What was the worst food you ever encountered during your travels?

I'd like to say food in India but that is too general. All five of us could not get used to food in India from north to south. I lost five pound in three weeks without getting Delhi belly once.

The worst food I had was pig hocks in a Chinese restaurant in Delhi. After eating lamb and chicken swimming in yogurt a few days in Delhi we succumbed to the craving for Chines food. Big mistake. Even worse mistake was we ordered pig hocks upon the waiter's suggestion. Pork is generally not consumed in India. You see pigs roaming the street just like cows do on the street. That should have tipped us off. The chef just didn't know how to properly prepare pig hocks. It was tough and salty. We should've known also. Even if the chef knows what he was doing properly done pig hocks takes time to cook we couldn't have waited long enough to have it.

The only time I've been through a McDonald's drive-through -- one of there's times I've been through any drive-through -- was with a friend who got a plain burger,nothing on it, for her teacup poodle. We discarded the bun.

Methinks this thread has been unreasonably edited.

This is the first time in well nigh a decade (in my recollection) that I have, if in effect, accused a mod of unreasonable deletion.

I'm not going to debate the matter, unless invited to the House to give evidence before a Select Committee (no, they won't need to issue a summons, in my case).

I just post my comment for the record. (Superfluous in one sense: despite the deletion the record remains.)

#12.Have seen cows,goats and pigs scavenging around worse places than streets like open garbage dumps,shanty town toilets in cities and rural areas of India,Bangladesh as well as parts of SE Asia.
Most of these animals end up in the cooking pots of homes and street resturants.

Certainly not cows in India, or do they? Roaming pigs on the street tells me they are not popular food items. The restaurant menu is another indication pork is not a popular food item in India.

Actually there is quite a significant population of beef eating Indian Muslims(and some Christians)live in India apart from being the majority in Bangladesh.
Quite a number of cows and buffalows are also smuggled across the border from India as well as frozen butchered beef exported to SE Asian countries.
Pork is only mostly eaten by the expats and the local Christian or animist communities especially in Goa as well as the hilly tribal areas.
The worst Indo-Chinese dishes,on rare occasions including pork,we have had in resturants were in Dhaka and Chittagong in Bangladesh.
However,the tribal Bhuddist Chakma tribal people up in the Chittagong Hill tracts make some deliciously spicy dry hot curry pork dishes from semi feral wild boars there.

I think the worst meals I've probably had have been western style food in oriental or eastern destinations

I forgot the "breakfast" in Chinese hotels when I visited in the early 1980s. Things were still pretty rigid in China where tourism was concerned (you could only go with a tour & many places were off limits.) and the tourist office had told hotels that Westerners would want a Western breakfast.

However, outside of a few big cities, hotel keepers had no first hand experience with a Western breakfast. They just knew it should be toast with butter and jam, and eggs. Bread not really being a part of the Chinese diet, they did the best they could. It was pretty bad. It didn't help that they often let it sit out so it could get good & stale before use. The farther south, the worse the flour, so the worse the bread.

The Chinese also didn't do dairy, so most of the time the butter was canned. The jam was of uncertain vintage.

The eggs were sometimes fried sunny side up, in as much oil as possible. More often, they were boiled. I say "boiled" generically, rather than hard or soft boiled, because the degree of cooking was random. Sometimes they were served hot; sometimes they had been boiled ahead & left at room temperature. In that case, you had to paw through the bowl of eggs to be sure you got one that was not cracked (entrance of germs, you know.)

Hotel keepers were rather surprised when we kept asking for Chinese breakfasts instead of the Western ones.

The bread leftover from breakfast was sometimes used to make sandwiches for a picnic lunch. Stale bread spread with canned mystery meat or containing something vaguely bologna-like. No condiments.

I quite like ye, Nutrax. (But I hope that ye never give me cause to think yer judgement is partial.)

Pork is generally not consumed in India. You see pigs roaming the street just like cows do on the street.

I beg to differ, Pork is consumed by both Christian and Hindu communities along the West coast from Maharashtra down to Kerala and also Coorg Bangalore and parts of Tamil Nadu. To this day I haven't seen any pig wandering the streets like cows do, I have on the other hand seen them running from compound to compound foraging in the undergrowth of untamed gardens and backyards and although some local pigs are fed in the old eco friendly way, many more are being fed an organic diet due to to the fact nobody wants pork fed on shit. I know this for a fact because I have a house in a rural location on the West coast of India.

@ivor Pigs roam in Rajastan quite commonly. Just like cows they sift through garbage for food. Although cows on the street are much more common. Not too many cows wander in Kerala either. We did see packs of boars in Kerala. The boars in Kerala are probably wild as we saw them in a National Park. But they don't seem to be afraid of human and visitors do not bother them either. The packs we saw in Rajastan are all inside reasonably crowded neighborhood.

Edited by: yaofeng