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.
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
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’ve eaten at Popeyes Chicken restaurants three times in my life, each time 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.
Parents were really into hot wings. They kept ordering them hotter and hotter. It got to the point where my eyes would water being in the same room as them, and I have a high tolerance for spicy food. However, I don’t enjoy the texture of wings and usually got something else, and I remember commenting that this time they smelled “off.” My nose is sharp and something smelled unmistakably rotten. They brushed it aside saying it was probably just the new nuclear fission burn the hair off your tits tropical fuck storm flavor or whatever goofy name they were newly trying out. I was feeling nauseous from the odor so I took my food to my room while they plowed through the pile occasionally pausing to exclaim I was missing out.
I woke up to one of them crashing their way through the house to the bathroom in a blind panic. The door slammed shut, the fan whirred to life and I could hear muttering, gasping and cursing and then the lovely sound of their body forcibly ejecting chicken from both ends. “Goddammit what the hell.” And then a request for a bucket. Stepdad staggered out looking pale as a sheet. “I think I need to go to the ER. Feels like I have knives in my stomach.” My Mom hadn’t succumbed yet, it hit her while she was in the waiting room after she drove him there. They were sick for about a week from salmonella and I was freed from their trufflepig chicken snarfing noises for about a year.
What a picture you painted for us
This is one of the reasons why I keep a solid trash can in each bathroom (not one of those mesh wire ones). It definitely saves you to have a place to vomit when you’re shitting yourself simultaneously lol. Had an episode of “both ends at once” last year!
I really appreciated how close the sink was to the toilet in my hotel room during my last bout.
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.
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.
Thanksgiving 2019, went to meet the family at a “fancy” sort of pub out in the sticks for Thanksgiving dinner because all of us were too busy to deal with a traditional get together. Naturally, everybody had their fill until regret as it goes and everybody went back their separate ways.
It wasn’t until a couple hours later I started feeling queasy and figured I just needed to sleep off the copious amounts of food I’d eaten, so I went to bed. Until 11pm. I had to rush to the bathroom and rotate between facing the toilet, and sitting on it, for about 20 minutes expelling everything my body could muster. After I got back to bed, it came back every hour like clockwork for about 7 hours, except I’d already been empty after the first episode. I finally got to sleep and spent the next 36 hours trying to remain asleep so as not to feel the pain, and ultimately didn’t eat anything for the next four or five days, except small amounts of chicken broth, water, and ginger ale.
Working at a studio sound stage we had catered lunches from a 3rd party ( not the meal truck that follows the main unit) one day we had ravioli. It went down without an issues but that evening and all night it was coming out both ends. About 30+ other people all got it bad. Needless to say we switched caterers. The local health authority did an investigation it was so bad.
Yikes, glad they were investigated, there’s no way it should be so bad that 30 people get sick
Unbelievably sick after some seafood at a well-rated place near me.
Dizzy, cramps, shitting.
Stood up after, nauseated. Went to vomit and blacked out, woke up with chipped teeth, bleeding nose, mangled lip, and what would become a black eye whilst lying in a puddle of blood.
Best I can gather is I face planted hard directly onto the edge of the toilet and then the floor. But I honestly don’t know.
Ended up having to go to the ER and getting stitches. Recovery for non drinkable foods was some 1-2 weeks.
Have scars from it.
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. :(Huh, neat! And by neat I mean, well, not so neat
So sick! Literally
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.
Wow, I’ve never heard of that before.
Apparently common in Asians, weird for me not being Asian.
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.
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.
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.
LPT: don’t eat oysters the day before your own wedding. or anyone else’s wedding. or ever
Furiously taking notes
Oysters got me too. I went to the ER thinking my appendix was bursting because the stomach cramps were so painful.
I still like the slippy little bastards, but I’m very cautious about where and when I order them now.
Yeah, now I only go to the fancy oyster restaurants. It’s a rarity now because those places are expensive, but I’ve never gotten food poisoning from the places that specialize in them
It doesn’t matter how fancy the place is. Oysters are filter feeders and clean up the water ways of anything and everything. All it takes is a boat to flush its toilet somewhere near the oyster field and the whole lot will be contaminated.
I guess it’s the best indicator because they pick out their own oysters vs just picking any oysters. There’s always a risk, but at least they’re picking and choosing theirs, at least my local place does
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.
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.
Probably the fish. The acid in mayo makes it spoil a lot less easily then people think.
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.
