Tampering with Food and Drink: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

 

If the perpetrator is unlucky, his plans may be thwarted by a [[Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo]].

Compare the larger scale [[Water Source Tampering]], usually perpetrated by [[Ancient Conspiracy|conspiracies]] and such.

 

 

{{examples}}

* At one point in ''[[Sakura Gari]]'' [[Yandere|Sakurako]] feeds Masataka a piece of sushi. He quickly spits it out, revealing that Sakurako had snuck in a piece of glass.

** Later, [[Depraved Bisexual|Katsuragi]] invites Masataka over to his home and gives him a cup of tea laced with a sleeping drug. [[It Gets Worse]] in a span of minutes.

* In ''[[Gankutsuou]]'' Heloise receives a ring that contains poison from the Count. She uses it to poison some water she tried to give to Valentine but Albert ends up drinking it instead. She also poisoned some lemonade which one of the household staff ends up drinking. She later mentions that she wanted to poison more people this way as well.

* ''[[Katekyo Hitman Reborn]]'': Bianchi, known as "Poison Scorpion Bianchi" in the Mafia underground, specializes in poison cooking; food items that contain poison and have a nasty color to them.

** Her food also has a tendency to ''melt'' its surroundings.

** Also, when {{spoiler|Princess Charlotte de Orleans aka}} Tabitha was younger, she was at a party with her family where a strange man gave her a glass of wine. Tabitha's mother, meanwhile, saw the man smirk as he walked away. She immediately recognized a potion in the wine and took the glass Tabitha held; [[Heroic Sacrifice|she drank the potion in order to save Tabitha]], [[The Ophelia|and she became mentally ill.]] {{spoiler|She regained sanity at the end, though.}}

** An example where this trope is used to actually '''save''' someone and not harm him/her includes Saito slipping sleeping potion into Louise's wine at their supposed "marriage ceremony" to make her run away and not face the danger {{spoiler|of 7,000 Zombie soldiers. He had his own [[Moment of Awesome]] that day, when he faced them himslef.}}

** Candy that was not only wrapped, but in a SEALED BAG.

* In ''[[Saiunkoku Monogatari]]'', Shuurei is the subject of repeated poisoning attempts during her time as Imperial Concubine. In the most notable instance she's presented with a cup of poisoned sake during a banquet; immediately suspicious but aware that refusing the offer would be a grave insult, Ryuuki drinks it in her place, counting on his better constitution and [[Acquired Poison Immunity]] to get him through it. It still makes him quite sick for a while, and when Shuurei finally finds out, she's torn between being impressed that he basically [[Taking the Bullet|took the bullet]] for her, and being angry at him for taking such a risk. (Not because she's got ''feelings'' for him, or anything - it's just that the civil war that would result from his death would be really bad for the people. [[Tsundere|That's all, really!]])

* In ''[[Pumpkin Scissors]]'', one episode features a visiting princess from a neighboring country, with a particularly draconian rule of succession: Whichever royal child survives, takes the throne. Poison is a favored means of sibling rivalry, and she reveals that on her 10th birthday, the cake was poisoned, causing the death of her favorite maid. The fear of poison is so in-grown in her, that even when eating a hot-dog at a street-stand, where nobody knows who or what she is, she can't take a bite until somebody has tasted it for her first.

* The sociopathic protagonist in [[Suehiro Maruo]]'s short ''[http://samehat.blogspot.com/2005/10/poison-strawberry-chapter-one.html Poison Strawberry]'' puts thumb tacks in her classmate's milk. What happens next is horrific.

** Additionally, she also poisoned a half-eaten bar of chocolate and switched it with one that was given to the victim as Valentines gift by his girlfriend, in an attempt to frame the girlfriend since the lady knew the victim would take a bite of his chocolatey "enemy" to please her. And even more: a "friend" of the victim tried to tamper with the guy's cigarettes via poisoning the filters, but he just cut said filters off in a whim and thus he failed.

** Another case has Ran falling victim to poisoned coffee and then almost being drowned to death by the killer of the week. {{spoiler|In a subversion, the guy didn't want to kill ''her'', only knock out whoever drank the poisoned coffee to give himself an alibi.}}

* In ''[[Naruto]]'', Tsunade poisons Jiraiya's drink, leaving him unable to fight at full strength against Orochimaru. It is implied that she was leaning toward accepting Orochimaru's offer at the time, then changed her mind later.

* Subverted in ''[[Fullmetal Alchemist]]''. When Roy Mustang gets offered tea by {{spoiler|Fuhrer Bradley, who knows that he knows that he's a homunculus and tried to tell Central Command about it}}, he wonders if it's poisoned, but is told that it is not.

