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Please refer to the thread about the 70's Weight Watcher's recipe cards. So very much gross-out food. Fluffy Mackeral Pudding....Cabbage in gelatin...congealed masses....all so very eewww.

Oh yeah Beth! I love this site for even more like the WW cards!
http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html
Be sure to check out all those links...too darn funny! The meat sections are especially bad...and the white foods....and the gelatin stuff...all of it!

My gross-out moment was in high school. Had not lived in the south for very long and was at a friend's for breakfast. Was served eggs by the mom, scrambled. Not a food I love anyway, but I am big on eating to be polite when at anothers' home so long as I am not gagging or truly morally opposed. I take a few bites and cannot figure out what the creepy texture is, or why they are kinda gray.
After a few bites, not even buttery biscuit or burning hot coffee helped the nasty taste so I made an excuse and stopped eating.

Found out later it was brains in the eggs. Ew. Not a taste I enjoyed, especially when mixed with another food I did not really like either.

a pile of pancakes served with a roach cooked right into the batter on the first pancake! all i can say is that i'm thankful it wasn't cooked into the bottom pancake!

Imagine if you will, heirloom tomatoes sliced thick and surrounded with toasted slices of multigrain bread and kissed with creamy homemade dill mayo . After taking my first bite I put the sandwich down and walked to the fridge to get some sweet tea and in my mind knowing the sandwich somehow didn't taste as I had invisioned it would. I filled a glass with ice cubes first then the sweet tea and washed the taste from my mouth returning to the table to find the second half of a hornworm making it's way out of my bitemark! (insert ewwwww here)

OMG renzata that was gonna be my story as that happened to me this week!!!!!!!! I wonder if there is a lazy inspecter out there? I was not a obs chick but more like some blood in the egg.

About 10 years ago, I purchased some imported dry pasta from a small local grocery store. Apparently, not many folks go for the import stuff in that particular town. It must have been sitting on the shelf for a looong time. I opened the bag and poured the farfalle into boiling water. I tasted it several times during the cooking process. But why were ther all those small "bubbles" rising through the foamy starch as they cooked? Maybe broken pieces of pasta?

Or maybe WEEVILS' EGGS.

@Kerosena - we had some weevily raisins in my house when I was little - I still remember munching them and asking my mother what the white things were, the look on her face was priceless!

Norwegians are fond of putting cubes of ham, onions, cabbage, carrots, etc, into plain jello molds. Our cousins always serve it to us...ew, ew, ew.

I was having quiche lorraine at a little cafe in Paris once, and it didn't taste quite right. There was something bitter and tangy in the crust....it was only when I turned it over that I discovered the bottom of the crust had mold growing on it!

I was making a balsamic vinegarette one day and was coming to the end of my bottle of balsamic...I shook the bottle to get the last few drops and these huge clots of congealed sediment fell out that looked exactly like blood clots. I puked right onto the counter.
It was a while before I could use balsamic vinegar again.

My other gross out food moment happened many years ago as a child with my mother, who had been misinformed when told that tuna noodle casserole was a good thing to cook. Nope. Not. Ever. Hot canned tuna, mushy egg noodles and lumpy mushroom soup with canned french cut beans and soggy onion thingies on top. BLLLLEEECH. Till this day, I CANNOT eat an egg noodle, and the smell of hot tuna makes me wretch.

@julie - I'm with you on the tuna noodle casserole...I babysat for a family who served it once, it was all I could do to keep from retching! Unfortunately, it was one of those "parents sit down to dinner before going to a movie" things, so I was forced to eat it. Awful.

@megannesta - I think I just threw up a little.

when i was about 8 i was sent to the corner store to buy a big sack of potatoes. the babysitter sent her son and it was the first time she let either one of us off the street. we were so proud. when we got back she started yelling and retching. the whole bag was filled with maggots. she made carry the bag back. now when i buy them i have to inspect every one.

rice.
with mayonnaise mixed in.
mayonnaise has always made me gag but that was just too gross.

Great idea for a topic!!!

I was reading all of these and slightly wanting to vomit in my mouth but thinking I had not really had a gross food moment of my own...until it all came rushing back at me.

One very hot summer afternoon I had stepped outside to fire up the BBQ pit and as I am often want to do, I was carrying along a cold beer. I get the pit fired up and by this point the beer is half empty and the top of the can is no longer cold...this is important later. I walk back inside to get the meat for the grill and return to the pit. After the meat is sizzling away, I reach for my beer to drain the last half so I can get another ICE COLD one from the cooler. Apparently the weekend before while grilling I had left approximately half of a beer out on the stand besides my BBQ pit and I accidentally pick up this one instead of my "fresh" beer. Grabbing the beer and not noticing the temperature of the can in my hand I proceed to chug the contents.

