Damn, I had to think LONG AND HARD about this since I have a rather....delicate stomach. When I was a kid? The smell in the cafeteria every single day would make me literally gag. Needless to say I was an endless source of amusements to my best friend, until one day I made her laugh so hard that fruit punch came out of her nose and the same day she found a quarter in her ass crack in the bathroom after not being able to find correct change for a snack in line. It was mutual blackmail, you know how that goes.
Okay, I think it's a tie between three things.
1. Again, years ago when I was younger, we were taken on a field trip into Philly to go to some weird, inner city German restaurant for German class (I have
no fucking idea, but you need to put it into perspective, I went to a public school that thought visiting the woods was an amazing field trip for math class). They had lamb, or....lamb. No other choices for meat. I'm a major carnivore so I was dying to eat something after sitting on a bus and listening to 25 other students belching, farting, and bitching for an hour and a half. I went "Well...it's meat. It can't be THAT bad, right?". Now, I had eaten venison (yum) and other game meat before so at the worst I was expecting it to be a bit on the irony side, having no prior experience.
I have no idea what the fuck they did to that meat, but whatever it was it tasted like it had been rubbed between unwashed sweaty ass cheeks(which I imagine might taste the same, this not ever having been on my dining menu thank you very much). I had to work not to vomit at the table.
2. This one is a bit of a cheat, since it was completely apparent from the beginning that I was going to hate the ever loving hell out of it. My mother and I were out alone waiting for my grandmother and younger sister to finish a day of "girl time" alone and meet us after dinner. We decided to brave the local Country Buffet since it was cheap, close, and we were hungry. Now this particular one apparently often serves stuff that seems a little strange to the average diner, and once we had eaten a sub-par meal and found ourselves bored and waiting, my mother began looking over the more exotic selections and proposed a dare that we each eat something gross that the other had picked for us. I picked some kind of brains for her, and she picked deep fried chicken liver for me. Holy hell! Now, I'm not very good with things that have a distinct "animal" taste to them, like chicken that has marinated in its own juices too long, or older beef, that sort of thing. This was like what I imagine drinking the residue at the bottom of a package of chicken breasts tastes like. Absolutely horrible.
3. The mildest of the three from my perspective. At the Chinese buffet there are many strange delights to be found, but undoubtedly my favourite was the tiny, raw baby octopuses. I picked one up just to freak out my family, and decided to lick it (shut up I have the kind of family that you make bad decisions with, see above for mother example
). I was expecting any number of tastes, but rubber tire? Really? It tasted like I had gone outside and licked the front wheel of my grandmother's SUV. The octopus then got paper napkin eyes stabbed into it and was waiting for my sister on her plate when she came back from the bathroom.
Now, something to cleanse the pallete: Raw sugar lollipops. Extremely hard to find where I live (apparently more of an Italian/European thing that became tradition in my Italian family for generations), but they're just poured sugar with the slightest hint of a brown sugar/maple taste to them from being made from raw sugar. Delicious!