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Ranma: Soup, Akane. How did you manage to burn soup ? You'd better hope the EPA never finds out about you... Akane: You could have at least tried it! Ranma: Tried it? It was on fire! The bowl was melting! And I didn't like the look of that portal the fumes were forming... Akane: It was only a tiny portal. And the chanting wasn't that ominous... Ranma: Damnit, Akane, good cooking isn't supposed to break the laws of reality! — from the Ranma 1/2 fanfic "The Nameless Sequel" by Mike Loader
Her cooking is not just bad, it's inedible, and sometimes actually poisonous. Or it might have bizarre magical side-effects. Or explode. Or it comes to life and either attacks or tries to run away. Animals will stare at it and back away. The character — usually female — may well love to cook, but she's never actually bothered to learn, or she's learned from aliens, or her taste buds are wired wrong, or she just doesn't look to see what she's grabbing when it comes time to throw in another ingredient. The results are often dangerous to the poor sap who has to eat it so as not to hurt her feelings. It seems especially forced when they avoid tasting their own food. Curiously, this is a very popular trope used in anime.
A Lethal Chef sometimes has one or two things she can cook well — or at least edibly — but she usually prefers to experiment. Often she is unaware — either through the kindness of friends or determined self-imposed ignorance — that her food is inedible, but occasionally the Lethal Chef can be taught to cook well - usually by a Yamato Nadeshiko type character, generally a sister, the mother or the best friend.
Particularly lively when the cook is trying to win someone Through His Stomach.
This trope is almost always used for comedy, though there are exceptions. Two dishes the Lethal Chef favors are the Fire Breathing Diner and Oven Logic, with a Gargle Blaster to wash it down.
In recent years, a milder form of this trope has emerged. Typically, the Less-Than-Lethal Chef cooks food that looks absolutely disgusting - but tastes fine.
A related trope, Cordon Bleugh Chef differs in that the chef in question is able to cook perfectly well but takes experimenting with food combinations that more often than not, really should NEVER be combined.
Contrast Supreme Chef, Feminine Women Can Cook. Can lead to It Tastes Like Feet. See also Evil Chef. Heaven help you if your Team Chef qualifies as this.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- Bruce Wayne. That's right, children, there's one skill Batman entirely failed to master. It goes from ruining the kitchen as he attempts to prepare chicken soup to, well...
- In one particularly badly-written issue, Alfred took skill levels in lethal chef. He ran out of baking soda, so he used salt instead. (Any basic cook should know that one's a rising agent, the other's a flavouring.)
Folk Lore
- An ancient Chinese story tells of a comatose general being saved from hunger by two beggars. The dish in itself was terrible (consisting of trampled spinach, rotten beancurd and unpotable water), but he didn't notice because he was semi-conscious, instead thinking it delicious. When he became emperor, he ordered said beggars to present said meal to his ministers. Afraid to lose face, they all gulped it down. The Emperor, realizing how horrible the dish was, still drank it all. The two beggars ended up rich.
Film
- Lane Meyer's mother Jenny (played by Kim Darby) from the 1985 John Cusack film Better Off Dead. In one scene Jenny is shown cooking a pot full of something emitting a suspicious mist from which tentacles wave, and in another, one of her dishes actually crawls off of Lane's plate when he pokes it with a fork. Even her "ordinary" meals are somewhat ... skewed, as evidenced by the "French-themed" dinner she makes for a French exchange student — consisting entirely of foods with the word "French" in their names, like French dressing and French toast.
"It's got raisins in it... you like raisins!"
- In the extended edition of The Two Towers, director Peter Jackson inexplicably turned Eowyn — who in reality would have learned very early on to cook over an open fire and with whatever supplies were available — into a borderline Lethal Chef who proudly presents Aragorn with a bowl of "soup" containing some limp boiled leaves, one gelatinous dumpling, and a puddle of liquid shimmering with grease. (To be fair, she could have been nervous due to the presence of Aragorn. Apparently Viggo Mortensen can do that.)
- I interpreted it as a "sorry, but this is all we have right now."
- She was too proud of the culinary terror she'd created for that.
- There's really not much reason to assume that Eowyn would have learned to cook, even less to cook over an open fire. As the niece of a king that's hardly a work she has to learn, no more than anyone would have expected an early medieval princes to know her way around a kitchen. (Or these days Paris Hilton.) Neither did anyone expect her to fight or do patrols like her brother, so no reason for outdoor skills.
- Jack Black's character Nacho from Nacho Libre is like this initially. Once he makes enough money (through his wrestling) to purchase better ingredients, he's capable of making dishes that at least look appetizing.
- In Ratatouille, Linguini, before meeting Remy, makes a soup so bad that when he tastes it he pukes and Remy nearly does when he sniffs it.
