Wow. So this weekend, I accidentally ate the most disgusting
thing I will ever eat in my life. Me and Curtis hang out with some friends in
Fort Worth once a month and it’s been a new tradition of ours, to go out and
try an exotic restaurant together.
Russian food was great, Lebanese food was awesome (mainly
because I discovered that after all these years I have developed a taste for
Hummus, which is now my new favorite snack) but this week we went Jamaican. I wasn’t that hungry, so I thought I couldn’t
go wrong with a bowl of soup. Here’s the description from the menu:
Mannish Water (Goat Soup)
A real Jamaican favorite! A flavorful soup containing goat
meat, garlic, scallions, cho-cho, green bananas, scotch bonnet peppers, and
spinner dumplings.
Okay, the name was sketchy, and goat meat isn’t all that
great, but how can you go wrong with a garlic, meat and dumpling soup? Well… I’ll
tell you how.
When they said “Goat meat”, we were to somehow know that it meant
goat “tripe”.
If you don’t know off hand, let me give you a definition of tripe,
taken from an online dictionary:
“The rubbery lining of the
stomach of cattle or other ruminants, used as food”
Tripe is apparently then,
not food, but something “used as food.” And this is what was in the soup.
The first sip, I was like, “Oh
that’s not as good as I was hoping.” I thought I could add some salt, and it
might be okay. But then I started to see chunks of stomach and intestine.
I thought, well, I’ll just
eat the dumplings and skip the nasty bits and I’ll be okay. But then as I tried
that, I began to realize what exactly the nasty bits were, and that the taste
of them had permeated the soup, and that by drinking even a sip of the broth, I
was drinking the stomach and intestine of a goat.
And one of my friends had
ordered the soup too, and he was going through the same process as me, and at about
the same moment, we both gave up. When our other friends noticed our disgust,
they got curious and decided to take a taste of our Mannish Water. One of them
gagged horribly and then almost threw up right there in the restaurant.
There was just something
about it. I could taste it off and on for the next 24 hours.
Since then I have researched
“Mannish Water.” It seems many people like it, and I can’t begin to comprehend
why. Apparently it got its name because some Jamaicans believe it increases
male virility. One site said:
“People in Jamaica revere
Mannish Water, the same way that Americans do with milk. Jamaicans believe that
Mannish water has powers within it that make people strong and healthy…”
Okay, Americans don’t REVERE
milk. Nor do we BELIEVE that milk makes people strong and healthy. We KNOW it
has calcium and Vitamin D, and it is the natural source of nourishment for
growing babies. Those are facts. The Jamaican beliefs about Mannish Water are
myths. A male does not become more virile when he eats something nasty. Tripe
tastes like crap, mainly because it comes from the body organs that literally
make crap. That’s not a fact, so much as it’s my opinion, but it’s still true.
And that is the story of the
worst thing I will ever eat.
