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Scrubbles @poptalk.scrubbles.tech

What is your horrible Food Poisoning story?

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.

71 comments

  • When I was a kid, working in a mall, there was this french fry place across from us that made AMAZING french fries, with this house made dijon sauce. Just phenomenal.

    You could buy a POUND of fries, so the other guys and me on the shift would get a pound and split it.

    Except I'd get sick from eating them. Only me, the other guys were fine.

    OK, process of elimination...

    Fries by themselves? Fine.
    Fries w/ ketchup? Fine.
    Fries w/ dijon sauce? Horribly sick, puking, the whole bit.

    Now, you might already know, dijon sauce is made with white wine.

    Ok, maybe it's the alcohol? I don't drink so... let's test the theory...

    Had A beer. One. Within 30 to 45 minutes I was throwing up everything I had eaten since I was 12. Was sick for 3 days.

    Turns out, my liver doesn't have the enzymes to correctly process alcohol.

    Alcohol -> Enzymes -> Acetaldehyde
    I have those, Acetaldehyde is what makes you sick when you're hung over. Cousin to formaldehyde.

    Acetaldehyde -> Enzymes -> Sugar and water.
    Those I'm missing. :(

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6875787/

  • Kicking us off. My worst story was on the day of my wedding. The night before I was drunk with friends in town, and they had never had real seafood before. So I ordered a huge platter of everything. Including, you guessed it, oysters. Now oysters are delicious, and they are usually fine if prepared well. Unfortuately we had just been through a large heatwave, and most of the oysters had spoiled, but no one knew yet. So I slurped a good 4 or 5 of them. Next day was the wedding. I really began to notice right before the ceremony. My (now wife) sent in the best man thinking I had cold feet. He came in, we chatted, he asked if I was alright. I... explained everything and he did what any good best man would do, and laughed. I was able to rally and attend my own wedding, but didn't enjoy too much of the food the day after.

    Turns out - it was Vibrio. I spent the next few days within 30 feet of a toilet at any given time. We weren't on our honeymoon yet thankfully, but our first few days of marriage were definitely interesting.

  • In high school we were hosting a marching band competition for schools a little smaller than ours. The band students helped work the whole event, so we were outside running around the football field all day.

    Eventually, we got to lunch, and myself and friends ran over to Arby’s. I’ve never really enjoyed coffee in my life, but a friend convinced me to try the JaMocha Shake. “It’s so good,” they said. So anyway, after a shake and roast beef sandwiches, we go back to the football field to help out in the afternoon.

    An hour or two later, something in my gut started turning sideways. I was sitting high up in the stands with friends, waiting for a band to finish their performance. Suddenly, it all came up. Roast beef and coffee shake. All over the stands…and dripping down onto who ever was unlucky enough to be below. At this field, the concessions were under the stands. Oof.

    So I ended up going home, of course. But I know that a friend of mine unfortunately had to clean it up. Poor girl.

    • Oof, Roast Beef and Mocha... Another lesson learned. Don't trust anything from a place that doesn't usually make them. Not always for food safety but also just quality. Frappacinos from fast food, or a burger from a coffee joint. Order what they're good at. (Sorry sounds like I'm telling, but I'm reflecting back on my old life lessons I learned the hard way)

  • I was on the final day of an overseas trip. I’d been there for several weeks, and my wife flew over and joined me for the last week to see the sights.

    I’d eaten the hotel breakfast buffet almost every day of my stay with no issues. So, I grabbed my usual items, including some buffet line shakshuka (an eggs, feta, and tomato stew). It may have been sitting out a while…. Thankfully my wife opted for something else. Yum yum, check out, drop stuff off at my company’s HQ, off the airport, drop the rental, etc.

    We were sitting in the airport inside the security check when it started - nausea, sweats, and bad cramps. Not the best look when in a foreign country with serious (and slow) airport security. Got through, beelined to the bathroom, and I thought I got it out from both ends. I boarded the plane feeling a bit better, but it ramped up again once we were onboard and continued for the entirety of the 13 hour flight home. I have seen immense torment inside the tiny bathroom of a 747 airliner, and I think I spent more time in there than my seat. When I did make it out, I sat shivering and sweaty in my seat for a few minutes before I had to go again.

    I was thankful my wife was there to keep me hydrated and that the plane was empty enough that I could grab a seat row near the back for myself to lie down, instead of climbing over some poor bastard every time.

    Surprisingly, I still like shakshuka.

    • That is the second airport plane story here in this thread. When I'm pre flight I eat only things I know, one example is McDonald's. Something I usually don't eat regulary, but I know how it affects me every time I fly. I'll feel some indigestion, but much better than... well, you lived one of my nightmares.

