One of my teammates found old popcorn that had been stored and forgotten by our company. Naturally, it was free. So, we both popped up the popcorn and tried to eat this stuff. Well, our venture didn't last long. This popcorn was hard, tasteless and gross. We realized quickly that it belonged in the trash.
I can't think but the one that sticks out my mind is when I was at the hotel in Chula Vista. I guess hotel food is never good but I don't remember tasting such awful sausage and eggs in my life.
lol The question made me laugh. I've had some pretty bad free samples in stores. They were just bad news. Yet, I'll still give the free samples a go because *shrug* you never know?
Hah, as soon as I read this thread it immediately reminded me of these "power bars" I bought at a flea market several years ago. I had just started a new job with a pretty large company, and was just getting settled in with it. A friend of mine and I hit up a local flea market one weekend, and they had entire cases of these energy bars for like $2 each, so I grabbed both of them -thinking that was a total steal since the are usually $2 per bar. I neglected to read the expiration dates on them (I didn't even know power bars had those!) and they were like a year and a half past their expiration. Long story short, I was eating these as a snack while at my new job, and started coming down with horrible indigestion. Every 30 minutes or so I had to run to the bathroom, and it wasn't pretty. Not a great way to make a first impression with your new coworkers, lol.
I think the worst thing I've eaten because it was free was a cheese at the supermarket. I think it was late Sunday afternoon, before I was headed home to make dinner and I was doing something that we should never do - shopping with an empty stomach. To counteract this a bit I decided to check out the cheese section as usually they have something for you to taste, what they had that time was this really smelly and odd looking kind. I had a taste and immediately regretted it
One of my old supervisors treated the department to the most bland Mexican food on the planet...and the company was in Downtown L.A. Everything looked light brown, pale yellow or orange-brown. I tasted no peppers, spices or essences that reminded me of any culture. The worst part was the supervisor, though. She kept patting herself on the back for doing a kind gesture since we'd put in long hours for weeks. Finally, I reminded her that Mexican was cheap and managers usually get reimbursed either by their employer or the tax man.
The worst I have had comes from the cooking classes in the school I am at. The students bake these monstrosities and then as a gesture of good will, offer them up to the teachers. When a 10 year old is in charge of deciding how much sugar to add it can be a bit overwhelming. Why stop at a teaspoon of vanilla when you can use a bottle? More is better right? Other than that, I can relate to the free samples given away at the grocery stores. I used to try them all but now I rarely do. I don't think that the free samples have ever made me decide to actually buy a product.
I must be the only one that has had good experiences with free samples at the grocery store. Of course if it's something that I'm not going to eat anyway then I'm not going to try it but most of the free samples have been pretty tasty. I didn't really like the gluten free grilled chicken but it was okay for something that was gluten free.
Cheese from a food bank. I thought that the generic brand from a grocery store was bad until I ate that garbage. I couldn't have caught a mouse with that, they would have smelled it and thrown it back at me. That was a long time ago but it taught me that not everything that is free is a good deal. In the case of food, you get what you pay for.
I always had good experiences with free food except with one that I had at a five stars hotel few years ago. Breakfast was free for their in-house guests and that's usually my favourite part of staying in a hotel. I love omelette so much so I asked for one with a cheese and other stuff to come with it. Well, when it arrived to me I quickly ate it but spat it out back. I'm not sure if it was because of the cheese but the taste was completely terrible, it was so bitter.
Aha, great question! My roommate brought home some sort of chicken dish one time and offered me some. It was good for two bites and then it became absolutely horrible. Perhaps it was because I was a poor starving college student, but I continued to eat it so I wouldn't have to make dinner that night. We do what we have to I guess to get by
Various local restaurants used to donate catered meals to the PBS public television station during pledge drive when I worked there. We had some really appalling Cuban food catered one night that was burnt and greasy. I picked at the yellow rice and plantains because I was hungry, but the pork looked charred, so I skipped it.
Some other disgusting free food that comes to mind (and all of them involve crock pots)... I've actually seen this one happen several times at various parties - the host or someone contributing to the potluck selection of food, thinks they can just cook buffalo wings in a crock pot. You can tell they just bought a bag of those raw, flash-frozen wings and drumettes, and a bottle of BBQ sauce and just threw them both in the crock pot and figured it would be OK in a few hours. Not only were the wings still somewhat under cooked, but the skin was gelatinous and slimy, and the sauce was watered down from all the moisture they gave off in the crock pot. I seriously thought I and everyone else there was going to get food poisoning from eating those. On a similar note, one of my coworkers did the same thing with a crock pot and some hot dogs. She brought them to work for a potluck, and threw them in the crock pot like 45 min before we were supposed to have lunch. They were somewhere between room temperature and lukewarm by the time we were supposed to eat - everyone had to take their dogs over to the microwave to finish warming them up. I mean, I know some people can't cook, but this is just basic common sense - seriously? Another time a friend of mine tried making BBQ pulled pork with rootbeer. It was some recipe she read about online. She threw a whole pork roast in the slow cooker with some bottles of rootbeer, and let it cook away while she was at work. Problem was, I think she started slow cooking the whole thing the night before or something, and didn't shut it off until late in the evening the next day. By then, it didn't even look like pork, the whole mess was really dark brown and burnt, and it tasted awful.
