When it comes to food memories some parents have a lot to answer for.

Our childhood food horrors include being told that chewing gum was made out of rat's blood and that ice-cream men don't wash their hands, just so our parents didn't have to fork out for a round of 99s.

And, of course, there were the meals that sent shivers down your little spine - 'plate pie', liver and onions, tripe...

Can you do better? We want to know your childhood food horrors

Custard, mashed potato and rice pudding all of the same consistency, very similar colour and not warm enough..........school dinner offerings........but as my parents were paying good money for it I felt it was terrible not to eat it. But now wont touch anything similar in colour or consistency.

My childhood food horrors were the overcooked vegetables for Sunday lunch. My mum would have them on to boil by 11.30 and by the time we had lunch the cauli was just grey mush and the cabbage was slimey!

On the whole my childhood memories of food were very good. School dinners were just like home made with fresh veg and a good variety, (I knew the cook as she was the mother of a boy in my class and it was a very small school so not quite in the league of mass catering). However I did not like sago, still cannot eat it, the frogspawn analagy still comes to mind. My mother in the early 70's suddenly decided that fresh food, ie home grown veg was very outmoded and that tinned was what we should be doing, very strange in hindsight, I hated that we went from home made soup, which I loved to tinned Heinz, in particular oxtail, another thing I simply cannot eat. Then came the Bird's Eye TV dinners, she seemed to think that this was very trendy along with Vesta meals, they were simply cardboard replacements with no taste whatsoever. I am amazed to see the return of the Spam fritter. This was never a good item, it was greasy, tasteless and went by the name of Pirelli slipper soles, and if my husband ever served them up to me with a salad for my anniversary we would be in the divorce courts the same day! Perhaps we look at the past with rose tinted spectacles but the horrors of overcooked cabbage, boiled to death potatoes, liver, etc simply did not happen in my home. Only after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon did the "space age" concept of convenience meals creep in, one small step for catering, one giant step back for food.

You're right lemon drop. The late seventies exploded with the beginning of processed food and ready meals and they were snapped up by housewives because of the convenience and novelty of it all.

To my shame I used to prefer shop bought cakes and jams. I am glad my tastes have changed as I've grown older.

Thank goodness Queenstomper that more of us are becoming attuned to eating real food as opposed to the laboratory designed stuff, (in a brief flick of the TV channels I saw that in China they are making fake eggs!! Fake eggs for goodness sake). It is thanks in the main to the high profile given to the likes of Jamie Oliver, HFW and Gordon R and the current media interest, though this, like antiques and house renovation programmes may be short lived if it converts just a minority it cannot be a bad thing.

I hated school dinners with a vengeance. They werent cooked on the premises but arrived in metal containers which were put in ovens and warmed up and served. There were black lumps in the potatoes and I used to get so upset on the few occasions when I had to stay that I was invariably ill during the night with worry and unable to go to school the next day. I remember the pudds were OK but the actual dinners were aweful. And in those days the idea of taking packed lunch was unheard of. If you stayed at school you ate slop or you went home which in my case was a half hour walk there and back again.

Tapioca, Rice pudding, semolina - Bossy diner lady forcing it into my tiny 5 year old mouth with a massive spoon to the point of choking and it comming out of my nose. I had to sit there until i had eaten it all and not left a scrap all the othe kids ate it all up YUK. It was cold revolting and lumpy. Every time i was sick i remember it was lumps of that stuff - needless to say i can't touch it now. Porridge and readybrek are also No No's. She would be struck off nowdays (This went on in the 70's) Put on a register of some kind!! - Thank god she didin't demonise custard!!!! Bread and butter pudding made with sunblest bread holds a similar curse. Little me as a great recipe - albeit a boozey one

Our family was pretty hard up.On one occasion a stray cat had wandered into our yard so Dad tempted it with a piece of stale bread and when it got close enough he smashed it's skull in with a hammer.Mum boiled it and served it up with left over custard from the day before,it was revolting.She did however make a little teddy bear out of the skin and fur which made up for the crap meal.