On my 28 visits to Guantánamo, I have watched the US navy's cuisine being delivered to my clients for the last nine years: it smells vile, tastes worse, and is generally cold by the time it arrives.
After a chance encounter with a fellow American on this very train, he had made contact with a Tarahumara village chief, paid a small fee and taken part in the shamanistic ritual of the potent, cactus derivative, which had been mixed up as a vile tasting broth.
Many people find any soy cheese vile tasting and unsatisfying, while others find it delicious.
All those years believing that coffee-drinkers had scaled a grown-up wall I would never climb, had overcome that vile mud taste in order to grow, to go faster, think clearly.
By contrast, processed food is designed to be eaten quickly: Pay it too much attention and you start to realize how vile it tastes.
There are a couple of exceptions: raspberries, carrots and parsnips don't taste vile.
Other sweet drinks, such as Lucozade and Ribena, have slashed their sugar content to avoid the tax, and consumers are complaining that old favourites now taste vile.
It is recalled by old-timers as a murky liquid so vile to the taste that some thought it could only have been brewed to grow hair on the chest, but its real purpose seemed to have been to clear the heads of those who had been out partying with the proprietor the night before.
Of course, some of us consider this sugaring of the pill to be prima facie evidence of duping by the drug companies, and we go instead for the bitter natural cures, the Bach remedies and alcoholic tinctures which, like the medieval syphilis cure called guaiac, are made from twigs and wood, cost the earth, and taste vile.
For those who finally reached the age where brandy or Scotch didn't taste vile, tavern-hopping for T&Js; was a rite of Christmas vacation.
