"I Faked An Emergency And Got The Hell Out Of There": 22 Times People Were Invited To Eat At Someone's Home And Regretted It Immediately
Sometimes, you just have to politely eat what your friends and family serve you despite not loving it. Other times, I think it's absolutely warranted to make up some excuse not to eat their food after getting a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how they make it. So when Redditor u/195901 asked the r/AskReddit community to share their "can't eat at everybody's house" horror stories, people gave some truly harrowing tales of eating (and refusing to eat) in other people's homes. Here are some of the worst.
1."Told my dad my sandwich tasted like fly spray at my grandma's house. He didn’t believe me. Two days later, I catch my grandma spraying the benches 'clean' with the $2 fly spray you find at a cheap store. Dad figured it was safe to make sandwiches straight on the countertop because they looked clean. I dragged him over to see and he apologized and took my sister and me for fish and chips for lunch."
2."My first boyfriend’s parents invited me for Thanksgiving. I came over a few days before Christmas and all the same dirty dishes from Thanksgiving were still in the kitchen. I passed on coming over for Christmas dinner."
3."I had a Christmas party at work and someone brought pasta salad. The bowl was full of cat hair. Some hairs in the salad looked like pubic hair. I wanted to throw up immediately. Unfortunately, I'm bad at keeping a poker face."
4."I was babysitting a kid in a pretty dirty house. I was told to wake him up, supervise bathing and changing clothes, and feed him. I was welcome to whatever was in the fridge. The house and his clothes were filthy. Then, when I opened the cabinets, floods of roaches poured out. There were roaches in every opened box and container. I took him back to my house and returned him later that day. I hope the boy ended up in a better situation. I found out Child Protective Services got involved shortly after."
5."My mom thought that the turkey would 'dry out' if you cooked it for the recommended time. We even used the turkeys with the popping thermometers in them and never once did I see it pop — as a kid, I just thought it was a turkey button. Then, she would eat the outside of the turkey (that was cooked) because she 'liked the white meat and skin'."
"Like, ma’am, there would be a lot more 'white meat' and less 'pink meat' if you cooked it longer! My siblings and I always got sick after Thanksgiving and she’d tell us it was because we were fat and ate too much. Wasn’t until I moved away for college that I found out turkey wasn’t supposed to be pink. I honestly thought I was just allergic to turkey."
6."Sleepover in the fifth grade at a friend's house. Her mom made chicken and veggies. I took a bite of chicken and something was off. Flipped it over and the backside was COATED in black dog hair."
7."When I was a kid, Christmas Eve was always celebrated at grandma's house. I always got sick afterward. Like, Merry Christmas, you're going to puke now. It wasn't until I was all grown up and helping her out in the last weeks of her life that I learned why: She did not believe in expiration dates on anything!"
8."My aunt served us a lovely tray of deviled eggs complete with very old paprika sprinkled on top. So old, in fact, that the many weevils mixed in it were dead."
9."My mom tells one story about going over to her aunt Virginia's house. She, her parents, and siblings were in the kitchen while her aunt was cooking, and my mom could not figure out why no one else was having ANY of the incredibly delicious bread that was on the table. She was on her third slice when her aunt stepped out to do something else and my mom was told by her brother to go look in the flour bin. It was absolutely filled with miller moth larvae. Aunt Virginia had been losing her eyesight for years."
10."I visited a friend's house who was living with his mother. She asked if I wanted a coffee and I said yes. Upon getting to the bottom of the cup and taking the last few gulps, I found there was a used bandaid stuck to the bottom. Never ate or drank there again."
11."A girl I was interested in at the time had cats. I came to her house one day to pick her up for a date and she had a large sack of rice open in her pantry with the pantry door open. One of the cats hopped out of the sack of rice and she just casually laughed at it like, 'Oh they are always getting into things.' I came over the following weekend and that SAME sack of rice was in the pantry and I could hear one of them tussling around in it again. We stopped dating sometime after that, but anytime she offered to cook for me, I immediately pivoted to taking her out to eat instead."
12."My mother-in-law fished around in the green bin (compost bin) with her bare hands, didn't wash them, WIPED her GARBAGE JUICE HANDS on the tea towel, and then WENT BACK TO PREPPING THE SALAD. She also got horrifically offended if I didn't want to eat at her house."
