Grub Tub

Obviously, a sub-standard pool.

Wilkins: I just filled my whole swimming pool with Wilkins Coffee.
Wontkins: (falls in) Help! I'm drowning!
Wilkins: I told him he'd end up drinking Wilkins!

— Wilkins Coffee commercial

What does every moderately wealthy person need to have these days? Certainly, a swimming pool is often on the list. But if you're really rich then why fill it with plain, boring old water? Why not gelatin, or pudding, or booze? The real reason is that most consumables would clog up the filters that pools use to keep the water clean and you can't really swim that easily in something like gelatin.

Of course, it doesn't have to be an Olympic-sized pool. There are always jacuzzis and kiddie pools. One doesn't even have to be that wealthy that way.

Sub-Trope of Conspicuous Consumption and Unconventional Food Usage. Compare Pooled Funds when the pool is full of currency instead, and Foul Ball Pit when a pool is full of plastic balls and likely contains excreted food (feces, urine, vomit). Tomato Skunk Stink Cure could be considered an occasional subtrope. A Don't Eat and Swim reminder may or may not be required. Food used this way that looks good would be Food Porn as well.

Note: "Grub" as in the slang term for food, not the insect, although one video game has filled a pool with that particular insect as well.^note In Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Chapter "This Vortal Coil'', Gordon discovers the larvae in the mines and underground nests of the antlion species. Called grubs by other characters, once squished, they emit a health-enhancing pellet. As Gordon goes deeper into the caves in order to procure a specific form of larva extract, he comes across an area that has an antlion guard. Seeking refuge from the constant harassment, this inner nest akin to an ant colony, has passageways etched into stone by the antlion workers and coated with an organic substance, filled with the health palette dispensing larvae. The sound effects of walking in them even resemble a sort of viscous liquid.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A Buca di Beppo restaurant in Florida in 2010 set a world record 13,780 pounds of spaghetti in an above-ground pool, with 120 gallons of marinara sauce to go with it. The previous record holder was a Buca di Beppo in Qatar, with over 9,000 pounds there.
• An Australian ad for a MILO (a chocolate malt drink by Nestlé) showed a couple sitting in a hot tub filled with MILO. Needless to say, The Gruen Transfer had a field day with this one.
• Steven Seagal promoted his Lightning Bolt energy drink with a commercial showing a model in a pool, dumping a can of the energy drink in. The narrative of the commercial has Seagal state he loves swimming in the stuff (though true to form, Seagal never leaves his seat) and then pushes the model into the pool.

Anime & Manga

• Gintama: Happens in Chapter 322 Gintoki and Hasegawa want to enjoy their trip to the pool in their own ways, so Hasegawa goes Skinny Dipping and Gintoki fills the pool with strawberry milk. It makes just as much sense as described.

Fan Works

• Starting Over Again: Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie prank Starlight Glimmer by dropping her in a pool full of marshmallow creme, throwing some ice cream and mare-aschino cherries in for good measure.

Film — Animated

• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: one of the many Jell-O constructs Flint makes is a swimming pool full of the stuff. Deconstructed when he and Sam go to use the thing, though... Flint smacks against the surface of the pool due to not having enough momentum, while Sam punctures it and ends up about three feet down... and stays there.
• In Winnie the Pooh (2011), Pooh imagines himself swimming in a lake of honey as part of a hunger-induced Disney Acid Sequence.

Film — Live-Action

• Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: Ashley mentions she knows a guy named Tony who invited her to see his wading pool full of mayonnaise.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Oompa-Loompas do synchronised swimming in a river of molten chocolate.
• Don't Look Under the Bed: Weaponized as a prank by the Boogeyman; he adds Jell-O powder to the school swimming pool, causing a high diver to get stuck in it.
• Trail of the Pink Panther: At one point, Dreyfus has a dream where he's living the high life in a fancy house on a hill. As he's about to dive into his swimming pool, his hot trophy wife tells him that he'd been sent 3000 pounds of Jell-O for his birthday. Dreyfus remarks that only Clouseau would be stupid enough to do that before he finds out firsthand just where he put it.

