Oh what a nice and very trustworthy contest! I'll be happy to participate though I can't really remember bad meals... There was one time when I was younger, 7 to 9 or so, it was summer and we went to Whataburger. They had little sand rakes and those plastic turtles you can use to mold sand as toys and my mom got me a burger. It was the soggiest, nastiest burger I can ever remember eating and to this day it's why I know Whataburger as Waterburger and why I can't eat there anymore.

This sounds legit. The worst meal I ever had was pretty recent. It's the most worst one I can remember right now anyways. I really wanted a calzone but no place near my house makes calzones so I was like [i]"I'm going to make me my own!"[/i] So I go to the grocery, spend like $50 bucks on ingredients, but hey they say home cooked meals are more healthy, and go home and get ready to cook the next day. First I have to make the dough, found a recipe for a calzone online and the same lady had a recipe for pizza crust so I just used that. Making the dough in the first place was a disaster so I'll just skip to the meal part. I was all excited cause I really wanted a super cheesy calzone; I take it out of the oven...it is as hard as a rock (I wanted squishy crust here) and after the struggle to cut it in half, I take a bite. It was saltier than the ocean. It was really bad. But I am hungry so I keep eating, and it keeps getting saltier. See, both recipes (dough and calzone) called for garlic salt and I didn't know what I was doing, I don't cook. I eventually just gave up. I couldn't get the taste of salt out of my mouth for the next hour, I drunk an entire bottle of water. It was awful.

Ohhh... I think worst meal I ever had was a "mix your own" salad, I bought for supper just around 6 PM at a local sandwich place. I wasn't swimming in money, so I didn't buy food from take-out places often, and I was looking forward to my salad. Turns out, that "mix your own" bar, probably should have had ingredients switched an hour or two earlier. Don't buy mix your own salads just around closing time at sandwich places. Especially not that sandwich place! While the salad might have been OK while I ate it, it sure didn't taste well a few hours later... And the feverish trembling for a couple of hours before... "Tasting it the second time" weren't exactly enjoyable either. Needless to say, i didn't visit that particular shop again. - Best meal I've ever had, I think was a basic "powder + boiling water" asparagus soup. Served after an operation, where I at that time hadn't had anything to actually eat for about three days. It's true what they say about hunger! XD

I've managed to fall into the loving arms of so many bad cooks before. It seems to be a requirement for most everyone I date that their cooking must be atrocious. (Luckily, current love does not fall into this category, but he has an obsession with fried chicken I just don't match.) But a boyfriend I had oh, five years ago? I flew across the ocean to visit him, and one of the nights he decided to show me how he was 'improving' with cooking. He was gonna make fried gnocchi with butter and garlic. The ACTUAL meal I ate was not bad. It was delicious even. The fact that he some how managed to get fireballs erupting from the pan before actually getting to the cooking part was. Mnn. Yeah, I tend to not enjoy my meals with a side of heart attack, especially cause I can get that from most fast food places. But seriously. Actual fire balls launched out of the pan and I was very afraid. According to him, it happened because he heated oil and put water in onto, and "that's never happened any of the other times I've done that."

It's difficult to pick one exact meal. When I was in the Navy there were just so many! Everything from crunchy powered eggs and 'bacon' that came in boxes marked "FOR MILITARY OR PRISON USE ONLY" to brown-grey slop with indeterminable meat mixed in. No, seriously, the US military uses the same company that provides meals for federal prison and it is absolutely disgusting stuff. The absolute worst though? Well, one time when were out to sea, the Culinary Specialists (read: line cooks) used the left over sausage from breakfast - which was already pretty bad on it's own- ground it up, served it in spaghetti sauce over egg noodles. The real problem was, someone along the way wasn't washing their hands properly. Out of a crew of 2,500, 900-ish sailors were sickened, including the Department Head who oversaw the mess decks. Combating vomit, diarrhea and dehydration became the mission of the week. It was so bad that they kicked the biggest Air squadron out of their berthing and turned into a quarantine bay. They shut down both of the main mess decks and had to feed the entire ship out of the Cheif's mess and officer kitchens, which is completely unheard of. (They way better chow than jr. sailors). I was among the sick, expect that I didn't have time to be sick. I belonged to a small, but critical work center related to the launch and recovery of aircraft. Without us, we couldn't fly. And even with so many of crew down for the count, the mission had to continue. Sooo... each of our watch locations were outfitted with buckets to puke into if you had to. I had two six hour watches (with a two hour break in between) on the LSO platform ([url=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/FD_F-14D_VF-31_CVN-72_LSO_26Jan2001.jpg]which looks like this[/url]). When I needed to throw up, I had to do it over the side and hope the wind wouldn't blow it back into my face, and then go right back to work. Fun times!

