Dinner-time Topics Series: Number One

What we discuss at dinner. This one was held a few days ago.

The most disgusting things we can remember eating at the Land:

1. The Polenta that tasted like feet. This was a three-cheese truffle polenta mix of great notoriety. We ate it about four years ago and only one person out of the forty who lived here was in favour of it. His name was Kevin and we fed it all to him.

2. The ground beef that had blue veins. Enough said.

3. The beef sticks that were harder than anything our teeth could manage. Some of the guys used it to play fetch with our dog Pickle, who apparently thought that if she chewed it up and swallowed it more than once, like a cow, it would at some point be digestible. (I'll leave that up to your imagination)

4. The horseradish cheddar that melted the back of your throat if you even smelled it. We had pounds and pounds and pounds of it. It sat around in our refrigerators for months, and the cooks would put some out with each meal, hopefully, with their fingers crossed. The stuff wouldn't go bad.

5. But, the winner beyond belief was something that we didn't eat, but would have if a certain person had their way. One of our freezers got unplugged somehow, and in it we discovered a huge lamb shank, blue and green and mauve with mold. It smelled like the ocean. Lamb that smelled like seafood from a mile away. We couldn't figure out what to do with it, so we eventually decided to burn it on our burn pile. The certain person (okay, I'll name him: it was Todd) insisted that if we scraped the mold off it would be fine. We ignored him. But, as we burned it, he was heard to comment, "Mmm, that smells good. I'm gonna go get me some of that."

(This list comes at the end of eight years of eating Food Bank food here. We are extremely grateful for all the things we have eaten and loved, but we want to pay tribute to a few that we did not love.)