  • I'm not sure if this counts, but dysenteri from drinking contaminated water.

    2008 rendered me and my family homeless for 6 or so years. I was a teenager back then.

    We were on vacation in Morocco. We were never a rich family, this vacation was something we planned several years in advance. But as we were in Morocco the whole economy collapsed and we were left stranded.

    We made it into Spain by selling a bunch of our stuff. Then we were left stranded in Spain. Still realing from the shock of having lost everything, we were living in some plastic tents next to a river. We weren't allowed to drink the much cleaner water used by the local irrigation, so we took river water and boiled it.

    Boiling it apparently wasn't enough. For a whole week I had snot-like slime with blood clots coming out of both ends. Nothing I ate stayed in or could be digested. Some locals who decided to help us said I looked like a skeleton, like someone from a concentration camp. I felt weaker and weaker, more tired, slept longer until I was basically asleep the entire day. I was told I was dying.

    What saved me may have been activated charcoal. My mom had a whole pot of it and was feeding it to me with yogurt.

  • 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.

  • While camping my dad and I found a watermelon. Not a wild one, or anything like that. One that someone had left. We ate it. We regretted it. It was not even that great tasting of a watermelon. Plus since we were camping we brought a limited amount of toilet paper, there was a lot of dipping our bottoms in the stream.

  • A few years ago, I went to a cafe for breakfast, quite regularly. One morning I decided to try their cooked breakfast, quite similar to a Full English. I'm not a fan of sausages, especially cheap ones, so I didn't think anything of it when I didn't like the taste.

    Over the rest of the day and the next morning, I ate a few different meals, but nothing unusual for me. By about lunch time I was feeling very rough. I was hot and sweaty, and needed the bathroom more often than usual. Now, I have a chronic illness, and between that and the meds, I get upset stomachs fairly often, to the point where I know if it's serious or not just from experience.

    I was starting to feel weak and dizzy, so I knew that it wasn't normal, and then liquid fire started coming out of both ends. Luckily, my wife was home, and realised that I wasn't joking about this time being worse, and called my doctor. I ended up in hospital for several days with severe food poisoning, and had to have IV fluids.

    Environmental Health were called and quizzed me about everything I'd eaten in the last week, and agreed that it was probably the sausage on my breakfast. They investigated the café, but found no serious problems. Luckily, it looked like whatever was wrong with the sausage only affected me because of my health issues, and didn't seriously affect anyone else.

    I haven't been back to that café though, just in case.

    • Anytime there is ground meat in the process like sausages I immediately have a second laser focus on it. You're probably right that that's what it was. All it takes is for one of them to be a bit undercooked

  • I ate a burger at a restaurant. There was nothing concerning about the burger or restaurant. A couple of hours later, my friend asked me if I wanted to catch up to watch a movie. We planned to have dinner after the movie.

    As I sat in the cinema, I started to feel sick, fast. I felt the urge to run to the bathroom. So, I got out of my seat and ran to the bathroom. But, as I opened the bathroom door, I projectile vomited all over the floor. A cinema staff member walked into the bathroom, and all I could do was apologise. I still feel terrible thinking about the person who had to clean it up.

    I left the cinema with my friend without watching the movie. But, when I reached my home without any further incident, I basically kept throwing up all night. I lost 8kg that night. So, I went to hospital the following day, and spent 8 hours on a drip.

    That was my first and hopefully only food poisoning incident.

  • This was really on me, but I once ate yogurt that was well past its expiration date and ended up with hives everywhere.

  • It was either the shrimp or the bean sprouts in the food court Pad Thai. I was visiting my S.O. in Canada and wound up in a 3-day war with food poisoning. I could not stop puking and shitting. I shit so much acidic death juice that my asshole was in absolute agony and never cooled down. It was like someone had fileted and cauterized my rectum. I couldn't even sit on the couch properly. Fortunately, her sectional was old and had collapsed in on itself in the very corner. I sat in this corner, right on top of the collapsed portion. It was perfect for supporting my body without making contact with the seat of my pants. I sat in this corner for three days watching weird YouTube videos about Centralia and other phenomena, while intermittently hopping up to puke and shit and fart. I was so fucking sick. I felt like I was going to die.

  • 1999 - Taco Bell nachos did me in, never ate there or at any Taco Bell ever again.

    2004 - Some sushi joint outside of Tacoma, WA, I had the shrimp tempura. Nothing tasted off, but that was my first experience with it coming out of both ends at the same time.

