The absolute worst food experience I ever had was baked coot. Now, for those of you not up on your waterfowl, a coot is a very common duck-like migratory bird. Coots fly much more slowly than ducks and are pretty easy to hit when one is duck hunting and the ducks just aren't coming in and one is bored shitless and has an itchy trigger finger. Well, my dad had gone duck hunting one cold winter day and had struck out on the ducks, so he bagged a few coots and brought them home to try out. He figured that they eat the same things ducks do so they can't taste much different. So, we cleaned 'em and washed 'em and seasoned 'em and stuck 'em in the oven. About thirty minutes later, we put 'em on the table and dug in. The only way to describe the taste of coot is, "Imagine what the mud at the bottom of a stagnant swamp might taste like. Now, imagine that it's extra chewy." The "digging in" consisted of one forkful, briefly chewed and hastilly spat out.
So, there we sat with these thing on the table and we began to notice a rather fowl odor emitting from them. Not only did they taste horrible, they stunk. We hadn't noticed it while they were cooking because the vented oven had sent all the noxious odors outside. We had to open windows to let the stink out, even though it was below freezing outside.
So, we took the coots outside and gave them to the dogs. The dogs - two full-sized dachsunds who had never refused to eat anything before - sniffed at them a little and went back into their doghouses.