We couldn’t really do a food issue without stretching our own palates – thankfully we couldn’t find anyone serving horse or dog dishes but you still might be surprised at some of the things we let past our lips for the first time.

CAT FOOD
My cat Leia – a petite black and white fluffball – adores human food. Marmite on toast, HobNobs, cereal, cheese… If we leave it unattended for a moment, she’s got her face in it. Maybe if I show her how yummy I think her dinner is, she’ll stop being envious of mine. I waited until she was hungry, then emptied a sachet of Felix chicken in jelly (‘as good as it looks’) into two plastic bowls, and made a side dish of Go-Cat tuna, herring and vegetable biscuits on a saucer. I didn’t fancy sharing her water bowl too, so I ran myself a glass from the tap.I was gagging before the first quivering forkful of Felix entered my mouth. The stringy chicken slivers tasted like the final scrapings of the last kebab in the shop, mashed into cold, sweat-flavoured gelatine. A few stomach-turning chews later I retched and sprayed the jelly down the front of the washing machine. My second attempt was no more successful. Even holding my nose to reduce the flavour, I still spewed it all into the sink. The Go-Cat fared better. After a few crunches it tasted like mouldy Ryvita, but I managed to swallow a few multi-coloured handfuls down. Leia frowned at me from her bowl and carried on eating. She’s welcome to it. (SH)

McDONALD’S
Yeah, really, I’ve never eaten McDonald’s. It were all Wimpy bars round here when I were a girl. McDonald’s didn’t even roll into our smalltown backwater until I was 17, and by then I’d been indoctrinated by Morrissey into a firm ‘Meat Is Murder’ stance. When I subsequently relaxed my teenage convictions a little and tucked into a few bacon sandwiches, I still steered clear of McDonald’s, cos they’re evil, right? And their hot chocolate cups tasted of fishy latex. But this year I was out with some relatives who informed me we’d be taking luncheon in McDonald’s. No longer a rabble rouser I reluctantly acquiesced and ordered myself a Big Mac, intrigued to know what all the fuss is about. The first bite was a disappointment – gherkin, yuck. I removed it and carried on, but the whole thing was tainted with the pickle residue and tasted of very little else. Naming it a Big Mac can only be described as disingenuous – it was small, soggy and not a patch on a Grubbs bacon burger. The whole experience left a bad taste (of gherkins) in my mouth. And they’re called chips not fries, you corporate slags. (RK)

OX TONGUE
Ox tongue. Yes. Seriously. Ox tongue. The tongue of an ox. And what’s worse is that I was in some pretentious restaurant in Hove so it wasn’t just ox tongue, it was tongue of ox relaxing on a bed of fresh baby greens dressed with a sauce of triple-distilled cat sick. Or something like that. I ordered it because I wondered what eating tongue would be like. And I kind of didn’t think that it would be an actual tongue. In fact it was, and it turns out eating tongue is rather like eating a tongue.Cooked tongue looks pretty awful. It’s the same colour as a live tongue but just about 10 times more disgusting because it’s cut up into little pieces on your plate. Even the pompous little salad the restaurant kindly disguised it with couldn’t hide the fact it was pretty much a tongue on a plate. Yum. I gave it my best shot. But there is something undeniably disgusting about the feeling of tongue on your tongue. Like French kissing an ox. It has that slightly rough texture and – have you ever bitten your tongue? – crunch. It tasted like the worst kiss ever. Bon appetite. (ASW)

RAW EGG
Eggs are one of my favourite foods. Poached with Hollandaise sauce, scrambled with flaked salmon, fried and dripping with grease from the cafe round the corner – I am a lifelong fan of (cooked) eggs. Yet it seems I haven’t been getting the best out of my egg eating – vitamins are lost and carbohydrate levels are reduced by heating, according to the internet, which is why hard-core protein fans enjoy raw eggs. Well, it’s healthy, and anything old men, bodybuilders and Rocky can do, I can do better.Feeling full of bravado, I cracked an egg into a glass before my disgusted onlookers. Then, doubt set in. If raw eggs were tasty, they would be on menus. I haven’t eaten the uncooked, unfertilized ovum of any other animals, so why start now? What if I was one of the unlucky 0.0003% and caught salmonella? What if I died? More pressingly, what if I threw it straight back up? I poured it into my mouth. The yolk was huge. I spat it back into the glass. I tried again. This time, I gulped with less enthusiasm than if I were swallowing my own hand, and it went down. Slowly. How was it? I felt sick. Imagine drinking cold phlegm and you’re nearly there. (JMM)

SPACE FOOD
Developed for the early Apollo missions, this freeze-dried ice cream space food is pretty odd. It’s also something you wouldn’t really come across in the shops, so when a work colleague received some from the National Space Centre, I had to get stuck in. It has the consistency of crumbly halva but it tastes like warm ice cream – warm ice cream which is still solid. Very strange. It comes vacuum packed between two cookies, so it’s more like a halva/ice cream flavoured Oreo sandwich. On a blind taste test I don’t think you’d ever correctly guess what it is. On reading the ingredients, things such as ‘diglycerides’, ‘carrageenan’ and ‘partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oils’ jump out at you and personally put me off a bit. If all astronaut food is this dry (which it probably is) and full of hydrogenated oils, I don’t think I’d enjoy dinner very much in outer space. (KK)