 

* ''[[Hellblazer]]'': During the Hard Time arc, one of the prisoners grinds up glass in the workshop, then his brother slips it into Constantine's oatmeal. John, in his wiley, unexplained way ( {{spoiler|probably magic!}}), switches the glass to the grinder's oatmeal, resulting in a rather grisly breakfast after a week's worth of dosing...

* ''[[Asterix]] in Switzerland'' opens with with the Roman governor varius Flavus poisoning the food of Quaestor Vexatius Sinusitus in an attempt to dispose of him before Sinusistus can uncover Flavus' embezzlement.

 

== Films -- Animated ==

* In ''[[Shrek]]'' 2 the Fairy Godmother orders the King to slip Fiona a love potion so that she'll fall in love with her son, Prince Charming. The King places the potion in Fiona's tea but finds that he can't go through with it, and gives his daughter a cup of tea that wasn't laced with the love potion instead.

 

== Films -- Live-Action ==

* In the early Peter Falk flick ''The Bloody Brood,'' Falk plays a psychotic beatnik who feeds some poor kid a hamburger filled with broken glass to watch him die...[[For the Evulz|just for kicks.]]

* ''[[The Court Jester]]'' combines this with [[Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo]].

No! The Flagon with the Dragon holds the pellet with the poison, the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true. }}

* In ''[[Kill Bill]] Volume II'', Elle Driver reveals that {{spoiler|she murdered Pai Mei by poisoning his fish heads}}.

* In ''[[The Sixth Sense]]'' one of the [[It Was His Sled|dead people the kid sees]] was a small girl poisoned by her stepmother putting cleaning fluid in her soup.

* ''[[Murder By Death]]''. Lionel Twain arranges for one of the cups of wine served to the guests to have a tasteless, odorless [[Poison Is Corrosive|acidic poison]] in it. It turns out to be a subversion: Twain made sure the cup with the poisoned wine was served to the one guest who could identify it.

* In [[The Three Stooges]] short "Who Done It?", the villainess prepares two drinks and slips poison in Shemp's drink. The two distract each other while they [[Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo|switch the goblets]]. Finally, Shemp drinks down the poison and goes through some hysterical death throes. Naturally, he recovered.

* In ''[[The Assassination Bureau]]'', Eleanora first poisons {{spoiler|her husband Cesare, the Italian assassin}}, then prepares drinks for herself and Dragomiloff, slipping poison in his drink. Dragomiloff spins the table until it stops, picks up the goblet in front of him, drinks down the contents, and falls to the floor. {{spoiler|Of course, he was faking it.}}

 

== Literature ==

* Willard Price's ''African Adventure''. While they're on safari in Uganda, someone tries to kill Hal and Roger Hunt by putting ground-up leopard whiskers in their food.

* ''[[Dune]]'' had terms for poisons used this way: chaumas (in food) and chaumurky (in drink).

* In the first book of ''[[A Series of Unfortunate Events]]'' Violet believes Count Olaf poisoned the oatmeal he serves to her and her siblings one morning because he's frankly a horrible guardian who was never nice to them in the entire time they've known him. He quickly proves them wrong by eating one of the raspberries on top of the oatmeal convincing the siblings that it's safe to eat.

** Earlier Violet was thinking miserably that she should've poisoned the sauce she's serving with the pasta for Count Olaf and his troupe considering how they are acting rude and refuse to eat the food the siblings made for them because they wanted roast beef instead.

'''Emperor''': Would these be the urgent matters of state in a little bottle marked "Antidote" on your dresser? }}

** Tampering with food and drink was also a popular tactic of the wizards in the early books (before they mellowed out and became a satire of modern academia). There was even a saying: When a wizard is tired of looking for broken glass in his dinner, he is tired of life.

* In ''Summers At Castle Auburn'', the Crown Prince is poisoned at his wedding feast, despite his using a taste tester and without anyone else at the feast dying. Only two people figured out who did it, and only one of them figured out how: The poisoner put the poison in the main course, which the prince was certain to have a large helping. The poisoner then put the antidote for the poison in the water pitchers. Since the prince never drank water (due to a paranoid belief that someone had tried to poison the well years previous, despite considerable evidence to the contrary), he was the only person at the feast who took the poison but did not take the antidote as well.

* In the [[Lord Peter Wimsey]] novel ''Strong Poison'' the victim died of arsenic poisoning. {{spoiler|It was put into the cracked egg that was made into an omelette, which he shared with his cousin (the murderer, who had built up an immunity to it over time so he could vouch that the poison wasn't in that particular meal)}}.

** ''Crooked House'', one of the two murder victims is poisoned by spiking a cup of cocoa with digitalis.

** The victim of ''Five Little Pigs'' had poison put in his drink.

** In ''Mysterious Affair At The Styles'' {{spoiler|it's subverted. One of the characters believes poison was put into the first victim's drink and tries to cover up any clues that would led Poirot to this conclusion}}.

