Hawai'i has yet to apologize for keeping this monstrosity alive.
I'm not certain who else has posted on the board regarding this singularly disgusting food but having lived in Hawai'i for my first 25 years I was continually exposed to some fucking awful stuff. Some of the chopped up raw fish preparations were stomach-churningly bad and there were a few really horrible ways to destroy a perfectly good piece of meat but the worst of the worst, the food I have to extend my scale downwards for, is...

POI

Poi is made from the mashed, pulped and strained remains of the taro root, a particularly nasty root vegetable which became a staple in the remote island chain of Hawai'i because nobody had the foresight to bring any of the sweeter root foods from their Polynesian home islands. This stuff is supremely nasty: it sits on the store shelves in clear plastic bags and is cold, slimy and utterly forbidding to touch. It is a dark gray-brown with a hint of purple in the mix. It is a bag of H. R. Giger's worst nightmares and that's _before_ it goes rancid: after that point you had better build an arc furnace to dispose of this abomination. At its best this stuff feels and tastes like you are slurping an old rock: large quantities of sugar are often used to mask the taste and on a few occasions I saw it being applied in a 1:1 mix. I tried it exactly three times (without additives) during my years there: each successive attempt was long after the screaming nightmares had stopped and I had convinced myself that, "it was just me: no food could possibly be that bad." It is that bad and I hope I never encounter the gray goo on my kitchen counter ever again.

NOOOO!!!! The bastards have figured out how to dry out the stuff: this hellspawn slime food can now be shipped around the world to traumatize palates everywhere. Save yourselves!

www.tarobrand.com/
( Felis Concolor, Sat 17 Jul 2004, 11:38, Reply)