- In the film version of Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget thinks string soup is made by boiling string. The result is blue.
- In the Blue Collar Comedy Tour movie, comedian Ron White tells a joke about how his wife was such a bad cook that he tried to feed it to his dog and it started licking its butt. His wife asks "What's he doing?" and he goes "It looks like he's trying to get the taste out of his mouth!"
- Isabelle in The Dreamers cooks for narrator Matthew and her brother Theo. The food is so badly burned that they can't tell the souffle from the ratatouille, and tastes so bad that Matthew can't swallow it. Theo happily goes downstairs and raids the neighbors' garbage for an alternative meal.
- Bullshot. Rosemary Fenton's rock-hard scones are an ongoing joke. When the hero nearly breaks a tooth on one and tries to covertly dispose of the scone, he finds every hiding place in the house already stuffed with scones disgarded by previous guests.
- Humphrey of Cannibal The Musical:
Miller: [seeing their dinner] You son of a bitch, Humphrey.
Humphrey: Come on, you haven't even tried it.
Miller: [Miller takes a mouthful] You son of a bitch, Humphrey.
Literature
- In Artemis Fowl for a example, the lead attempts to make a sandwich that is described as an explosion on a plate.
- An entire race of literally Lethal Chefs is found in the Discworld series, in the form of dwarf bread. Used less as a food and more as a weapon, its main ingredient is apparently gravel. Its most useful purpose when used as rations is to make everything else look edible. Note that this is intentional on their part, and they can cook other dishes that are perfectly edible to any race (at least, if you don't mind rat).
- Of course, the trope is also subverted by the Vimes household; Lady Sybil is a bad cook, but Sam has spent so much time eating low-quality food on the streets of Ankh-Morpork that he actually enjoys it.
- Let's not forget Archchancellor Ridcully, who swears by (or, swears at) Wow-Wow sauce, a dangerous and highly unstable condiment that includes sulfur and saltpeter, and an equally potent alcoholic drink called scumble. Wow-Wow sauce might have been a contributing factor in the explosive death of his uncle, who invented the stuff.
- Albert counts too, but its not so important when you're the cook in Death's household. He firmly believes in grease, fat and black gritty bits. His porridge eats spoons.
- And we can't forget the borderline inedible pies of CMOT Dibbler.
- "Could I interest you in some yoghurt? Onna stick?"
- ...as well as: Disembowel-Meself-Honourably Dibhala's funny-colored antique eggs, Al-Jiblah's highly suspicious cous-cous, the terrible yak-butter tea made by May-I-Never-Achieve Enlightenment Dibhlang and the unmentionable blubber of May-I-Be-Kicked-Into-My-Own-Ice-Hole Dibooki (main ingredient: exploded whale), the green beer of May-I-Swallow-My-Own-Blowdart Dlang-Dlang and the meat pie floater in pea soup with tomato sauce (regional speciality of the last continent).
- Bungling Inventor Bergholt Stutly "Bloody Stupid" Johnson took up cooking on a few points in his life. His attempt to make a pie took out a significant portion of Ankh-Morpork.
- Mrs Samuel Whiskers from Beatrix Potter's "Tale Of Samuel Whiskers And The Roly Poly Pudding".
- The outdoor humorist Patrick McManus has written extensively about growing up in a household headed by his hard, fearless, super-competent mother, commenting that the only thing she couldn't bend to her will was food. He learned to "scrape off the burnt parts".
- He's also written about the dangers of hunting-camp cooking. Most important tip: avoid the green hash.
- There is an entire rhyming children's book about this very subject called The Great School Lunch Rebellion.
- Hagrid's poor attempts at cooking are the butt of many jokes in Harry Potter
- Jay Leno's childrens book If Roast Beef Could Fly has Jay's father, who attempts to do a bbq every year but fails miserably in someway- he even says that his father throws the roast when it's done.
- A strange subversion in Lambs To The Slaughter: A woman beats her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb then cooks it and serves it to the police who are investigating.
- At least one of Mercedes Lackey's SERRAted Edge books features a Sidhe warrior attempting to cook breakfast. Mind, the Sidhe ordinarily magic their food out of thin air... The sequence includes such gems as breaking the number of eggs required by the recipe and then "carefully picking out most of the shells" and figuring that hey, tomato paste, Tobasco... Both red sauces, a 1-1 substitution should be perfectly cromulent.
- Interestingly enough this disaster actually becomes a major plot point instead of just a random funny. He gives up after recognizing his failure and conjures the breakfast- but doesn't do it sneakily enough, blowing his human cover identiity.
- The searat captain Slipp in ''The Bellmaker'' claims to be a cook rather than a pirate when trying to get into the Abbey. Of course he's told to prove it. His patented "skilly an' duff" contains a wide range of vegetation of dubious non-toxicity and the smell is compared to that of a compost heap, thus blowing his cover.
- Molly Carpenter from the Dresden Files is a borderline lethal chef. According to Harry she one time burned a boiled egg, and refers to her kitchen attempts as "committing dinner." At least she can make coffee.
- While we never actually got to read about Shae's cooking in A Song of Ice and Fire , she did mention that "every man who tasted her cooking told [her] what a good whore [she is]."
Live Action TV
- The Hong Kong game show Beautiful Cooking is built completely on this trope...and Bishoujo
- My Parents Are Aliens. Virtually everything cooked by Sophie Johnson uses rather... nonstandard ingredients. Like sausage cake, or chicken nuggets — complete with bones, feathers and "fresh" chemical additives.
- Neelix from Star Trek Voyager. While his meals are never actually lethal, they are often deeply disgusting to the human palate. It's only when he tries to show off his "skills" do the wheels come off. When he sticks to the basics (or recipes), things turn out nice.
- Likewise, Captain Janeway manages to ruin food that comes from the replicator!
- In one episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, Riker invites a few of the other officers over to show off his experimental cooking (some sort of alien omlette). Most of them are clearly attempting to conceal their distaste, while Worf eagerly scarfs up his portion. In a later episode, Riker is shown apparently enjoying Klingon dishes.
- Quark from Star Trek Deep Space Nine was apparently a Lethal Chef, necessitating certain defensive measures.
Quark: "This is my disruptor pistol. The one I used to carry in the old days, when I was serving on that Ferengi freighter."
Odo: "I thought you were the ship's cook."
Quark: "That's right, and every member of that crew thought he was a food critic."
- The first series of the Brit Com The Vicar Of Dibley featured Letitia Cropley, known as "The Queen of Cordon Bleugh" and "The Dibley Poisoner". Her recipes included Marmite cake, peanut butter and anchovy sandwiches, and tripe salad. She also bred her own snails, apparently for Bread and Butter Pudding Surprise.
- Rimmer in Red Dwarf only attempted to cook once, but it was enough for both his living crewmates to require stomach-pumps.
Lister: Rimmer, real dumplings, proper dumplings, when they're properly cooked to perfection, real, proper dumplings should not bounce!
- Baldrick in Blackadder. Naturally, he is also the only chef from series 3 onwards.
- In Blackadder Goes Forth, he does at least have the excuse of limited resources.
- Lisa Douglas from Green Acres. Her infamous "hotscakes" have the consistency of bricks.
- Mr. Douglas was terrified when his neighbor, Mr. Ziffel, asks lisa for a shopping bag full of her pancakes. Mr. Douglas, very worried, asks him if he's going to eat them. Mr. Douglas calms down when he finds out Mr. Ziffel only wants them to reshingle the roof of his barn.
- In an episode of Friends, Rachel tries to prepare a traditional English trifle, but the pages of the recipe book get stuck together and she ends up making half a Shepherd's Pie: a trifle containing jam, custard, ladyfingers, and beef sautéed with peas and onions. Ross says that "it tastes like feet", but that doesn't stop Joey: "Custard, good. Jam, good. Meat, good!"
- In another, Monica reviews a restaurant and calls the food inedible. "None of my friends could eat it, and one of them eats books!" (Joey, of course.)
- The point of the British Reality Show Kitchen Criminals is to get horrendous cooks around England and have world class chefs teach them how to cook fine cuisine for a food critic. Some of the contestants when they first started tried to serve shrimp raw or fry an apple core.
- A running gag in My Family is that Susan, the mother of the titular family, is the worst cook in the world.
- Similarly with Ria in Butterflies.
- One My Family Christmas epsode featured not only chocolate raisin turkey with caramel (due to pages of the cookbook being stuck together) but also this exchange.
Ben: Before that was the year of the turkey.
Susan: OK, so it needed to be in for a bit longer.
Ben: Susan, it was still alive.
- Susan from Desperate Housewives, being The Ditz, ruins every dish she cooks.
- Lucy from I Love Lucy. Wah!
- As bad as Lucy is, she's demonstrably better than both Ricky and Fred, as shown in the episode where the men undertake the women's typical responsibility and vice versa. Fred ends up flooding the whole apartment with rice when he assumes the proper portion is one pound per person.
- A skit on All That is called The Filthy Chef which is a parody of The Naked Chef.
- One word: Joxer. In one episode, Xena and Gabrielle are incapacitated (by skin fungus and head lice) and it falls to Joxer to defeat the entire invading army - by cooking for them. He's actually successful. Too bad our heroines discover his "skill" by first falling victim to it themselves...
- A recurring gag on The Beverly Hillbillies concerned how awful Ellie Mae's cooking was. Even Jethro had trouble eating it.
