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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.
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.
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.
Contrast Feminine Women Can Cook. Can lead to It Tastes Like Feet.
Examples
Anime and Manga
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.
- 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.)
- It's not inexplicable at all — Eowyn's an Action Girl, and as such must be bad at anything "feminine". Remember, this is Hollywood.
- And she's a member of Rohan's royal house; maybe that normally gets you out of cooking duty.
- 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.
- Actually IIRC, it was string used to tie asparagus(?) together for boiling. And it ended up very, very 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.
Literature
- 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 CMOTDibbler.
- "Could I interest you in some yoghurt? Onna stick?"
- 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.
Live Action TV
- 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!
- 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!"
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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 humam meat must taste really good.
- This troper heard it tastes like slightly-gamey pork.
- 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 and her energy drinks. However, she's a variation in that the drinks taste terrible but work well. Another variant occurs in the form of Leona, 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...
- 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 LOOSE HP and Overlimit for eating food they disliked, but 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.
- 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.
- 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. After one such quest, where Filo is the one who gets the ingredient, she valiantly offers to suffer through the dish herself.
- 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.
- One character in Soul Nomad And The World Eaters is such a bad cook that there is a body count associated with it.
- 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 Harvest Moon is also one of those which doesn't stop her from entering the cooking contest every year
- 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 Evolution Worlds Gre Nade can use his food as a special attack. It damages the enemies and chops their stats.
Webcomics
- College Roomies From Hell!!!'s Marsha is a webcomic lethal chef, causing stomachs to be pumped and a single bite from one of her cakes sending someone to the hospital.
- In Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, Mab's brownies are repeatedly mentioned to be "the stuff of nightmares" and haunt the dreams of Jyrras even years after trying them. She also has the apparent ability to make ovens explode just by trying to use them, but that might be an usual reaction between Faes and technology, according to some filler strips...
- Bruno had the title character staying in an isolated house with the writer Stanley, who managed to ruin everything he cooked for her. Subverted at the end of the storyline, where he reveals that he's an excellent cook; he initially made inedible food because he wanted to be left alone, and kept doing it because Bruno's reaction was so hilarious.
- Pat from Achewood may not be a completely lethal chef, but the vegan meals he serves to the other characters aren't all that tasty, either. In one strip, he offers them some of his homemade chocolate-covered cherries — which turn out to be stewed prunes covered in carob. For this injustice, Todd shanks him in the leg with a toothpick.
- Crystal from Sluggy Freelance is apparently a lethal bartender. Her infamous "Survivor Nights" (in which her patrons vote off her various alcoholic concoctions from the menu), she's created drinks such as Prince Charles (tastes like ear) and Cheeseburger Margarita (exactly what it sounds like).
- Ace from Too Much Information is in all other ways TheAce, but he likes hot food. Really hot food. As in, puts hot sauce on his pancakes. His housemates won't let him share in the cooking duties. Anything he fixes is bright red from all the hot sauce.
- Helix, in this Freefall strip.
- Actually, Sam diet is extremely wide, as he show it in the "The Golden Trough",restaurant "the finest in bad cuisine". Outstanding a cockroach.
- Faye from Questionable Content inverts this trope in that she seems to more lethal to herself in at least two cases; she burned her building down making toast, and nearly killed herself with spaghetti.
- And at Coffee Of Doom, she regularly posts specials like and "Cat-Hair Latte`" and "Cup O' Bees" (although no one actually orders them.)
- Several characters in Girl Genius seem to fit this trope. Moloch's cooking is so bad that a fellow inmate claims that she would rather eat his engines - he only has the job because he's the only person who can stand being in the evil sentient kitchen built for a literal Lethal Chef. Theo mixes Gilgamesh a drink that actually causes him to stop breathing for a time (though this might have more to do with Theo preferring his liquor to be 200 proof or higher, based on dialogue). Gil himself apparently has made a drink out of toothpaste and hedgehogs (that's actually quite good). Oddly enough, Agatha seems to be a lethally good cook - at one point she makes a cup of coffee so "perfect" that it causes the drinker to go temporarily insane.
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."
- 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 straight-laced 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.
- X Men Evolution's Kitty Pryde is an example of this early on, 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.
- Squidward in Sponge Bob Square Pants seem to be something of a gourmand, 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?
- Even Mr. Krabs was also shown making a terrible dinner once, which got alive and tried to eat him and some customers.
- This was due to him using rancid food to save a quick buck. One would hope he'd be okay when using fresh ingredients.
- He cleaned the bathrooms on the S.S. Gourmet- he was the head chef on the S.S Diarrhea.
- Starfire on the Teen Titans cartoon is probably a very good cook — by Tamaranean standards. