Bizarre Taste in Food
Bizarre Taste in Food is when a character, main or minor, does something irregular to their meal that becomes a defining trait. Note that this has nothing to do with the viewer or players' taste, but the character to witness it.
 |
Reporter: So, Mr. Presley, what do you do every morning when you wake up? —An Interview with the King of Rock
|
 |
Differs from Cordon Bleugh Chef in the sense that the food is not inedible because of the cook. Its when the character does something minor to the food that completely transforms it.
Typically after doing so, the Cloud Cuckoo Lander will try the food and proclaim that it tastes better, much to the chagrin of the others.
Has overlap with Wacky Cravings when a character is pregnant.
Anime & Manga
- Bleach: In one of the early episodes, Orihime is talking about strange food she eats.
- Later, it's revealed that Rangiku also enjoys her bizarre cooking.
- In Gintama, one of Toushiro Hijikata's defining character traits is his love of mayonnaise. He tends to put so much of it on his food that it becomes unrecognizable. Multiple characters remark on it as being rather disgusting.
Comic Strips
- A Garfield strip had Garfield douse Jon's scrambled eggs with ketchup, much to Jon's disgust.
- Zippy the Pinhead enjoys Ding Dongs with taco sauce. Creator Bill Griffith recounted how he had the combo available, as a joke, at a book signing - and gave away a lot of them!
Film
- The Breakfast Club: during lunch Allison removes the pimento loaf from her sandwich and adds sugar and mashed up Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. (Also her sandwich uses one slice of white bread & one slice wheat.)
- In UHF, Weird Al's character puts a hot dog weiner into a twinkie, puts cheese whiz on it, and dunks it in his drink.
Literature
- The aliens in the Roswell High series put Tabasco sauce on almost all their food and combine flavors in ways that would make Earthlings vomit. This was carried over into the TV show based on the books (see below).
Live Action TV
- This trope is played with in Star Trek Deep Space Nine. The Ferengis cannot believe that Hu-mans enjoy root beer, and occasionally insult other Ferengis by implying that they enjoy root beer.
- The Eleventh Doctor's taste for fish sticks dipped in custard in Doctor Who.
- Fringe Observers will cover their food in peppers and douse it in Hot Sauce before eating it.
- Subverted and invoked in an episode of The Voyage Of The Mimi. One character prepares a sandwhich and describes all the ingredients in it. It's so disgusting it makes the person she's talking to throw up. It turns out she wasn't really planning on eating it - she just thought that inducing vomiting might be a good way to help the other character stop feeling seasick.
- Dawn, the little sister of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was notorious for this.
- The aliens in Roswell put Tabasco sauce on almost all of their food and even bake it into brownies.
Web Original
- It is yet undiscovered just how The Nostalgia Critic can eat sugar-frosted burrito-stuffed, lard-filled, liposuction-butter hotpockets all the time and still stay as skinny as he does.
- Mortimer from Newheimburg likes his pizza loaded down with every topping, including breadsticks.
Real Life
- Elvis Presley and his peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwiches.
- Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, describes with some degree of awe watching a fellow job-searcher help himself at a buffet to "a mound of lettuce, covered with canned fruit salad, topped by a desiccated gray hamburger patty and dripping with Thousand Island dressing".
Video Games
- In Uno Undercover Agent, a seven- or eight-year-old character made lunch for her family of four. When her mother said that the sandwiches were delicious and asked what was in them, the kid replied "Mayonnaise, sardines, tomato and half a stick of gum."
- In the Nancy Drew games, recurring character Professor Hotchkiss is fond of things like roast beef with caramel sauce or curried waffle sandwiches.