The Worst Thing I Will Ever Eat

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.