After a small bout this weekend, I want to hear what your horrible food poisoning stories are! Embarrassing? Thrilling? Was it a kitchen ignoring safety protocols or did you trust something that was a little iffy out of the fridge? Let me hear it! I’ll post my own below.
Our family was on a road trip, and I made tuna salad sandwiches in the morning. We ended up never stopping for lunch, and in the evening I went to throw away the sandwiches. “They can’t be that bad,” said my husband, “you only made them this morning.” I gave him a “really?” look and continued to throw the sandwiches away.
Apparently this made my usually intelligent and science-minded husband eager to play the tuna roulette. He grabbed a sandwich and took a small bite “see, they are fine!” I called him crazy and threw the rest away. “You’re going to regret that,” I said.
The next morning, we are getting ready to drive to Bandolier National Monument, about a 45-min drive from our hotel. Everything is fine, my husband is driving. All of a sudden, he says “Shit.”
“What is it, baby?” “I need to go. Like, right now.”
He ends up crouching behind a lone scraggly tree next to the road while pooping pure shit water. The rest of his family pass us by in their other two cars. One of them stops as he wildly gestures for them to keep going. They finally get the hint and leave.
Yeah, we never made it to Bandolier that day. But he only had to shit one more time by the road on the way back to the hotel, so that was a win.
He has since agreed that my food safety knowledge is superior and developed a healthy respect for mayonnaise’s ability to ruin a fun day.
I too come from a family who knew more than scientists when it came to food spoilage. I think it’s why I have such a delicate colon now. Grandparents and parents who said “Just drink it, it’s fine” when their children say “It tastes funny”. So many “24 hour stomach bugs” that now that I’m grown I realize were probably food poisoning. For your husband I often think to when I feel guilty that food is wasted. I have to tell myself “No, throwing it in the trash wasn’t when it was wasted, it was wasted when I decided not to eat it earlier, that’s when I allowed it to become trash”. Eating it after it’s spoiled doesn’t make it un-wasted.