This resulted in projectile vomiting and me not being able to drink that particular brand for upwards of a year without gagging from the memory.

I was out to eat at a local Mexican restaurant a decade or so ago, and I ordered a big plate of enchiladas covered in cheese. As I was eating, I ended up with a bit of cheese stretching from my mouth to the plate. I tried using my fork to scoop it up, but it didn't want to seem to go anywhere. It was then that I discovered it had been a foot and a half long piece of hair covered in enchilada that I had been trying to shovel into my mouth.

As a kid on a family camping trip, I had to beat my sister to the lake. During lunch I was preoccupied and didn't notice her getting ready to swim, so when I saw her in her bathing suit, I left my half-full soda on the picnic table and ran to the water. Half an hour later, I run back to the table and take a huge gulp of the leftover soda, only this time I also get a mouthful of bees.

I didn't get stung, but it really explains how I developed my palate to love bees.

let's see, once as a child, i opened a box of raisin bran that had been down in our basement for awhile... and well....it was moving...i'm sure i don't need to elaborate.

Cassaendra, I was reading to the end to comment and you beat me to it. I was about to remark about the canned drink stories and how it's even worse when someone doused a smoke in there. I drank a sip once... ugh. *Vom*

For truly gross foods though, I agree with the original post. Tongue, brains... the textures... I just can't.

When I was little, my mom would repeatedly buy the Quaker variety pack instant oatmeal. I NEVER ate the apple cinnamon oatmeal packs, the freeze-dried apple was just too much for me to handle. One day, she decides to make me eat the apple cinnamon oatmeal that has been sitting in the cupboard for who knows how many months. While I was waiting for the water to boil, I notice 8-10 green 1/2 inch long worms crawling through the dried oatmeal. I'm still not sure what kind of worms they were, but they survived quite a long time on that oatmeal before it was opened.

I have a very strong fear of maggots. When I was in elementary school a friend and I brought in some acorns and put them into our cubby. Well, when we returned to school the following week there were maggots in our cubby. Disgusting.

A girlfriend of our roommates left a bag of buttermilk pancake mix in my cabinet. I can't eat milk or wheat, but I figured it would get used eventually for my boyfriend or something. So, one day that eventually came around. I opened it and found it full of maggots!

I was also just told of a woman who went to an IHOP here and had a GIANT RAT crawl up her leg and into her lap. OMG

How about the 4 heads of broccoli I bought at the farmer's market this morning? I had to toss it, because by the time I got halfway through breaking down the second head I found over 10 caterpillars, including 2 over an inch long.

Pretty much anything my mother in law ever cooked. My first experience with something she'd made, a tuna sandwich. Very little tuna, and just about anything and everything that probably was about to go off in her fridge, drowning in mayo.. nasty. I never even took a taste. It smelled strange, I took a peek and my then to be future husband explained her "recipe" for tuna salad.

I just remembered something that happened to me after reading about the caterpillars in the broccoli. The horror of this memory flooded in. It isn't something that passed through my mouth. I am glad for it. :)

When I first moved from home, I bought 3-4 Okinawan potatoes and put it in my cupboard to process later. Having forgotten that I bought it, it sat for several weeks. When I rediscovered them, I noticed some light brown powder that had sifted to the bottom of the plastic bag. The potatoes felt firm to touch and didn't have that putrid rotten potato smell, which btw makes me retch.

I cut one of the potatoes down the middle and noticed that most of the potato had large holes in it that it looked like lotus root. I thought it was odd, when the horrific realization came upon me that something was moving in my potato. I dropped my knife in silence horrified and stumbled backward. I truly understand how fearful someone can be that they can't let out a scream.

A really fat juicy severed worm plopped out of one of the holes. I almost cried. Gathering all the courage I could muster, I lurched forward, threw the cutting board with the potatoes in the sink, and turned on the hot water tap. I let it run for a long time over the cut potato halves so the worm(s) scalded, shriveled, and turned a dark fleshy mauve.

My bf at the time came home several hours later and I had him toss everything.

Funniest.Thread. Ever! :p

Surprised no one mentioned Lutefisk.

.

No food stories to share. But the phrase "MY senora" is starting to make me pretty queasy...

First off, WAY too early in the morning here in the Northwest for this topic...

Fried brain sandwich in St. Louis. Apparently it's a local favorite there. I took one bite by accident, and really couldn't eat anything else for the rest of the day.

And dont_like_liver mentioned Lutefisk? Oh yeah, a totally disgusting but necessary evil if you grow up in a Scandinavian family like I did. I don't know what's worse, the taste or the smell, which can hang around for days. (Actually it looks pretty gross, too).

How about these? Hard Core Sustainable Sushi These won't be going into my Teach a Man to Fish event. Sorry Charlie.