Literature

• In the children's book Alice The Fairy, Alice, fed up with bathing in ordinary water, tries to use a spell to turn it into jello. However, she's not actually a fairy; she just wants to be one, so the spell doesn't work.
• An iconic scene from every version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the chocolate river, which Willy Wonka claims is a key part of the mixing process. In a bit of a subversion though, Wonka gets angry when somebody dips his hands in it and falls in, but has no problem running a boat on it.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Wrecking Ball: Manny's idea for home renovation is to have a pool filled with chocolate pudding.
• The Moomins: In the first book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, Moominmamma, Moomintroll, and Sniff encounter a kind, elderly man who owns a Level Ate park with almost everything made of candy. Moomintroll and Sniff eat so much that they get a stomach ache and a toothache respectively. Moominmamma inquires whether there is a pool with hot soup somewhere; the man sadly says that he only has one pool of whipped cream and one pool of jam.
• Paths of the Perambulator: When the party gets trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine hallucination, Clothahump's apprentice's Sorbl hallucination is that he's found an entire lake filled with bourbon.

Live-Action TV

• In the TVB drama Gods of Honor (loosely based on the novel, Fengshen Yanyi) the Zhou tyrant has a "Wine Pool" in his palace courtyard (right next to the "Meat Garden", where roasted slices of fine meat are hung from trees by his royal cooks), which as the name states, is filled with the finest of wines where he can dip himself in with his harem and concubines, drink from it as he swims whenever he feels like it, and the pool will be drained and refilled regularly by the eunuchs and courtiers. In an ironic twist of fate, the final episode has the tyrant, having his vile head concubine Daji usurping him, then drowning the tyrant in the pool of wine.
• The Gruen Transfer had a field day pulling apart, analysing and mocking a MILO ad that showed a couple sitting in a hot tun filled with the drink (see Advertising above). Of particular hilarity was a Freeze-Frame Bonus that showed the hot tub full of MILO was listed as a 'serving suggestion'. At the end of the episode, Wil pulls out two huge buckets of MILO and announces he is going upstairs to Ita Buttrose (the chairperson of The ABC)'s private spa.
• Kenan & Kel: An episode has Kel hoping to attend an Orange Soda Festival, the attractions at which include a swimming pool full of it.
• The Last Man on Earth: Phil fills an inflatable kiddie pool with tequila and lime juice and makes himself a margarita pool.
• Mythbusters:
  • They once filled a pool with syrup to test the myth that you can swim through it as easily as water.
  • Another time, they tested the myth about the dangerousness of quicksand by filling a pool with cornstarch.
• Odd Squad: As Oscar explains in one "Welcome to Odd Squad" video, Precinct 13579 has had quite a few swimming pools filled with substances other than water, including one that was filled with ice cream.

Music

• In the kids' song "I Feel Crazy So I Jump in the Soup", the singer jumps into a giant bowl of soup and starts goofing around there due to "feeling crazy".
• One Judy Pancoast song, "Swimming in Jello", has the singer dreaming about trying to swim through jello but having great difficulty doing so.
• Preschool Popstars: In "Juice Box", some of the surreal visuals include the girls swimming in juice.

Pro Wrestling

• Before the PG-era, occasionally there would be pudding matches in WWE, where female wrestlers would battle each other in a larger kiddie pool filled with chocolate pudding.

Web Animation

• Eddsworld: "Zanta Claws II", the titular Zanta tries to distract the trio by giving them what their hearts desire. Which for the Cola-obsessed Edd is a pool filled with the stuff. After eagerly diving into it, we find out what happens when you try to jump into a pool filled with fizzy carbonated liquids.
• GoAnimate: In Caillou's 2nd Punishment Day, one of Caillou's punishments is being forced to swim in a pool full of mashed potatoes.
• The Strong Bad Email "Winter Pool" features Strong Bad and Homestar filling up a pool with gelatin. They end up sinking to the bottom, forcing The King of Town to suck up the whole thing in order to rescue them.

Web Original

• In this video, Mark Rober fills his pool with jello.
• What If?
  • For Free Fall, Randall assumes that there's a pit at the bottom of the cliff filled with something to safely break one's fall, like cotton candy.
  • In Lake Tea, Alex asks how strong would a tea made from dumping all the world's tea into the Great Lakes be. "Weak, bordering on homeopathic.", answers Randall. He concludes, however, that by dumping 2700 tons of tea into Frying Pan Lake when it's particularly hot, one could brew a year's worth of tea in minutes.

Webcomics

• Faux Pas: Randy the red fox is chosen to play Galacta-Fox in a sci-fi movie. He's given a few space-themed accoutrements and set in a wading pool of lime gelatin. Randy naturally starts eating the gelatin. This distresses the director, who commands, "Dirk! Make Galactafox stop eating that radioactive slime".
• Housepets!: The Milton ferrets are known for filling their Olympic-sized pool with gelatin and the jacuzzi with chocolate fondue.
• Insecticomics: Done in one strip, where Beast Wars' Megatron goes to soak in a hot oil bath. He's interrupted by Kickback, who reveals he'd repurposed the tub for cooking when he says that "You're sitting on my pierogis."
• xkcd: In one strip Michael Phelps shows two people trying to catch Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps by dumping Jello into the pool... which he promptly eats in a short time.