- The Japanese Iron Chef had a turkey battle. Offerings included turkey sashimi.
- Far more memorable: tuna sorbet. For the rest of the series, whenever a chef headed for the ice cream maker, the commentators would recall it.
- Subverted with some crab ice cream, which the judges enjoyed. It was described as something along the lines of "sweet, with a hint of crab, not at all fishy, and surprisingly good!"
- Also subverted with some beer ice cream in the US edition. The beer wasn't the surprising part, it was the caramelized bacon on top of the ice cream that threw people off. And yet the judges loved it.
- Cod soft roe ice cream. Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai was chastised by the entire tasting panel for it. He later proved he didn't learn his lesson by making trout ice cream on one of the US edition pilots.
- Jill Taylor on Home Improvement, though to be fair half of this is via Informed Inability (Tim and other people's comments); she's shown to be at least decent more than once.
- An interesting subversion is Wilson. He's a good cook, but his meals are of the Foreign Queasine variety (eel pie and tadpole soup, anyone?).
- Becky on Full House has this reputation, one episode even has a B-plot with her and Michelle learning to cook together.
- Thelma from Amen was a notoriously bad cook. In one episode following her wedding to the Reverend, she burned down their apartment while cooking chicken with the gang locked inside. Everyone panicked except for Rolly, who knew "Thelma's cooking would kill us all one day" and read the newspaper as smoke filled the room and the others made frantic calls to 911.
- Anil from The Basil Brush Show. There are so many examples that could be listed.
- Barth from You Cant Do That On Television was known to blow his nose in the burger buns.
- Airi from Kamen Rider Den-O can brew a mean cup of coffee, but she also makes health foods for her brother Ryotaro that are...less than pleasant. Think "sesame seed milkshake". One episode actually has the two in a spat because Ryotaro called the cops to dispose of one of Airi's stews as a bio-hazard.
- Naomi, the waitress on the DenLiner has the opposite problem. She can prepare tasty foods like rice and pudding, but her coffee is a powdery, whipped cream-topped disaster that is only enjoyed by the Imagin.
- Maddie Magellan from Jonathan Creek Perhaps not truly lethal, but upon opening her oven and discovering the contents to be in flames, she declared that it needed "Two more minutes" and closed the oven door again.
- Manny is, at least according to Bernard on Black Books: "You call this a tower of soup? Where are the minarets? The turrets?"
Newspaper Comics
- The comic strip Foxtrot treats us to both an invocation and partial-lampshading, with matriarch Andrea Fox and daughter Paige. Andy is actually a good cook, though she has a tendency to try and prepare "healthy" foods that border on the poisonous(such as tofu...anything, really). Paige, on the other hand, has been shown to be able to cause boiling pasta to burst into flames. Pasta that is submerged in water.
Tabletop Games
- This troper's RPG game included a character who could literally cause Salads to self-immolate, that's how bad he cooks.
Theater
- In Sweeney Todd, we first meet Mrs. Lovett while she's telling Sweeney (and us) how awful her meat pies are ("The Worst Pies In London"). Interesting how nobody seems to notice the connection between the barber moving in upstairs and how good her pies suddenly get...
- More interesting to this troper is the question of why her cooking skills miraculously improve as soon as she has a ready supply of meat. Are we supposed to assume that the mere lack of filling is enough to turn a delicious pie into the worst pie in London? I mean, empty pie crusts aren't exactly the most exciting food, but they're not that bad.
- This page has examples of people ruining toast. Trust me, anything is possible.
- I think it's mostly that Sweeney Todd just likes her human meat pies that much, not that they suddenly get that good.
- Well, she did imply that she was getting dead animals off the street for her filling before, so maybe at least now the meat's fresh.
- What she implied was that Mrs. Mooney's pie shop was using cat meat, and that she'd never think of doing that...because the cats are too fast for her. And it's not necessarily that her cooking was inherently bad, per se, but rather she likely didn't care enough to put forth some skill and make the pies palatable, since the ingredients were terrible to begin with.
- So the human meat was just a Magic Feather?
- This Troper recalls a case in his country when a man was knows in the entire city for his delicious meat pies. Eventually, the police found out that he used dead hobos as a meat source. Other similar cases happened around the world, which makes one think that human meat must taste really good.
- This troper heard it tastes like slightly-gamey pork.
- Cannibal Issei Sagawa (who is free right now) seems to think it tastes like tuna
- Journalist Willam Seabrook claimed, from personal experience, that it was flavorless meat quite similar to veal.
- The entire plot of Nunsense is set into motion in the aftermath of Sister Julia, Child of God, having killed all but five of the Little Sisters of Hoboken with a tainted batch of vichyssoise soup.
