Everything in the cafeteria today scared me.

I eat lunch in the Gruner+Jahr mega-canteen most days, experiencing a mix of traditional German meals and traditional cafeteria slop. Always on the lookout for something new, I’ve chowed my way through a bewildering variety of dishes: a large, white sausage patty topped with a fried egg, a rainbow of cabbage types (white: pretty good; green: not bad; iridescent red: rather scary), scads of uniquely prepared potatoes, meats that came from animals I couldn’t — and didn’t particuarly want to — identify.

Today there was nothing I could identify. On the menu: brown goop covered with white goop, which turned out to be uncased blood sausage and semi-mashed potatoes; some type of noodles covered with vanilla sauce (I actually checked my translation on this one to confirm that, yep, it’s vanilla sauce). a “peasant’s breakfast,” which turned out to be a egg-ham-and-potato hash that came complete with a pickle (!?); and what I thought were onion rings but turned out to be squid rings.

Squid rings. If you’re at work right now, I want you to stand up and say “squid rings,” just to see what type of reaction you get.

The scary thing is, they weren’t actually that bad — and had to be far better than eggs and pickles or blood sausage.

I’m going to go heat up a frozen pizza now.