When I was younger, my parents got divorced and I stayed with my dad. He was new to the whole cooking dinner for three kids thing, but he tried. One night he served us spaghetti, only he didn't know how to make marinara sauce. He served us pasta covered in ketchup. His reasoning was that ketchup is a tomato sauce. Unfortunately I didn't realize it was ketchup until after I had taken a bite. I got him a cook book for the next Father's Day

My dad was the stay-at-home parent while my mom worked, and he was never very good at cooking things that people wanted to eat -- eventually he found a sort of Crock-Pot groove that worked okay, but I took over one night a week and Mom would cook on the weekends, just to reduce the chance of disasters. And then I got braces. Dad had a hard time understanding what kinds of things would hurt to chew, and there were sad feelings all around for the first couple rounds of adjustment. Then I came home from the orthodontist one night and found that he'd made hamburger patties, potatoes, and peas. Sad feelings again for me. But wait! Dad had thought of this! He brought out... the blender. Where he had thrown all of the ingredients together. And blended them so I wouldn't have to chew. Let's just say that little jinian was not quite as happy with the green and brown slurry as he had anticipated.

The worst meal I ever had turned into one of the best memories I have with my dad. Ok so, I was hungry and it was lunch time, I was trying to find something to eat when my dad wanted to get rid of one of our many cans of soup. So to entice me he sweetened the deal by offering to make the soup for me, naturally I choose one of my favorites, New England Clam Chowder, and eagerly awaited my dish. Some time later dad came out with a great smelling bowl of Clam Chowder and I dove right in only to realized he used water and not milk. Rendering the soup disgusting. So I look up to my dad and inform him, "I can't eat this." "Why not?!" He takes a bite himself, "Oh... well lets give this to the dog". My dog at the time, Sparky, was a Pembroke Welsh Corgie, and the dumbest dog I have ever known, but he was always hungry and always happy! So we put the bowl down in front of this jumping furball because YAY people food. Sparky was the kind of dog who never turned down anything, he even enjoyed salad so a fresh bowl of food was exciting. Sparky takes one sniff of the bowl and starts growling, which before this point I have never heard him do, slowly backing away from the food. His fur standing on end. You could see in his eye that he was expecting this thing to grow tentacles and drag him away. Soon he was barking madly at it and running from the soup. My dad and I were first in shock but then we both were laughing so hard we were crying. Dad went and rescued Sparky from the demon soup and gave him a doggie treat instead. I still can't help but smile every time I think of this.

When I was in college, I was once sitting there in the dining hall eating a hamburger when I looked down... ... ...and saw in the half-remaining burger the half-remains of a cockroach. I stood up, marched the burger down to the dining hall office, and said, "I'd like to be allowed off my meal-plan and given a pro-rated refund." "Why? We don't normally allow..." *Hands over burger, open* "...ok, we'll allow it." And then I was able to feed myself in the dorm kitchen for the rest of the semester!

My Sophomore year of college, I wasn't on the meal plan, but I still showed up to dorm dinner to scrounge leftovers. It was Steak Night, and a friend of mine was grilling. After everyone on the meal plan had grabbed their steaks, there was one steak left, which my friend let me take. Now, this was pretty exciting, because I'd been expecting some garlic bread and pasta at best. So I bite into my steak... ...And it's raw. Literally raw. My friend had basically just seared the outside of a frozen steak and then handed it to me. I was SO DISAPPOINTED.