Fear Factor Cafe

Sometimes I think my mid sized Canadian city is a little starved for news - this is about the 5th time in the last year they have written an article on one of my teen programs at the library. Don't get me wrong - it's fun to be internationally famous locally and have free publicity for the library and my programs, but it's getting to be a little ridiculous. Last Friday this article about my Food Fear Factor program appeared on the front page of the paper in the "Local" section. Names have been omitted to protect the innocent (and guilty).

Welcome, little darlings, to Fear Café — a repugnant repertoire of repulsive repast. Dip into the Nasty Nachos. Fill up on Sickening Stew. And for dessert, finish with olives, grapes, cherries and pickled onions, drenched in dark chocolate. Between courses, why not try Harry Potter style jelly beans, but watch for the ones that taste like boogers or dirt — or worse.
Call it an Epicurean Russian Roulette: There’s no way to tell whether the next bite will contain the surprise that ruins your appetite for the rest of the meal — or at least leaves it severely diminished. The idea was to see if the teens had to guts to tackle something difficult, without putting them into any kind of jeopardy.

“(The jelly beans) have the potential to taste like vomit,” says WM Jenner, teen services librarian at the _____ Public Library. WM put her cooking skills to work on Thursday afternoon, inviting youngsters from her summer reading program to pop into the auditorium and pit their wills — and stomachs — against some truly disgusting concoctions. First, they had to taste the stuff. Then, they had to try figuring out what was in it. Those who were willing to try everything would be eligible for a grand prize.

Twelve-year-old S screwed her face in disgust as she tried the first course of ordinary tortilla chips served with a heaping spoonful of something orange and stringy. “Are there onions in here? I’m allergic to onions.” Well, no onions. Just a giant mass of sauerkraut, beets, sweet potato, tapioca, artichoke hearts and baby food.

Yucks all around.

Thirteen-year-old A managed to finish his and was still smiling when WM introduced the next course, Sickening Stew. What could be tastier than cutting a can of grass jelly in with some baked beans, canned spaghetti, mushrooms and green peas? So what if the hunks of grass jelly look like gooey eyeballs? S nibbled at hers, then pushed her bowl away. A finished his. Then he finished his sister M’s. Then S’s. Then he had a couple more helpings, along with a few of the dreaded Harry Potter jelly beans. S2, also 13, fearlessly crammed jelly beans into her mouth between bites of the so-called stew. “I’ve eaten chocolate covered centipedes — oven roasted. They weren’t that bad, but knowing it’s a centipede, that’s nasty,” she said.
S, spitting out yet another mouthful of food, decided the Fear Café really wasn’t such a good idea after all. Nor was 13-year-old S3 amused. “I think you have, like, a new pig chow here,” said S3. A2, 16, seemed to actually enjoy the stew. Maybe almost as much as A.

And then there was the dessert: a huge tray of chocolates disguising blobs of who knows what. WM insisted that each diner take at least four, to make sure they got a good variety. After all, some were filled with maraschino cherries. Others were filled with red seedless grapes. Yummy. S scraped some of the chocolate coating off her first morsel, to find the globular green body of an olive lurking inside. Then she got a pickled onion. Phhtt — into the garbage can. Then she got another onion. Finally, she found a cherry. It was about the only thing she managed to get down, excluding a couple of plain tortillas.

A and S2, on the other hand, were preparing to go up against 19-year-old C and the tag team of J, 14, and S4 (damn, who knew I had so many S's at the library! No, this line was not in the article), 13, for the grand championship. WM gleefully put together her piece de resistance: grinning like all three of the witches from Macbeth, she stirred together the Nasty Nachos, the Sickening Stew, the chunky chocolates, the tortillas, a bag of fish-flavoured chips and the Harry Potter jelly beans. “I might win this by default,” said A, as he watched the faces around him while stirred her brew.

S2 took a bite, clamped her hand over her mouth and turned red. She tried and she tried. It went down. But for a few seconds, she wasn’t sure it was going to stay down. J and S4 pinch their noses shut to hide the taste. Nothing doing. C quietly munched away at the glimmering goo. A took a few bites, but he was too full to finish. Too much Sickening Stew. The grand prize went to C, with A taking second for his valiant effort at cramming everything possible into his juvenile gullet.

Nobody got sick. And that’s kind of unusual for a Fear Café, WM said afterward. “It’s not fun until somebody vomits.” She said the people who showed up for Fear Café showed a lot of courage. “I admire them for that.”

Uh, did she just compare me to ALL three witches in Macbeth? I sort of resent that ... aren't witches hideous old crones? And am I not a young, beautiful librarian? Also, the ironic (or just shitty) thing is that after making the "it's not fun until someone vomits" comment, I got hideously sick on the weekend and was vomiting all over the place for two days. Although I didn't actually eat the Fear Factor food, so it wasn't from that. It could be that the absinthe actually did burn a hole in my stomach, or the pigeon shit, or some other infectious disease, but either way I ate my words (and threw them up again) because you know, it really isn't fun when someone vomits.