@dont_like _liver , I was going to relate Lutefisk myself what a horrible dish texture, smell, flavor nothing works alone or together some holiday dish that one is, it must be to remember how hard life use to be,.
Here's a few others:
1. the band-aide my wife spit out from a spoonful of Ben &Jerry's chocolate fudgey something. We dont eat much ice cream here anymore unless its home-made
2. during the annual week-long all saints fiesta in a village where I lived while in Mexico; the barely warmed piece of a chicken foot with a claw attached, on a sopes I didnt see it before I bit into it thanks to Pacifico Lager-vision, couldn't eat the rest or the beef sopes either there was also lots of FRESH beef after a semi hit a bull on the highway they even set up a hamburger stand
3.Mexico again; the rusty washer and piece of poly-twine in my machaca at a fancy hotel on the beach in cabo named after El Presidente
4. While living in Indonesia I ate all my meals at a friends warung (resturant) and I was going barefoot on this day and I went into the kitchen to talk to the girl who was the cook and upon stepping into the kitchen my momentum was such that it took a few steps to stop without slipping I noticed I was kinda sticking and sliding on the floor and the substance was oozing up between my toes nothing was spilled this was the way it always was (it was not water soluable they swept the floor with a greasy broom) as a friends wife saw me come out to the dining area and knew what I had done by the look on my face , she said " you dont have sandals on do you." even the finest americanized hotel resturants there are like that.
5. At the very tender age of about 7 or 8 I was served rare liver by mom and staring at the biggest cluster of veins in the liver eye to eye and told to stay at the table til I ate it so I waited about an hour til dad "lovingly" forced me to eat it and I brought it back up instantly on the table for a vote never had to eat liver again but at least I got an ass wooping for wasteing food. have another drink dad.
6. My wife is Japanese so as no suprise, She likes fermened (I call it putrified)squid entralls they come in a jar so you can see the suspect food(?) I did try a small bite and it tastes just like rotten squid guts and I did puke it up
7.A friends wife cooked up a pheasent he had bagged. He gave it to her with the head and feet removed and plucked in the field,he told her to finish cleaning it and cook it up for dinner so she did just that [ can you see this one coming ?] well dinners on and its sliced and served all are eating not the best but edible he asks his wife what kind of stuffing she made as he had never had one with rice in it ? the last he heard before getting violently ill on the spot on the table was "Rice, what rice ? I didnt stuff the bird." none of the rest of us could eat anymore, but we made it to the bathrooms and outside to lose it , couldn't blame him

Well... after I had a lot of spinach from the TUB I bought... I was digging in for a little more and I found a couple lady bugs... so I am pretty sure I ate a couple - oh, love that protein...

Like many others, most of my 'bad food' experiences were as a child of a mother who was a 'bad' cook. She hated cooking, and it showed. Now, this was in the '50s, when all those 'convenience' foods such as instant mashed potatoes and "TV dinners' were very popular. She would make recipes she found on the tins or packages, and they were usually 'yuck'. And, I, too, was forced to sit at table until I had eaten everything on my plate. I remember sitting there for hours on end most nights, and when my parents finally decided to let me go to bed, they stuck the plate in the refrigerator and served it to me, cold and dried out, for brekkie!! I threw up so many times, but all that happened when I did was I was punished for doing so...as if I had done it purposely. I especially despised tinned peas, and do so to this day. Very 'unpatriotic' of me, I know, but the texture and taste raise my bile. Of course, tinned peas were 'on the menu' at our home several times each week. I also hated junkets and gelatine desserts, anything 'slimy'. I seldom minded not getting any dessert. I did learn to cook early on as self-defense. Luckily I had two grandmothers who were wonderful, 'old fashioned' cooks, with totally different ethnic backgrounds, so I learned the entire gamut of 'good' foods from them. I was so happy when I was able to leave home, as that meant never having to eat any foods I despised ever again. (My parent's didn't mind my doing the cookery, but the ingredients available were always their choice.) I would rather go hungry than eat something I dislike. Oh, and I grew up to be a chef. (There IS a happy ending to this story.)

first off that drinking someone else's moucas made me gag. Growing up we had two refrigerators the "front" for food and leftovers and the "back" for drinks. If by some mistake or necessity food was put in the "back" refrigerator it wouldn't be touched for months. When i was fifteen and about to leave to go out with my friends my mother made me clean out the "back" fridge. Someone had made American Chop Suey roughly 3 months earlier. When I opened it the elbow macaroni had turned purple and there were several varieties of mold growing. However, the most disturbing part was that it was moving. I wabted to throw the whole thing out but my mom made me empty it and then clean out the pan it was in. I threw up for five minutes and everytime I smelled it I threw up again. And thinking about it, I may throw up again.