I HATE TO throw food away. Even if I don't like it, I try to finish it. I can't finish it? That's what friends are for, and lunchtime tomorrow is for. Or I'll give it to a hungry homeless person. Rarely, if ever – in fact never, until now – have I wound up with something I feared was entirely unfit for human consumption. Not healthwise, tastewise. This dish was so awful that I couldn't even in good conscience feed it to my chickens. I was going to dump it in the compost, but then I felt bad for the worms. I wondered if the dish's awfulness might not someday seep into our water supply, ruining everything. This was some bad fucking food. I could only finish half of it.

The other half is still in my fridge, quadruple-wrapped and duct-taped, vacuum-sealed and Tupperwared inside a locked box with skulls and crossbones all over it. It will have to be moved, if and whenever I move, in hazmat-approved trucks from place to place, refrigerator to refrigerator, until I have the technology to launch leftovers into outer space.

Ironically, the dish was a noodle dish I normally love, and it came from a place I am now going to recommend to you, for its sandwiches: Ba Le Vietnamese Sandwich Deli, a little hole-in-the-wall dive of a joint with just two tables, one inside, one out, and a little shrine on the floor in the corner. It's in one of El Cerrito's diviest strip malls, the pleasant-sounding Peppermint Tree plaza. Ba Le's next-door neighbor is a video store called something like the Video Store, with worn-out signs and cardboard-box-blocked-out windows, which features about one token rack of garbage Hollywood blockbuster trash, compared to walls and walls and walls of wall-to-wall triple-X pornographic masterpieces.

There's also a take-out pizza place, a print shop, an acupuncture office, and a Chinese dive. My kind of stomping grounds, in other words, and I wish I could have stomped around there all day, getting acupuncted and browsing the "racks" at the video store, pondering the many levels of surreality between Julia Roberts's lips and Wendy Whoppers's whoppers.

Unfortunately, however, I had business to attend to. I had to sit in the car like a detective, casing the traffic lights at a certain San Pablo Avenue intersection. To explain myself any further would threaten to take over the rest of this column and then some, in addition to exposing me as more of a nutcase than any of us had previously imagined. Suffice it to say it's just one of those things that someone in the world has to do every now and again, or else the world wouldn't be the world. As we know it.

So there I was in the world, being me, and the sandwich wrappings from Ba Le were piling up around me. That was lunch: Vietnamese sandwiches. Ba Le's are as good as and cheap as anyone else's I can think of. My favorite, the barbecued pork one, goes for $1.75. Other possibilities, for $1.75 or $2, include various combinations of ham, pâté, head cheese, pork cake, meatball, and bacon. Here's what I like, though: they also have a "veggie" sandwich, and that one costs more than the meat ones ($2.25)! Ha ha, vegetarians.

What comes on these sandwiches (besides mayonnaise, if you want it) is cucumbers, pickled carrots, jalapeño slices, and cilantro. It's just a delightful combination of flavors, all packed into one crusty roll. Not the biggest sandwich in the world, but at $1.75 you can afford to get four of them – which would be at least two too many.

Problem comes around dinnertime. Six or so, I'm hungry again because it's dinnertime, but I don't (as a general rule) eat sandwiches for dinner. Ba Le's got a couple, two, three noodle dishes on their menu, and one of them is almost my favorite noodle dish, with grilled pork and imperial rolls. Only this says shrimps instead of grilled pork. That's OK, I had pork for lunch. Right?

The guy tells me, when I order it, that they "don't have any more of those." I didn't understand, at first, until he started rustling through a bunch of shrink-wrapped prepackaged things on the counter there, and he comes up with one that consists of the rice noodles, some old-looking cucumbers, and wilted lettuce and mint and stuff, sliced imperial rolls that must have been fried who knows how long ago, no shrimp, no pork. Three dollars.

Anyone in their right mind runs screaming from the place at this point, right? Well, welcome to my world.

Ba Le Vietnamese Sandwich Deli. 10174 San Pablo (at Avila), El Cerrito. (510) 528-8882. Daily, 8 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Takeout available. No alcohol. Credit cards not accepted. Wheelchair accessible.