What's the worst meal you've ever eaten?

[latteloverr]

I'll go first. Steak and coco pops. The steak was in the coco pops. DD made it.

Prawn curry. I loathe prawns anyway and it was so hot that it was totally inedible in any case. I just left it.

My aunt who was the worst cook on earth, made a lasagne that she had to serve in a bowl as it had the consistency of soup.

Spam green Thai curry made by DH one night

Some sort of stew that we had in East Berlin.

Ex-H and I visited just as the wall was coming down. We'd gone through to the east and couldn't find anywhere to eat so decided to eat in the cafe in a department store (obviously a bad choice). To this day I don't actually know what the meat was. It was vile.

To cap it all we had to spend the East German marks we had as we couldn't take them back to the west . We couldn't find anything to buy and tried to go and have a drink somewhere but there was too big a queue. On our way back we met two East German girls coming back from the west and gave them our marks. They were slightly stunned but very grateful.

We then turned the corner and there was a duty free shop just before the crossing point.😁

At a dinner party at friend's house. They had made a Chinese beef dish, but used stewing beef instead of steak. It was stir fried. Imagine the chewing we had to do.....

Tuna pasta. My dad made it for dinner one day when I was younger, I took a few mouthfuls and really didn't like it. Well I wasn't allowed to leave the table until I had finished my plate, so I sat there forcing myself to eat it through my tears. I swear I will NEVER go near tuna EVER again. EVER.

A hot apple with a small omelette on top of it.
That was in China in the 90s - I think the chef in the college restaurant concocted it as a special treat for me because I'm vegetarian!

Once, when I was 8 months pregnant, we were invited to our friends’ house for dinner. They “cooked” chicken thigh, but it was well under and streaked with blood. Then they gave me a mattress on the floor with no pillow.

I was worried about getting off the mattress at any speed when popping to the loo in the night, so I requested the sofa instead. Bad move. The downstairs loo was nearby and in constant use, because everyone else had eaten the chicken. 💩

We had an office Christmas party once where the food was awful. 'Carrot and coriander soup' tasted like grainy water, turkey was lukewarm and also flavourless. It was altogether a rubbish evening - I had just moved in with now-DH and we'd just had our first big row, and my dad had been injured that day in an accident so that just added insult to injury!

Skate that tasted and smelt like piss. Posh pub lunch.... apparently it's a thing that sometimes skate has an ammonia smell and taste!

Ramen with slimy chicken and about an inch of fat floating on top. It absolutely stank and looked filthy. DS was in full YUMYUM mode, whilst DH and I tried to stop retching. It was in one of the best ramen restaurants in that area of Tokyo.
I was expecting it to be like Wagamama ramen!

I once took a large bite out of a cheese sandwich on a plane. I'd been offered ham and tomato or plain cheese by an air hostess and had taken plain cheese as I utterly detest tomato. I was, therefore, very suprised and totally horrified to find myself with a mouth full of juicy ripe tomato. The chap next to me was equally horrified at my frantic efforts to find the sick bag as my face turned greener and greener. Tomato was expelled and I re-affirmed my life's motto to never bite into a sandwich not first opened and inspected for tomato!

Chilli con carne at someone's house made with fatty cheap chewy mince and zero flavouring that I could discern

Saturday dinners as a child - always a variation of boiled neck of mutton, boiled chicken with pearl barley or tinned salmon accompanied by soggy mash with lumps of boiled onion, over stewed veg with a dose of bicarbonate of soda to make sure they were well cooked plus parsley sauce made with flour and water if it was salmon. Followed by the inevitable arguments when I couldn't/wouldn't eat it.

Not really a meal but instead of the famous tea and toast after birth I only got a ginger biscuit and they didn't have any water. This was after 21 hours labour and I was starting and so so thirsty. I was choking on the ginger biscuit while they were taking my babys measurements and for some reason they didn't write his length down so I have no idea how long he was when born lol.

Also once had Spaghetti so overcooked it was a block of congealed pasta we had to cut slices of.

Ha, I came on to post this. It was absolutely awful 🤢

At a fairly high end pub, a steak pie which had been made accidentally with sweet pastry. Even just one taste was enough to make me gag and I was only just about able to get that mouthful down. The chef actually argued that it was supposed to be like that! Until I got the manager to taste it, and 'steak pie' was hastily removed from the menu, and I got a second, actually very nice meal for free!

Out for FIL's birthday meal at a local restaurant. We had the set menu, can't remember what the starter was but it wasn't great. For the main course DD1 and I were given pasta that must have been made a week ago and had gone off, covered in that old fashioned ready grated parmesan that smells like sick.

Didn't want to make a big fuss what with it being a special occasion but it was so inedible I had to complain, and we did not pay for our meals in the end.

My DH made some "mashed parsnips" once, which made me gag when I tried to swallow it - it was like snot.

Aside from that, I spent some time in a rural part of Uganda where there were limited options for meals. The stew got progressively worse over time, and ended up as bits of chewy intestine in a watery sauce, plus grit.

I ordered a chicken and salad sandwich in Portugal. Took a bite and couldn’t really comprehend what I was eating and why the texture was so off. Was worried I was eating slimey off chicken! Luckily it wasn’t rotten chicken - I opened the sandwich and there were two bananas in it 🍌. Happened in the year 2000, definitely was not a bad dream.

Cuttlefish in Sri Lanka. Completely inedible. Even the 4 hungry cats hanging round our table wouldn't touch it.

I think this one counts, but I might get banned from the thread for not understanding the assignment!

I went to local restaurant – I was quite young and it was probably one of my first restaurant experiences that wasn’t a pub or a chain. The food was amazing and I was raving about it anybody who’d listen for about a week afterwards.

Another few weeks later they were exposed on “Britain worst restaurants” or similar! They had footage of the chef cooking whilst smoking, and food left uncovered outside the back doors until it was needed!

But it still tasted good and I didn’t get sick!

Restaurant in the Cotswolds. I ordered beef. It was green when I cut into it and smelled rancid. The place now has a Michelin Star…but I won’t ever go back. And it was bad enough I haven’t eaten beef since.

I didn't know what Andouillette was, and simultaneously the fact that the word sounded French reminded me if the most vile 'sausages' I encountered as a child on holiday in France that were literally nothing but a long parcel of gristle, slime and mini-tubes stuffed into a bigger tube. So I googled and it turns out that yes this is indeed Andouillette.

Recovering after surgery in hospital, the sandwich I ordered for evening meal was:
One slice of cheapest white bread, unbuttered
One slice of sweaty , slimy processed cheese.

If anyone had come to tell me how important nutrition was for post-op recovery, I would have slapped them with it.