Video Games
- Super Robot Wars's Kusuha Mizuha and her energy Drinks, best described elsewhere. The real example occurs in the form of Leona Garstein, whose food tastes awful and has a habit of knocking people out, which is something she admits happens. In one scene, she cooks for her boyfriend, and as she cooks she pouts about how it's just going to knock him out again. However, this is apparently related to her taste in food; when given the advice to cook something she thinks would be awful, the others think it's delicious while she hates it. The first time Leona's boyfriend tried her cooking, he needed something to wash it down. Unfortunately for him, Kusuha was the only person nearby.
- This is also subverted outside the Original Generation games. The classic timeline has a Lethal Chef in form of Tytti Noorbuck, one of the heralds of the Elemental Lords. The problem lies within her sense of taste, since she loves sweet foods, she'll make anything she cooks to become overly sweet... so sweet you could get your stomach swollen by eating it. In addition, cooking is her hobby (though in her defense, she's trying to improve)
- A recurring theme in the Tales Series:
- Raine Sage from Tales of Symphonia is such a bad cook that at one point she evidently manages to make an angelic being nauseated. This is reflected by how her ability to cook (a feature that restores health and various other things) starts at horrible and is maxed out at borderline decent, with her title being given as "Passable Chef?". Considering she and her much younger brother lost their parents at an early age, it's often wondered how they survived until Genis was old enough to cook...
- A skit in Dawn of the New World explains that it mostly comes from her obsessive tendency towards bizarrely expirementive food. For instance she once tried to get Marta and Emil to eat a rice-stuffed lemon skin. This was also touched on in a skit in the original game, too: "Spicy cake would be a breakthrough!" Marta from the same game is also an example, but eventually gets better—it turns out she never bothered to taste her food.
- It should be noted out that, according to the available cooking stats, Sheena is the only female playable character in the Symphonia games to be good at cooking. Emil even points this out in a skit.
- Tales Of The Abyss had Princess Natalia L.K Landvaldear, who had no speck of talent in cooking and mixed healing spells into burnt dishes in an attempt to reverse the burning; even the resident cook gave up teaching her. Even her supposed fiancé Asch cooks better than her. Luke is a pretty poor cook as well.
- This troper would like to point out that while Luke was a bad cook, he was actually the "best" person to cook for the party gameplay-wise, considering Abyss had that little unmentioned nuance where your character would actually LOSE HP and Overlimit for eating food they disliked, but where the cook avoids such a penalty. Since Luke is the pickiest eater of the group (his dislikes including every bit of seafood in the game), training him for cooking is the best choice.
- Another Lethal Chef in the series is Arche of Tales Of Phantasia.
- Flynn from Tales Of Vesperia was such a horrible cook that Yuri had to learn to cook for himself. Yuri just never had the heart to tell Flynn how bad he was.
- Jean Armstrong of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations has a tendency to make even basic-looking dishes taste terrible. He calls a simple lobster meal the "Twen-T" because it costs $20 to
eat order.
- Viola Cadaverini's baked goods and coffee probably aren't good for you either, considering how she laughs maliciously whenever she offers some to the main characters.
- According to her supports, Lalam the Dancer from Fire Emblem 6.
- Tanith of Fire Emblem 9 admits to Oscar that she is a Lethal Chef, although it sounds like she causes injuries to those nearby as she cooks.
- While never actually shown baking, GLaDOS from Portal lists a cake recipe near the end of the game that includes such ingredients as solid waste, dirt, volatile organic compounds, rhubarb "on fire", needle guns, and preservatives intended to "deodorize and preserve putrid tissue."
- .."shaped like fish."
- Fish shaped ethyl benzene, and enough rhubarb to kill someone, if she used the wrong part of it.
- It's probably a lie.
- This also appeared in Jade Empire, where the main character meets a Lethal Chef named Chai Jin. If you can eat three courses without passing out, each of which actually damages one of your precious health bars, he will reward you... or offer you the chance to go even further, with a truly vile dish he won't even try himself.
- It also seems to show up in Final Fantasy XII. One of the chop sidequests in Archades involves matching up a dangerously experimental chef with a bored philosopher of cuisine.
- The direct sequel Revenant Wings also reveals that Penelo's cooking is to be feared, though she genuinely tries to get better. Vaan seems to be the only person that likes it, though it's not easy to tell if its because he likes the food or just because he likes Penelo. Several sidequests revolve around getting rare ingredients in an attempt to help Penelo make edible dishes. By the time you complete them all she's actually improved to the point that unbiased parties think she's pretty good.
- One of the Persona 3 Social Links involves Fuuka "Tank, I need an exit" Yamagishi, who recruits the main character to taste test her food. Just being able to volunteer requires maximum courage — her cooking is foul enough to chase off nearby animals.
