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.

I’ve gone to the ER twice due to a stomach virus caused by a bad deli sandwich, about 100 miles apart. I only wish that on my enemies.

I got food poisoning from the fish they served in the students cafeteria. Can’t stand fish or seafood anymore, and if the fish van is set up on the local supermarkets parking lot once a week, I go around it as far away as possible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My wife, probably the year before last, got a fancy home made from scratch cake for her birthday from her fancy pastry chef friend. Well, she loved the thing so much she’d bring it out for dessert every night, the whole thing, and nibble on small bites until she had enough and put it back in the fridge. Savoring each night and bite. Well, she should have taken a small cut from it each night, leaving the remainder in the fridge, and nibbled on that. Anyway, live and learn. By the end of the week she finished off the cake… and got thoroughly sick over the weekend.

I couldn’t help but laugh a little at the absurdity of the situation, but I felt so bad for her. It was an amazing cake, but yeah. If you’re going to savor something like that, please cut a portion out each night instead of taking it out and putting it back after about 30-45 minutes nightly.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.