BREAST MILK
The queasy part to this was that someone else had actually produced this from their own mammary glands, which only really dawned on me as I started to drink down a whole glassful. It was a little strange trying to casually ask around for the substance, like some weird fetishist, but thankfully I found a willing party to help me out. I had imagined it would smell a bit like newborn babies do, but there was no real smell to it – I just had to try it to see. It had separated a little, so I gave it a swirl before decanting it out of the bottle. It was unusually sweet, but with an earthy/woody undertone to it, a bit like sweetened soya milk but much thinner. I hadn’t given much thought to how it would taste, but seeing how most of us were brought up on the stuff I figured it couldn’t really be all that bad, could it? I hadn’t thought there was that much in there to start with, but it got harder to drink with each contemplative sip. There was no real aftertaste, but it did sort of coat my tongue a bit. No milk moustache though, I’m afraid. (LS)

CRAB
I’ve never been a fan of fish, and seafood is reminiscent of big insects, so it’s no surprise that I’ve avoided crab all my life. But if you’re going to eat it you may as well do it properly, so I found myself at a crab restaurant with 12 sinister crustaceans in front of me. My determination was tinged with mounting dread as I watched my fellow diners to see what the procedure was. As they hit them with hammers and took their shells off I anticipated seeing crab meat inside, instead I was confronted by slimy green puddles of snot and frondy white conical gills. Trying hard not to gag with utter repulsion I opted for a leg instead. I gingerly pulled it from the body, hit it with a hammer and picked out a tiny morsel of meat, trying not to look at the stringy ligaments. I was sure that if I could overcome my squeamishness I’d experience a taste sensation. After all, with so much effort required for so little meat, it must be good, right? Well no. It was bland and as I chewed I was overwhelmed with revulsion at the crab innards littering the table in front of me. I swallowed quickly before doing a little sick in the back of my mouth. Never again. (RK)

FOIS GRAS
I know what you’re thinking. Force-fed birds, PETA campaigns, horrific YouTube videos, illegal in over 35 countries – a real food taboo. Yet the ancient Egyptians shoved food down their geese, and 18th-century writer Sydney Smith defined heaven as “eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets” so it’s got to be at least a bit tasty, right? First, research. I fire up the Mac and promptly put myself off the whole idea. Shocking practices, awful welfare – google it to find out more. However, I do consider myself a ‘gastronome’ (I enjoy liver, have eaten frogs’ legs, love black pudding…) and will try pretty much anything at least once. So, having waited a day or so for the memory of my research to fade, one trip to a specialist food shop later and the jar of ‘bloc de fois gras’ and I are eyeing each other up in the kitchen. Armed with some melba toast and caramelised cherries, in I go.Wow, what a flavour. Think pâté but richer, with a smooth, mousse-like texture; slightly nutty, almost beefy. Delicious. Sydney, I’m with you, mate. Just don’t think about where it comes from. Am I glad I drummed up the courage to try it? Yes. Could I eat it again? On balance, no. The cruelty meted out in its creation definitely outweighs the undeniably lovely flavour. (EI)

RAW BEEF
Popular opinion dictates that a well-cooked steak is the abominable ruin of a good piece of meat. Requesting anything more than medium-rare in a restaurant attracts thinly-veiled sneers from beef connoisseurs and waiters alike, and horrified glances at bloody forks don’t go down well either, or so I’ve found. My mother is vegan, so the closest I got to the sacred flesh of my fellow mammal was Quorn-based mince, until I reached my teens and rebelled by eating ham. Never one to let principles get in the way of my diet, by my early 20s I’d eaten most meats. However, I draw the line at anything still oozing blood – surely we’ve evolved to cooking meat for a reason, and that reason is that it tastes better? This separates us from other carnivores, and in my opinion, demonstrates civilisation.So, here I am, cutlery in hand, gazing nervously at a steak. The term used in restaurants for what I am about to consume is ‘carpaccio,’ presumably because ‘raw meat’ sounds fundamentally unappetising. I tuck in. The metallic taste of blood fills my mouth, though it’s not as strong as I expected. The texture is undeniably chewy, so I chew, probably for longer than necessary. How was it? Not as bad as I thought, but still not pleasant, with less taste than it has cooked. I’ll continue to leave rare beef to the savages. Well done, please waiter. (JMM)

WHEATGRASS
Shotting wheatgrass seems to be a fad in Brighton at the moment, with many people opting for the quick ‘hangover miracle’ it’s known as. People in their numbers are heading down to the Guarana Bar in Sydney Street but no matter how bad the hangover, I could never face doing a shot of something consumed by cows. Any time I thought about trying wheatgrass I imagined a bed of grass growing in my stomach and quickly hushed the thought away. So, the day finally dawned on me where I couldn’t handle the hangover that had been visited upon me. I marched down to the Guarana Bar with my head hanging low, hoping for this supposed cure to rinse my pain away. It all seemed very serious – they served my shot of wheatgrass with a strawberry chopped in half and a small glass of water, which they told me I’d have to take to stop me being sick. I downed the shot like a true trooper, munched the strawberry, gulped the water and well, what can I say, it tasted like grass. Did it work? Have you ever seen a cow with a hangover? (SD)

WORDS BY STEPHANIE DUNLEAVY, STUART HUGGETT, ED ISAACS, ROSIE KENDALL, KERI KENNEDY, JESSICA MARSHALL MCHATTIE, AMY SANDIFORD-WATTS, LYDIA STOCKBRIDGE

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