- The level of Courage required for this Social Link is literally titled "Bad Ass". That's how bad her cooking is. On the other hand, as you hang out with her, her cooking gradually improves, and it doesn't take long before she serves up something that is not only edible, but good.
- All three main girls of Persona 4 have very questionable cooking abilities, ranging from Rise (way too spicy), Yukiko (who can make an omelet taste "boneless") and Chie (just plain awful). When the latter two combine their powers, the result is dubbed Mystery Food X and manage to take out both the main male leads in one spoonful.
- To give an idea, Rise's cooking goes over better than the other two's, despite her putting fois gras (i.e., fattened duck liver) in an omelette.
- You're probably wondering about the "boneless" comment. During one event during the game, Yukiko makes an omelet that, through a process that can only be described as Alchemical, has no taste at all.
- In their defense, when Naoto joins in, although they do take a bunch of redos, they can actually make something good.
- Euphemia's cooking in Soul Nomad And The World Eaters is so bad that there is a body count associated with it. It is described as the rest of the cast as nothing short of biological warfare — Which turns into a Funny Aneurysm Moment once you've played the game through once and learned that Raksha was using her to develop a concentrated form of Scarlet Iago that was near-instantly fatal.
- The cooking contest in Breath of Fire 2. Not only do you have to get the ingredients (cockroaches, worms and flies) yourself, in the end you are forced to eat it all. Although I suppose this also has to do with the chef in question being a frog.
- According to one still shown during the credits of Professor Layton And The Curious Village, Flora may be this.
- The World Ends With You contains a subversion with the owner of Ramen Don, Ken Doi. At one point you see his restaurant is floundering due to the presence of a new rival, Shadow Ramen. Neku assumes it's because Ken's food isn't as good - and given he offers you a meal with a visible whole fish, one can understand why he thinks that. However, Ken is actually a brilliant chef; once Neku convinces him to cook something a little less unpleasant-looking, his business booms once again.
- Karen from the Mineral Town saga of Harvest Moon is also one of those, which doesn't stop her from entering the cooking contest every year.
- Maya, the waitress from Tree of Tranquility knows fine cuisine when she smells it (and really digs guys who can cook), but she's very bad at making it herself.
- In Metal Gear Solid 2. According to Raiden, Rosemary is one of these, giving a sigh of relief when he convinced her to book a reservation to a restaurant instead of cooking on their special day, visibly cringing in the CODEC screens when she brings the subject up. And even confides to Snake that rations taste better than her food!
- In a call back to this, in Metal Gear Solid 4 if you call someone at the right time they confide that Rose's cooking is still horrible. And she exclaims that she enjoys the terrible American Army Rations.
- In Evolution Worlds Gre Nade can use his food as a special attack. It damages the enemies and chops their stats.
- Tia, Maxim's childhood friend from Lufia 2.
- While she can make rice just fine, anything else Minori from Brass Restoration tries to cook falls squarely in the lethal category.
- El Fuerte from Street Fighter IV, as is proven when he mixes chanko stew and borscht to serve to E. Honda and Zangief after the tournament, with unpleasant results.
- Luca Trulyworth of Ar Tonelico II has literal abominations for her cooking, including a dish that knocks out two residents of her own Cosmosphere, two food-based Song Magics (one consisting of flinging food at the enemy, the other a food bomb), and hell, even what she does at Skycat's place is an abomination, e.g. the horrendous "Trulyworthit Soup" which still has fish bones and seaweed sticking out of it, to the okay "Baked Crackercake," which was meant to be a rollcake but somehow turned into a rice cracker. Jacquli may also count, but at least hers is meant to damage (such as the Bunny Roll, which happens to be a bomb that explodes once the bunny on top of it reaches the center).
- Aeon the chef in Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia is initially presented as this (his longest engagement was for three weeks ), but in the end he makes up for a subversion, since he CAN cook good meals (his miniquests unlock two of the best healing items in the game), he's just too much of a ditz to actually care for his costumers or the taste of his food. He still acknowledges his faults and promises to become a better chef, though.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Futurama: Bender, being a robot, has no sense of taste and a limited knowledge of organic biology. As a result, he has trouble understanding why humans dislike food that only contains 90% of a lethal dose of table salt. He even ended up accidentally killing his Obi-Wan with a dish that made his stomach implode. One episode also featured aliens called Cygnoids, whose bizarre physiology and foreign culture led to many problems, including "wine" made from crushed rats.
Leela: "Oh, God! It's horrible."
Amy: "Bender, is this salt water?"
Bender: "It's salt with water in it, if that's what you mean."
Fry: "My vision's fading... I think I'm gonna die."
Bender: "There was nothing wrong with that food. The salt level was only ninety percent of a lethal dose."
Zoidberg: "Uh-oh. I shouldn't have had seconds."
