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.
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.
My mother made rice in the morning and forgot to put it in the fridge, it was a hot summer day.
When my brother came back from school he decided to eat the rice, not knowing how long it was out. A few bites in he notes the odd taste, nothing major but noticeable, his solution? Add more sauce to drown the weird taste!
Fast forward about an hour, now my brother is puking and shitting it and everything else that was inside of him. So far this is pretty normal right? It can happen to anyone at least once and it wasn’t anything crazy since after one puking/shitting session he felt better and was mostly over it.
About 2 hours later my father comes home, this man does not throw away food as long as it isn’t covered in mold (this means that small amounts of mould are okay to cut out and eat the rest, thia is the level we are talking about) and just to clarify, we had no food shortage or money issues, he is just unwilling to throw away food.
For some reason nobody threw away the rice yet and it was still on the kitchen counter. My father sees the rice and we all immediately warn him that my brother got food poisoning from it and he should not eat it, of course my father, the genius, decides that my brother just has a weak stomach. He takes a bite, notices the weird taste and you guessed it… Drowns it in sauce!
As expected about an hour later he had a similar puking/shitting session, and learned absolutely nothing.
“Fried rice syndrome” is a thing. Room temp rice is a good place for the bacteria to grow and it’s heat resistant. Once in your guts it continues to grow on food in there too.
Bro wtf your dad is crazy lmao. Does your mom often leave things out like that? Myom will leave food out for hours after it is cooked and it will really bother me. She gets annoyed when I am always offering to put stuff in the fridge because “it’s still warm” and “I’ve been cooking for 50 years”. I don’t fuck around with food safety.
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.
It was the last day of my first year at the university. I had few hours before my ride arrived. And because I was a poor student I was doing everything to eat as cheap as possible. On the day of the move I had no breakfast as I assumed I can hold off until I get home. I was wrong. Luckily for me the place I lived in (it was some sort of a dorm) had a place to leave food that’s no longer needed. It wasn’t spoiled or expired, so everyone could grab something. Unfortunately one of the breads develop mold. I found about it after I was done with couple slices. Long story short, few hour drive home took half a day because I had to hit the bushes every 10 minutes.
Woke up with my stomach in knots, figured I ate something bad the previous day. Texted my work group chat and let them know that I would be useless if I showed up, and explained that I think I ate something bad for dinner. They said something along the lines of “no worries, but you’re still gonna have to come in to at least grab the paperwork for staying home for a day.” Annoyed, I got a ride to work and went to go do the formalities and explained that my boss had already given me the go ahead to stay home, I just needed the paperwork. First guy I talked to had no issue just writing it up and sending me on my way, but when he stepped away for a second I got asked some questions by one of his coworkers who told me “we have to give you a check up first to determine if you actually have to stay home.” She checked my stomach for pain and listened to it make some noises, then decided I was just constipated and gave me something to drink to help. First guy still wrote the paperwork up for me, and I got to go home, stomach in even worse situation and I spent nearly 2 hours on the toilet before I felt safe enough to go lay down and slept the rest of the day away.
(And yes I’m well aware that it’s atypical to get a checkup by your workplace, this was a weird and terrible place to work. Glad I got outta there.)
Wow, they suck. Also weird to have to come in to take a sick day.
I was in Jamaica and my friend and I bought mangoes from a Rasta. We went down to the beach to eat them but I saved some for the next morning. Unfortunately I forgot to put them in the fridge and they sat out over night. Dumb me didn’t realize at the time and I ate them for breakfast. Everything was fine up until this point but thing was I was flying back home in a few hours. Right before I got on my first flight it hit me. I managed to be calm and hold it but it was rough. Landing back in the states and waiting to go through customs was awful and once I got through I let it all free. I was in so much pain and discomfort waiting for the next flight and once we got on there were plane troubles and we had to get off and walk across the airport to our new gate. I had to use the bathroom every 20 minutes between this, had bad cramps and nausea. Luckily I was able to sleep through my next flight because I was so exhausted after all that. I’ve had some bugs before but this was the worse. All from my favorite fruit too.
Oh my god this is legit a nightmare of mine. I can’t believe you made it! Congrats for powering through customs, by twisted insides feel for you!
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.
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.
Probably the fish. The acid in mayo makes it spoil a lot less easily then people think.
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.
Oof, I’m sorry you lost your favorite place :/
Years ago. Was visiting a client on-site. Meeting ran late and had to race home. Popped into a ‘natural’ food store to get something. Grabbed a package of pre-made ‘fresh’ shrimp spring rolls out of one of those open coolers. Ate in the car.
A 1.5 hour drive turned into a four hour nightmare with all the unplanned stops.
Never again.
I started a new job at a nice-ish office, next to a pretty fancy mall. On my 3rd day, my colleagues invited me to lunch at the food court of the mall. A couple hours later, I started getting nauseous and sweaty. Had to rush to the bathroom a couple times, which looking back I was lucky it was coming out of one end instead of two. After the 2nd time, I thought I’d chance it and rush home rather than having to go through another ~2 hours of this at the office. Luckily I lived close to the office back then so I was able to make it home. But in my rush I forgot to tell my manager, just told a coworker sitting near my desk I wasn’t feeling well and left. I emailed my manager that night, telling him that I also wouldn’t be able to make it in the next day. So my very first week at this job, I was only there for 2.5 days before getting sick for 1.5 days. Not the best first impression.
I didn’t know until much later, but my manager told me that he thought I hated the job and was about to quit after a couple days.
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 had just moved from Portland to Denver, and were trying new restaurants. One Sunday we ordered delivery from a local Chinese place that had good reviews. Food came, we ate and all was good for a couple of hours.
Then my wife said "I think I’m gonna puke* and dashed for the bathroom. Being the good husband, I followed her to hold her hair while she worshipped the porcelain god.
She had barely got done emptying the content of her stomach, when I literally had to shove her out of the way to emoty mine.
We were both miserable for about 36 hours.
I mean, that’s love right there.
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.
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