I asked my grandmother, no, seriously, have you tasted this?
Of course she had, she replied. The soup was fine.
So I finished the soup. Every last drop, because it was the polite thing to do.
It was incredibly awful, but I figured the soup had to be okay, just particularly foul tasting for whatever reason.
For obvious reasons, my family has the ability to choke down food while ignoring the taste and any urge to vomit.
Of course, the truth was...she hadn't tasted the soup, she just lied and said she did, in order to win the argument.
To be fair, she did apologize when she discovered the melted remains of the plastic container at the bottom of the pot. This didn't make me feel better.
4. 'Tis the season
Tamales.
A long time ago we adopted a family in a really bad part of town for Christmas which basically meant we bought them presents and ate dinner with them and whatnot. I enjoyed it.
Anywho. We get to this place and the smell of these tamales is permeating through the house. The only problem is they're really really bad tamales. Like bad husks with bad meat and a bad cream sauce on top.
So we sit down for dinner, have our 45 minute prayer and start eating. The lady who made them looks so proud of them, I couldn't help but pretend that they were the best thing I had ever eaten in my entire life.
The only thing they had to drink was Sunny Delight, I wondered if the lady saw me cram a giant fork-full in my mouth and then take a huge gulp of Sunny-D to keep the gagging at a minimum.
When we got up to leave, I told her I MUST have one for the road. We drove about 5 minutes out of the bad part of town, I pulled over and yacked up a tamale and Sunny Delight slushy. I have yet to drink Sunny-D or eat another tamale since.
Somewhere I have a photo that they took of all of us sitting for dinner, a fake smile plastered on my face with the eyes of someone who is being forced to eat their loved ones bodies.
Good memories.
3. Assuming makes a... well, you know
Was visiting Guatemala, and this old lady invited us to dinner. In this country, it’s extremely rude to not eat what was placed before you. Unfortunately, this lady served us a vegetable soup with some meat in it that tasted like chicken broth from the underworld. She didn’t eat with us, as she was being polite or something. She didn’t even talk to us during the dinner.
We took a taste, and nearly wanted to puke. However, due to the country customs, we decided to eat it. We barely could get through it. We ate about 3/4 of it and then mentioned we were just full. We both retched later on that night. It was so nasty!
Ran into the lady later in the week walking down the street, and she apologized to us. Apparently the chicken was rotten and she only took one bite. She then chastised us for not telling her.
Sometimes it’s frustrating not knowing all the ins and outs of different customs!
2. There's no such thing as a free lunch
On a meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery, I had some food I could barely handle. First, there are monastic rules that forbid eating after noon, so on a retreat people will eat as the monks do. This means breakfast, lunch, then fasting until breakfast the next day.
Naturally, most of us would load up our plates for lunch well aware this was going to be what held us over for the rest of the day. The food was generally good -- some Asian cuisine, some American. One particular day, a southeast asian family brought food for the entire 30(?) person retreat as well as the monks as part of a celebration and donation, quite a generous gift.
I had no idea what anything was, but I loaded my plate up as usual and sat down to eat. It was a bit spicy. I was sweating. Some bites actually tasted more like chemicals and fire than food. It might even have been 'good' if that's your thing, but I'm a guy that struggles with jalapeno poppers sometimes. But everything the monastery was providing was for free, and everything the monastery received was through donations. It would be quite rude to not finish my plate. Even more so since this family had just provided an entire buffet for 40 people.
I managed to get it all down with about 2 gallons of water. And I was sincerely thankful to the family for their generosity.... but god that was difficult to eat. It wasn't a matter of anything being "gross" rather that it was painful. Surprisingly didn't have any stomach issues later in the day, though.
1. Even for a Marine, that must have been traumatic
Not me but my father. My dad is a former Marine who isn't picky. He'll devour just about anything. But for some reason he HATES meatloaf. Absolutely despises it.
My parents went to visit my mother's aunt and uncle. They are from her biological family that she tracked down after 40 years. So my aunt to welcome them makes this... fermented style of meat loaf that is basically a steaming pile of everything my father refuses to eat. But it's the first time my mother has met anyone from her biological family. He didn't want to offend them, So he stomached a piece by eating it as fast as he could.
Cue my mother. "Look aunt Carol, he loves your meatloaf. I can never get him to eat mine..." aunt Carol cuts off another big slab and puts it on his plate. He grins, and eats the second helping.
My mother... is a piece of work.