- To be fair, right before his digestive tract went blooey, his Obi-Wan declared it "...acceptable."
- Fireman Elvis from Fireman Sam is a very fine example of this as the food would often get burned. This troper wonder what the heck Sam was thinking when he got him to be in charge of the BBQ.
- Granma Stuffems from Codename Kids Next Door is a very extreme example of this — the food is literally alive and acts as her helpers. And also that giant sandwich creature Slamwitch is one meal that could probably make a meal out of you.
- Lizzie, #1's girlfriend, could also qualify. When "Nigie" is sick, she makes him soup that he later uses as an explosive weapon. When he goes on a retreat in Jamaica, she follows with a pie she baked for him. One bite of the pie knocks the pilot unconscious. And then the replacement pilot.
- Invader Zim often jokes about the lethality of cafeteria food at The Skool, including missing livers if the kids are lucky.
- GIR is a more straitlaced example. One sentence: "These got peanuts and soap in 'em!".
- "Grammy" from Disney's Gummi Bears.
- Miss Mooshk from "Wayside".
- Grandpa Max from Ben10. While his cooking may not strictly be lethal, it's generally... rather strange and somewhat unappetizing. This is a Running Gag for the series. At one point, Max pulls a grubworm out from under a log at Yellowstone and eats it, much to the disgust of his grandchildren.
- Word Of God says that his cooking and appetite is a result of his extensive and extraordinary travels on Earth and outer space.
- X Men Evolution's Kitty Pryde is an example of this early on, (Her muffins either bounce off the walls or leave dents in the floor. Poor Kurt) but gets better as the series progresses. (Unless this is a contributor's mind going drawing even closer to insanity.)
- Jon Arbuckle, in Garfield And Friends, is frequently portrayed as a Lethal Chef; his "new recipes" are invariably end up as something that looks like it belongs in a low budget horror movie, although he is also usually capable of making normal food when he's not trying to get creative.
- On the other hand, sometimes he even fails at that. In one episode, Jon attempts to cook breakfast. With the Rule Of Three fully in effect, the first two food items he makes, which require actual contact with flame, catch fire. Jon then gives up and decides to have some cereal. When he pours milk on his cereal, it promptly catches fire.
- Wait... well, then where does Garfield get his lasagna?
- Well, that other troper did say "sometimes". I would imagine he gets plenty of practice on that particular dish.
- Inn The Movie (well, the second one) Garfield can make it himself, with a little help.
- In the first movie and at least two comics, it's frozen lasagna (straight out of the package).
- Squidward in Sponge Bob Square Pants seem to be something of a gourmet, and in at least one episode is seen eating an elaborate dish he prepared himself. When asked to sub for Spongebob at the Krusty Krab, however, all he manages to do is burn everything to a crisp.
- Likewise, one suspects the main reason Plankton is always trying to steal the Krabby Patty formula is because his own cooking is highly unappetizing. After all, how good can food from a place called the Chum Bucket be?
- Mr. Krabs was also shown making a terrible dinner once, which got alive and tried to eat him and some customers ("Squilliam Returns"). In the same episode we learn that he only cleaned the bathrooms on the S.S. Gourmet - but that he was the head chef on the S.S Diarrhea.
- Exploiting Spongebob being a celebrity cook ("The Krusty Sponge"), Mr. Krabs uses mouldy, yellowed patties for original "Spongebob"-patties, sold for a premium price - with disastrous side effects on the customers.
- Both of the girls on the Teen Titans are lethal chefs, but whereas Starfire might be a good cook by Tamaranean standards, Raven is just plain terrible. It does not cheer her up at all when the alien on the team is the only one who enjoys her pancakes.
- The boys don't fare much better. Beast Boy is a strict vegetarian whose dishes are 90% tofu, while Cyborg is an avid carnivore. Their fridge has a strange, blue, living substance in it (that apparently tastes quite nice).
- Heffer Wolf on Rockos Modern Life is a variation: while the meal he cooks for himself and Rocko in one episode tastes decent enough, it looks disgusting, is made from thoroughly unappetizing ingredients, and actually tries to crawl away from his plate at one point.
- Lunch Lady Doris from The Simpsons routinely serves truly abominable food to the students at Springfield Elementary. It's hard to tell whether she's such an awful cook because of apathy, malice, lack of talent, lack of access to edible ingredients ("more testicles means more iron!"), or an evil combination of them all.
- "Todays special is free-fried dogpoop."
- "There's very little meat in these gym mats."
- Another episode of The Simpsons used the Jon Arbuckle formula above when Homer was attempting to cook breakfast for Mr. Burns.
- Once, Marge flashbacked to the last time Homer tried to cook for the family. He served fish that weren't quite dead. Don't get me started on the lobster.
- She can't be that great herself: "Eight spices? Some of those have to be doubles! 'Oregano'?"