    2005 - I was an idiot that thought, for God knows what reason, that the floor of the trailer I called home at the time while stationed in Iraq would remain cold enough to keep a can of Fritos dip cool after I opened it (we did not have a fridge). I was very very wrong and paid the price later the following evening after finishing the dip that day, and that was my second experience with it coming out both ends at the same time. I know it was my own fault, but I still can't eat those dips to this day.

    Fast forward to 2020 - 2023, something is making me randomly ill on a monthly, sometimes weekly basis. I eat a regular meal, 30 minutes later I'm in the bathroom with horrible cramps and shits. It took me nearly 3 years to figure out that I'd become lactose intolerant due to age (this is apparently a common occurrence as you get older). Haven't had any issues now that I know to avoid most dairy, but I can immediately tell if I've unknowingly ingested some, because it feels like I've been poisoned 15 minutes into consuming it. Then comes the frantic race to swallow as much Lactaid and lactase pills as I can to calm the storm before it can reach my intestines.

  • Kebab joint in the very centre of our million person town.

    Ate it on the day before Xmas, was walking and talking again by mid Boxing Day.

    Bleaugh, lie down sweats and toilet yoyo.

    The place shut down 5yrs after.

    This was 20yrs ago, no kebab related issues since then, all tasty. Sour cream and garlic sauce, add a single felafel too.

  • We have high standards for American Chinese food. There was this place where we used to live in the food was great. Not everything they made came out of a bag, and even the things that did come out of a bag had absolutely superior sauces. I don't know exactly what they did but whatever it was it was better heads and tails than anything else around here.

    We ordered our regular dishes one day. A few hours later we were exploding out of both ends. Was it them? was lunch? Who knows? We went about our regular business and two weeks later ordered the same regiment. A few hours later we again were exploding out of both ends.

    The puking wasn't all that bad but the raw acid diarrhea and the massive cramps were just insane.

    This was a pretty bad scenario because of the time we lived in a house with one bathroom.

    We never ordered from there again. They had this really great iced tea It took me ages to figure out how to replicate it. It ended up being like 14 to 1 regular sweetened black tea to Earl Gray, plus a splash of lemon.

  • I was on business trip in Atlanta and had nachos at a dive bar. My supplier had put me up in a corner suite overlooking the runway and I spent the night bowl hugging with liquid coming out of both ends. Met my boss at the airport the next morning where he said I looked green.. and he upgraded us to FirstClass. It was my first time in FirstClass and I spent it in the lavatory. Got off the plane, had a meeting at the plant, went to the hotel and passed out for 12 hours.

  • On a backpacking trip, the better part of a day away from the trailhead. It came on so quick I didn't have time to run behind a tree, just dropped pants and let it out in full view of my travel buddies. As embarrassing as it was, it was the right choice. I didn't have any other pants to change in to and the distance we had to hike out would have led to far more serious health issues had I hiked in dirty pants.

    I'm not sure what caused it. I was the only one who got sick. Probably a simple hygiene slip at some point. Someone didn't clear their hands well enough before cooking, or something made it past the water filters. I'm just glad someone had immodium and everyone gave me their spare fluids and electrolytes. I can see how a person could get really dehydrated really quickly and wind up in trouble.

  • Not embarrassing or thrilling, but way back when I still ate meat, I'm pretty sure Waffle House tried to kill me with a bad batch of Bert's chili. At least, that was the featured odor/flavor in all my bodily effluvium (which was copious!) in the several succeeding days. I didn't die but I do remember wishing I was dead. The experience turned me into a Waffle House skeptic and shortly thereafter, a vegetarian.

  • I've eaten at Popeyes Chicken restaurants three times in my life, each the at a different location, and all three of those meals gave me food poisoning.

    I won't be going back to Popeyes a fourth time, because I can take a hint.

    • I've never been but always wanted to try, but thanks for the heads up. It's not too hard people, basic safety measures are easy. What that tells me is that management doesn't care enough to teach or prep their employees on safety.

  • Most recently because my memory is bad? Had some ramen with leftover brisket. I had been eating it for a bit, but the brisket had just past the point of no return.

    Luckily I was the only one to eat that, so me and the single toilet were not disturbed.

    • Thanks to my story and stories like yours, we learned that we need minimum 1.5 bathrooms in our home going forward. Sounds like you got real lucky!

      • Yeah. We were less lucky ages and ages ago when we all got sick with...the flu? Pneumonia? Something near the holidays. That sucked horribly.

  • Sister and dad love Oysters, Muscles, shellfish in general. So when I got some muscles I boiled them up then made macaroni in the juice left behind. They ate it, they loved it. But I ate about a half cup of the pasta. Just the pasta.

    Sickest I've ever been in my life. Closest I've got to shellfish since is Shrimp. They don't bother me.

71 comments