The readers speak: The worst food they have ever eaten

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the worst foods I and a lot of my Facebook friends — many of whom I have actually met — have ever eaten.

Readers, bless ‘em, wanted in on the fun. So they wrote and emailed and called to say what the worst thing they ever ate was, too.

ThinkinDrinkin recalled a story from a colleague about a Thanksgiving dinner from many years before. Comparing the scene to a Norman Rockwell painting, he said that grandma took dinner out of the oven and brought it to the table — a whole roasted raccoon on its back, with its feet sticking into the air.

“Nope, nope, nopity nope!” he wrote.

Chillingly along the same lines was the barbecued raccoon Friessa had at a VFW hall.

Certain Scandinavian foods came in for their share of abuse, too. Cellolee and Alton both cited lutefisk, a notoriously noxious and gelatinous dried white fish that is first cured in lye and then rehydrated for several days.

“Many years ago, I visited a really nice Swedish family who offered it up as a delicacy. I choked some down, but never again,” Alton said.

Bongoshaftsbury — and I’d like to point out that the readers themselves came up with these names, not me — said, “One time, and one time only, I bought a tin of Norwegian fish cakes. Gray, mucilaginous lumps greeted me with the flavor of fish long on the stringer and exposed to the sun by a falling tide.

“Scandinavian weather in a can.”

Al’s most-disliked foods were more pedestrian: Brussels sprouts, tuna salad and neckbones. And Medi8r wrote, “There are still folks who ruin a perfectly good bowl of chili by putting beans in it.”

Personally, I like beans in my chili. If you want to get all foodie about it, they add an umami undertone that tempers the spice, allowing you to add more heat to the chili if you want. If you want to be less technical, I just like the way they taste.

But I don’t love beans in my chili as much as I love beets. When I was young, pickled beets were one of my very favorite foods, and I still crave them. I may be in the minority on this one.

Randy said the food he hates most is “beets. Nothing even comes close. Beets. Dreaded, horrid beets.” Ron added, “by far the worst thing I have ever tasted” is beet juice. And Avery’s most-despised food is canned beets.

I don’t care. Hate beets all you want. That just means more beets for me.

Nathan opined that his worst food is a pork kidney, and Walter dislikes sea urchin, which he says “tastes like biting into an electrical cord.” Jay detests those classic canned meats, Spam and Vienna sausages. Steve tried roasted chestnuts, and “I wanted a detachable tongue.”

Colleen calls shrimp “cockroaches of the sea.” Hillary calls them “insects of the sea.” Colleen and Hillary know each other. Colleen also hates chocolate ice cream. There is something wrong with Colleen.

The worst food Alan ever ate was beef liver with molasses. Larry agreed about the liver, and added “thankfully, (I’ve) never had to deal with it with molasses on it.”

Astelfrog submitted a whole host of foods he or she particularly dislikes, including haggis, sauerkraut, slimy okra, horehound candy (an old-fashioned hard candy that tastes like a blend of licorice and mint), rhubarb and “anything where the eyes stare back at you.”

The worst thing Pam ever ate was a post-Christmas meal of turkey soup her father made when she was nine. He used a turkey carcass that he’d kept in the refrigerator for a full two weeks. That’s a good week after he should have discarded it.

“It tasted awful, but he’d worked so hard I accepted a second bowl, and soon began feeling very ill. I went to my room and sat on my bed, wondering if I was going to die,” she wrote.

Ed pointed out that the main ingredient in the Chinese delicacy bird’s nest soup is a special kind of nest that is created by a certain kind of bird spitting out a gummy saliva that hardens when exposed to air.

Burkem detests the fermented egg, balut, he tried in the Philippines and said, “I have always wondered if it was invented on purpose or just discovered by accident.” Meanwhile, Kurt had even harsher words for another Filipino favorite, bopis.

“It is a dish made from all of the things that Westerners think of as garbage. It is a hash made of spleens, lungs, anuses, adenoids, eyeballs, nostrils, (dirty) toenails, rectums, ear wax and anything else that could be harvested,” he wrote.

In fact, bopis is actually made with diced pork lung, heart and sometimes kidneys, cooked with onions, garlic and spices. But his point is taken.

Quoting Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe on “Friends,” he said, “I know what evil tastes like.”