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* In ''[[Oz]]'' Nino Schibetta ate grounded glass that Ryan and Adebisi secretly put into his food for months until he dies from internal hemorrhaging, suddenly realizing one day that he's bleeding from the ears, nose, mouth...

* In ''[[Babylon 5]]'', Londo makes a request of Lord Refa:

** In the end, it's left unclear if it was truly poisoned, or if Londo was bluffing, as Refa dies from other means.

* Both played straight and faked in ''[[Persons Unknown]]''. Erika gets Joe to confess this way; later {{spoiler|Joe helps Janet fake her death by pretending to do this to a liquor bottle}}

* Pops up a few times in ''[[Mighty Morphin Power Rangers]]''. In "Foul Play In the Sky", Rita learns that Kimberly will be going for a plane ride with her uncle Steve. Seeing an opportunity to be rid of a Ranger, Rita sends Squatt and Baboo to spike Steve's soda with a delayed-action sleeping potion so that he'll fall asleep while the plane is in the air and it'll crash. In "Power Ranger Punks", Baboo spikes the Rangers' after-game fruit juice with a personality-altering potion that turns Billy and Kimberly (who drink first) into slacker punks with no interest in attending to their Ranger duties. In "Rita's Pita", Rita observes Tommy advise a kid he's teaching martial arts to to eat healthier foods and not binge eat. She puts a shrunken monster in Tommy's pita that will make him start binging on junk food, banking on the Rangers bringing Tommy to the command center ASAP to find out what caused the sudden 180 and unwittingly taking the monster with them.

* ''[[CSI]]'' did it at least once, as did ''[[CSI: NY]]''. The CSI one was a juror wanting to induce an allergic reaction in another juror but she decided not to at the last minute. The NY one was also an allergic reaction kind of thing.

 

== Music ==

 

 

== Tabletop Games ==

* The video that accompanies the ''[[Clue]] VCR Mystery Game'' (and forms part of the game play) includes a dinner scene in Boddy mansion where almost all of the guests end up poisoning something that is served at dinner.

 

== Theatre ==

* In the play ''Holy Ghosts'' one character talks about his prizewinning dog, who was killed by jealous rival dog-owners by putting glass in his food.

 

== Urban Legend ==

** [http://www.snopes.com/rumors/candy.asp Terrorists buy candy in bulk just before Halloween]

 

** ''[[Ceville]]'', for example, entails slipping Tabasco sauce into coffee.

** A bizarre example occur in ''[[Sam and Max|Sam and Max: Night of the Raving Dead]]'': Max, knowing that he will be bitten by a vampire, drinks holy water beforehand, thereby spiking his own blood with vampire poison.

* One of the many methods of killing in the ''[[Hitman]]'' series is to inject poison into food that gets delivered to the victim. (In one of the missions you can also put aphrodisiacs into a martini to make your mark move into a more remote location.)

* In ''[[Heroes Of Might And Magic III]]'', this is how King Gryphonheart was killed.

 

 

== [[Web Original]] ==

 

== Western Animation ==

* In ''[[Asterix]] and Cleopatra'', Edifice frames the Gauls by sending a poisoned cake to Cleopatra in the Gaul's name, which is quickly detected as being poisoned. Strangely, the cake was made without eggs or flour - the only non-toxic ingredient in the entire recipe was orange juice (for flavoring).

* ''[[Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi]]'': Yumi's opponent in an [[Eating Contest]] sneaks into the arena the night before and dumps a bunch of iron horseshoes into her food to guarantee his victory. It almost works too, until Ami realizes that watching a baseball game makes Yumi [[Extreme Omnivore|eat anything you put in front of her]] out of sheer boredom.

 

== Real Life ==

* In 1990, an employee at the Point Lepreau nuclear plant in New Brunswick with tritiated water/ Apparently he was trying to play a practical joke, by forcing people to give daily urine samples for an extended period. The joke didn't go over too well.

* In [[World War II]], food shortages in Germany meant that food waste was universally recycled as pigswill, including the leftovers from POW camps holding allied prisoners of war. Naturally as soon as the inmates at [[The Alcatraz|Colditz Castle]] discovered this they took to liberally seasoning their table scraps with shards of [[Razor Apples|broken razor blades]] despite the German authorities loudly threatening death to anyone they caught in the act.

* Antifreeze is one of the most commonly used chemicals to poison people. Not only is it easy to obtain, it has a sweet, syrupy flavor (due to the ethylene glycol in it) that doesn't raise suspicion if mixed in with someone's coffee- until they drop dead from heart failure.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Food Tropes]]

[[Category:Toxic Tropes]]