13."There was one time I was eating at my boyfriend's house at the time and his grandmother was cooking food. She wasn't feeling well and everyone offered to cook that night but she insisted. Usually when she's cooking, she doesn't like anyone in the kitchen. The thing is, the kitchen is the first thing you see when you walk into the apartment. So I came from the store to help pick up a few things for dinner."
"I walked in, saw her blowing her nose with her hand, and then used the same hand to massage seasonings into the chicken. She then cooked the chicken in the rice. I didn't eat that day and just said I ate before I came over. Some of his family members thought I was rude but I didn't have the heart to tell them since they also didn't like me very much because I was shy."
14."I had to stay at a friend's cousin's house for a few days. The thing is the house was...hoarder level. She fed me macaroni and cheese but I distinctly remember there being green crusts on the noodles and the fork being dirty. Not wanting to be rude, I picked out what noodles I could and claimed I wasn’t hungry since I had to leave my home. The milk she offered me the next day was cottage cheese and I politely phoned another friend to ask if I could sleep on their couch because I was finding bugs on my body."
15."I went to a friend’s house after school. She was going to make us toast, went to put the bread in, and realized there was already bread in the toaster. She popped it up and it was covered in mold. A lot of mold."
16."I went with my then-fiancé to visit some relatives of his. We arrived at their place to find that they were serving up the leftovers of this noodle dish (pancit) that had been their fare the night before. Now if you know anything about handling pancit safely, you'd know that it goes rancid real quick in hot weather. I could smell that it had gone off, even from the doorway of the house. One of the older relatives knew this too and bundled some of us to get McDonald's nearby. Those who insisted on eating the pancit got a bit sick later that day. What a mess."
17."I dated a girl once that thought it’d be a nice idea to bake some muffins. She forgot to wash the muffin pan. Do you wanna know how I know she forgot to wash the muffin pan? Because we had a mouse problem and there was mouse shit in the muffins."
18."I stayed the night at a friend's house and in the morning when I went to pour myself a bowl of Cheerios, there were tiny roaches in there. When my friend told me to just pick them out and eat the cereal anyway, I called my mom to pick me up and never went back."
19."Went to a BBQ held by a coworker of mine. When we got there, she mentioned that she had marinated the chicken in the bathtub, which put me off eating anything not pre-packaged. Later, I asked to use the bathroom and actually saw the bathtub. It was fucking disgusting, streaked with black for some reason. I went back outside and subtly passed the word around not to eat the chicken. I think I might have saved a life or two that day."
20."Had a friend several years ago who lived with her parents. She always told me not to go in their kitchen because it was 'unfinished.' This was weird to me as the rest of their house was completely fine. One day, my curiosity got the best of me, an opportunity presented itself, and I stepped inside. Lo and behold it wasn’t unfinished, just filthy. Dead rat in a sink of old dirty dishes, dog pee and poop on the floor, old moldy food sitting in pots and pans on the counters — never even thought about eating anything from there again."
21."I had a small circle of coworkers that I was friends with and we would occasionally hang out together outside of work. One of those coworkers was Lisa who had a couple of little yappy dogs and several cats. She invited several of us over to play board games and said she would cook us dinner. We got there while she was still cooking and were standing around the kitchen talking to her while she finished up."
"We all about shit our pants when she took the spoon out of the pot of spaghetti sauce she was cooking, tasted it, casually held it down for her two dogs to lick the spoon, and then stuck it right back in the pot of spaghetti and continued stirring it like it was the most normal thing in the world.
I am not sure how the rest of them got out of eating it, but just before we were supposed to sit down and eat, I faked an emergency call from work, said I had to run to the office to deal with a problem, and got the hell out of there. I was always 'busy' every time she invited us over after that (and NEVER ate anything she ever brought to an office potluck)."
22."When I was a kid, my sister and I were great friends with the kids that lived next door. I went to their house early on a Saturday once when they had just finished breakfast and were cleaning up. They were pouring the milk out of the glasses the family had been drinking out of right back into the milk jug. They had six kids so I guess they had to be frugal. I never ate there, not with the thought of backwash milk in my head."
Do you have a "can't eat at everybody's house" horror story? Tell us about it in the comments or fill out this anonymous form.
Note: Responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