- In the one time that Chowder decided to make a dish without the assistance of master chef Mung Daal, he accidentally dumped a whole bottle of poison in it, and then unknowingly tried to sell it on the streets. It even managed to burp out the warning "You... will... die!" when Mung was almost forced to taste-test it.
- Dave The Barbarian had an episode where Dave lived out his dream of running a bistro, the term "Lethal Chef" got taken to a new level when he used a cursed cookbook called "The Cuisinum Mysterium Cookbook" to help him — the recipes are cursed (the food comes alive and takes on a life of its own) and later on while making "Armageddon Souflé" the souflé comes to life and becomes a rampaging monster dessert.
- Arthur's grandmother probably wouldn't be such a bad cook if she weren't distracted by the other things she tries to do at the same time. (Buster Baxter gobbles her cookies right down, though.)
- His father, that grandmother's son, learned to cook early on, perhaps because of this. Of course, he's a good chef, but when he experiments, "Just try to guess / what's on your plate".
- Timmy's mother from Fairly Odd Parents. Don't worry, I'm sure she saved you some leftover cabbage casserole or some broccoli in gelatin brand gelatin.
- To elaborate on the subject, this woman's cooking is so bad, that it actually defies the laws of physics and collapses, becoming pink. In a black and white world.
- Parker in Mr Meaty , this has got to be the reason why the food there is always so terrible.
- In the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, the Turtles would put ridiculous combinations of things on their pizzas, such as "peanut butter and clams", much to April O'Neal's dismay. The Turtles themselves liked it, though.
- Catscratch has Gordon (being Scottish and all) but Waffle managed to do worse in the episode where he was asked to make the soup and used the wrong book- instead of using the recipe book he used the book of the dead and zombies rose from their graves because of this.
- Ricky Sprocket has Ricky's mom.
- A slight twist was done in The Adventures Of Teddy Ruxpin. Everybody hated Grubby the Octopede's food, but that was because he always used tree root as a main ingredient: A favored taste for Octopede's but disliked by everybody else.
- A running gag in The Weekenders is Tino's mother "experimenting" with healthy foods...with disastrous results. Tino often tries to avoid getting a parental lecture by commenting on the food instead with comments questioning the ingredients and sometimes even implying that the food is alive.
- One episode of Recess has Gretchen talking about Tomato Surprise (no relation). She later uses the Tomato Surprise to destroy the hinges and the lock on a door so she and the rest of the gang can free TJ.
Gretchen: The tomato surprise isn't without it's useful properties.
TJ: You mean this stuff is safe to eat?
Gretchen: No. I mean if you let it age, it can burn a hole through a concrete floor.
Vince: (Inserts spoon into Tomato Surprise and it dissolves) It doesn't have too far to go.
- Subverted in the animated version of The Tick - The Breadmaster's baked goods (or as Tick puts it, "Baked Bads!") are intended to be dangerous (bread bombs that demolish buildings by expanding to enormous size, gingerbread men that rob banks,) although when Tick samples the first bread bomb, he comments, "This is actually quite good!"
- In The Replacements, about the only thing that omnicompetent superspy Agent K can't do is cook; in one episode her husband builds an indestructible house for the family's pet mule out of K's breakfast bars.
- A Mickey Mouse Works short, Mickey Tries to Cook has Mickey Mouse trying to cook something other than sandwiches, and ending up causing an explosion when he doesn't realize his fan is flipping the pages of his cook book when he isn't looking.
Book: Cut Carrots
Mickey cuts some carrots
Book now reads "Whole Carrots"
Mickey takes the cut carrots and glues them back together.
- While not a lethal chef per se, Johnny Test's father can only cook meatloaf and it's next to indigestible.
- In GI Joe, Heavy Duty takes this to another level; He likes to use grenades to barbecue. This is an intentional contrast to his cousin, world class chef and gourmet Roadblock.
- Pleakley in Lilo And Stitch The Series. He's pleased by the fact that dog food makes its own gravy.
Real Life
- BUTLINS. 'nuff said.
- It's worth mentioning incorrectly prepared Fugu fish, which is literally lethal.
- Many tropers might fit into this. Some of them to the point that only the experimental food is edible.
- Deliberately Lethal Cookery has apparently become a pastime on several video sites, especially in Japan. Many chefs apparently have a code of ethics where they have to finish the food... Several examples follow.
- Every so often somebody gets overly-fond of nutmeg, or misreads the recipe. In one case, it actually was a lethal recipe-author who had missed that they'd used the wrong unit, and somebody actually followed the recipe exactly and ate it, with friends, and a subsequent trip to the hospital. The thing that amazed this troper's mother, who has been a professional cook, is that anybody could manage to eat food with that much nutmeg.
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