Western Animation

• American Dad!:
  • In one episode, Steve briefly becomes fantastically wealthy and fills a pool with jello...into which Roger shoves Steve's lookalike, causing him to asphyxiate.
  • Played for Horror in "The American Dad After School Special" when Stan unknowingly contracts anorexia. He fools the family that he's properly eating the food on this plate by disposing most of it in the family pool and keeping it covered up so nobody would see it. Francine only discovers it when she gets knocked into the pool and just barely manages to get out before she gets covered up by the automated cover.
• BoJack Horseman: One of the crazy over-the-top party things Mr. Peanutbutter employed in After the Party is filling the pool with Jell-O.
• Chowder: Chowder has an Imagine Spot of himself diving into chocolate pudding.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy:
  • In the late-series episode "All Eds Are Off", Ed drops his box of instant gravy mix in the community swimming pool, turning the water into gravy.
  • The tub in Ed's room is often filled with gravy.
  • In the episode "Knock Knock Who's Ed?", the Eds try making a pool full of lime-flavored gelatin Unfortunately, it seems that Edd has underestimated the viscosity of the gelatin, and the pool is simply a large, quivering mound of the stuff. To make matters worse, Ed drinks the pool, leaving him and his friends scamless.
• The Garfield Show: In "The Big Sneeze", Jon attempts to cure his sneezing issues by having a nice hot bath, only for Garfield to reveal that the tub is being used for his crab gumbo.
• Phineas and Ferb: In the episode "Day of the Living Gelatin", the boys make the world's largest gelatin dessert by filling a swimming pool with as many boxes of gelatin as they can get. Unfortunately, the massive gelatin gets hit with Doofenshmirtz's Turn-Everything-Evil-inator which turns it into an evil monster, to capitalize on the summer heat.
• The Simpsons: In the B-plot of "Bye-Bye Nerdie", Homer becomes a baby-proofer. During the montage of him protecting the babies of Springfield, he fills Dr. Hibbert's pool with Jell-O to prevent his infant son from falling in and drowning. When Dr. Hibbert comes outside, Homer scoops up some of the Jell-O with a champagne glass, tops it with whipped cream, and gives it to Dr. Hibbert.
• Spongebob Squarepants: In one episode, the Patty Vault in the back of Krusty Krab contains mountains of Krabby Patties which Squidward, who recently got addicted to them, swims in while eating them by the dozens.
• Tiny Toons Looniversity: In "Prank You Very Much", ACME Loo gets into a prank war with Aqua Loo. During the montage of the two schools pranking each other, Aqua Loo's students dive into their pool, only to find it filled with Jell-O, courtesy of Buster and Babs.
• Total Drama Island In the episode "Phobia Factor", the challenge is for each contestant to face their biggest fear. Courtney's is green jello, so she has to jump into a pool full of it for her trial.

Real Life

• The last emperors of China's semi-mythical Xia and Shang dynasties are alleged to have built artificial lakes filled with wine, among other forms of decadence at the taxpayers' expense. This eventually led to their individual downfalls.
• It has been noted throughout history that Queen Cleopatra VII bathed in sour donkey milk and honey with some herbs thrown in. By all accounts, the recipe tastes like a yogurt by modern standards. She used this concoction for its healthcare and beauty properties, as did Empress Poppaea Sabina, and Napoleon's sister, Pauline Bonaparte. Cleopatra was a forerunner for cosmetics that modern-day beauty products contain some sort of milk, herb, or mineral extract. Unsurprisingly, there are now facilities that offer some form of luxury bathing in milk.
• The Food and Beverage Industry certainly can boast large storage capacity of silos of various grains, vats of thousands of tonnes of liquids, distilleries' processing stills and syrup containers. Certainly have made a few people wonder how pools of say maple syrup or ice cream might be like.
• Matsuyama City in Japan's Ehime Prefecture prides itself on the availability of orange juice on tap. Inevitably this has led to literal swimming pools filled with the juice and various idols showcasing them for promotion of the area.
• One traditional home remedy to take the itch out of chicken pox is to bathe in tea or oatmeal. It wouldn't make the spots go away, but supposedly you won't want to scratch them as much.

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In the Grub Tub, flavors swirl and play.
Poolside feasts, laughter all the way.
Burgers, fries or candy, a very sunny day.
Good seasoning in it, come what there may!

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