We’ll leave it to Andrew Zimmern to dig slimy creatures out of tree trunks and claim they are food. Here we are talking about food the average American might encounter in everyday life. I believe we should appreciate the abundance of good food that we have. That appreciation is only enhanced by recognizing the awful stuff that we are fortunate enough not to have to eat.

Here is my list:

1. Spam™. Spam is mostly salt and grease. If you attempt to fry out the grease, the salt becomes overpowering. So to be eaten at all, the block of solidified grease must be largely preserved. The problem then is that there is not much that goes well with a block of salty grease. Hawaiians eat the most Spam per person. One explanation I’ve heard is Spam goes well with poi, the fermented taro root preparation. Poi is sour, so there may be something to that. However, who among the rest of us is going to Hawaii to eat Spam?

2. KFC Mashed Potato Bowl. One approach to making bad food is to provide layers of badness, rather than just one bad taste. The KFC Bowl takes that approach by combining chemical-tasting instant mashed potatoes with salty over-processed chicken and a gravy whose origins cannot be traced. There is a little corn in there somewhere, and a combo of cheese-like substances tops it all off.

Someone must eat it or they couldn’t sell it. That’s a depressing thought.

3. McDonald’s Big Mac™. Fast food hamburgers are uniformly poor because they are overcooked. Everyone agrees, I guess, that it’s better to kill dangerous bacteria by just cooking a burger three times as long, rather than suffer the expense of having meat that is bacteria-free to start with. What dips the Big Mac below other fast food burgers is the sicky sweet sauce served with the particle board patty. The sauce is 1000 Island dressing gone wrong. It might possibly be acceptable on a salad, but not on meat.

4. Campbell’s Hearty Soup. I was ailing once and thought canned soup would be a quick and convenient meal. Canned soup can be good because canning requires heavy cooking, and soup can tolerate that better than, say, fruit. Not this stuff. I cannot guess how they do it, but it is wretched. I bought three cans of vegetable beef, and threw two and a half cans away. I thought of donating it to a charity, but decided it wouldn’t be right to make another human suffer.

5. Strawberry Soda. Some artificial flavors are really not too bad. Artificial vanilla, for example, is OK. I tried strawberry soda forty years ago and was so impressed that I didn’t try it again until a few weeks ago. I saw strawberry soda at one of those eight-flavor drink machines and tried it again. I thought maybe decades of advancing chemistry might has improved the product, so I put a couple of ounces in my cup. Arrrgh. Save it for unrepentant serial killers.

6. Tilapia Tilapia has become a common farmed fish. It can survive in very crowded ponds, which makes it an economical fish to raise. The problem is that it tends to pick up a crowded-pond flavor. In one of those cooking contests on the Food Network, a contestant won with a dish made with tilapia in a sauce. One of judges made a comment along the lines of “Astounding, she made tilapia taste good!” Maybe there is hope for free-range tilapia, but it’s not a good bet.

7. Cheap Sausage. Sausage has the potential for being one of the best foods or one of the worst. In the market recently I happened to see a tube of chorizo, the Spanish sausage that certainly can be one of the very best. It was only a dollar, so I wondered how bad could it be for the price?

Reynaldo’s Pork Chorizo

The tube contained a sticky paste about the consistency of oatmeal. I fried it up carefully. There is so much paprika and flour in it that it burns very easily. The dominant flavor is salt, followed by an earthy paprika evoking attic dust, and finally an indistinct hot pepper. I could detect no meat flavor. Perhaps I should have read the ingredients in the store, but then I would never have discovered that salivary glands and lymph nodes have no flavor of their own.

In general, to make bad food start with something nearly flavorless, then add salt, and some stale or chemical flavors. I’ll eat just about anything edible if that’s all that’s available, and I’m be grateful for it. However, I’m also grateful when I don’t have to.

If someone would like to help with the bad food project, you might check out pickled pork rinds and tell me what you think. Not me.