Sometimes in life we eat things we REALLY don't wanna eat in order to be respectful or to spare someone's feelings. Pretty normal, right?
But when reddit user u/eland_ asked, "What's the worst thing you've eaten in order to be polite?" The responses were...a lot. Here are some of the worst:
1. "A guy I worked with gave me an Italian sub he brought back from his house while on break. I told him I was okay, but he insisted. From the first bite, I could tell something was weird about it, but I kept taking small bites to be polite. Eventually the dude tells me that his mom used to work at the gas station next door and that she'd take the subs about to expire and put them in the freezer. The sub was 5 years old."
2. "My grandmother cooked up half a dozen pies for Thanksgiving or Christmas — it was so long ago, I forget which. She sliced me off a little piece first and had me try it. It was AWFUL, but I ate it and thanked her. Later that night, after dinner, we were getting ready for dessert and Grandma just started crying. She had baked all the pies with salt rather than sugar."
3. "A frozen pizza with SpaghettiOs as the topping."
4. "A Jell-O mold with a full salad in the mold. Lettuce, tomato, olives, onions, etc. My grandmother made it. We all were forced to eat it. It's still one of the most disgusting things I've ever had to eat."
5. "My friend's dad, who had depression, made us breakfast one morning (he had a good day there), and he made scrambled eggs. But lot of the eggshells were in there too. He was also gonna use a little cumin (I hope), but for some reason, it was kinda...cinnamony. We ate it anyway, and man, was that just unpleasant. But his dad was a kind man, and we fucking ate that shit fast as hell and with fake gusto."
6. "I once ate pasta that had olives in it. I didn't realize that I was supposed to spit out the pits, so I just swallowed them. I thought I was being polite."
7. "I was once served fish that was cooked with the scales still on it. The host left the room, and I started chowing down. Awful. Scales stuck in my throat for the rest of the day. I thought that was how I was supposed to eat it because I'd never seen that before. Then the host came back in, sat down, and immediately peeled off the scales and ate it like a normal human being."
8. "When I had sushi for the very first time, I ate the green divider thing. Yes, the plastic bit. I didn't want to be rude. In my defense, that was decades ago, when sushi was REALLY new in my country."
9. "When I was 11, I moved to a small town in rural England and acquired a new best friend at school. Her (at that point) seemingly very normal parents invited me over for dinner and said they were making curry-and-rhubarb crumble. 'Curry-and-rhubarb crumble.' Never in the history of mankind have words been so untrue...
"The 'curry' consisted of — I swear I am not making this up — a vague mixture of oatmeal, tofu sausages, corn, tomato juice, chopped onions, raisins, 'leftover broccoli leaves,' kale, and scrambled eggs. The only spice in it was the tiniest smidgen of turmeric. All of these ingredients were vaguely stirred together, undercooked, and stuck under a broiler for 10 minutes.
"They gave me a massive portion. I somehow — I still don’t know how — was polite enough to finish it."
10. "My parents went to have dinner with friends when I was a kid. They said that their friends cooked pasta with cat food in it and served it to them. They politely but begrudgingly started eating it, bite by bite. Three or four bites in, their friends started laughing and explained the prank, then served them the real dinner. I don’t think my parents have completely forgiven them for that yet."
11. "A bay leaf. When I was around 8 years old, some friends had us over for spaghetti dinner and they used bay leaf for seasoning. My mom wasn't so fancy; I had never seen a bay leaf. I was raised to be polite, so I ate the damn bay leaf thinking it was just how she made spaghetti."
12. "My mother-in-law used to make tacos with no taco seasoning. I didn’t know this and made myself three huge tacos the first time I went over my wife’s parents' house for dinner. Plain. Browned. Chopped. Meat. Tacos."
13. "A pot roast that had been cooked in the microwave. It was so gross and tough and had these big, rubbery veins of fat running through it. I ate a few bites and then went to bed hungry."
14. "Our friend had us over for a 'meatloaf party.' He made three different types of meatloaf: 1) Bacon-wrapped meatloaf, which was essentially just a hard bacon shell with a grease sponge inside. 2) His grandmother's traditional meatloaf — aka only meat and whole olives. 3) And 'everything but the kitchen sink,' which was basically the first two put together, along with carrots, celery, black beans, rice, tomatoes, salsa, and dates. It was the worst dinner party ever; he was super proud."
15. "A glazed ham on Christmas Eve that sat in a Crock-Pot all day. That shit was about as dry as a 500-year-old tortoise taking its last breath. I threw up several times that night and said it was food poisoning from the burrito bowl I'd had for lunch."
16. "Lasagna with almonds in it. Who does that to lasagna?!"
17. "Shrimp that were blue and didn't look cooked. My boyfriend's dad served them to us. I don't think he cleaned them out, either."
18. And finally, "My sister-in-law hosted a holiday one year and bragged the whole time about how expensive her spiral ham was. She dumped the ham in a Crock-Pot and covered it with two liters of Dr Pepper. No seasoning, just Dr Pepper for hours. That thing was so nasty, and I'm already not a fan of ham. I know there are recipes that use soda, but this thing was swimming in it, and the flavor was atrocious."
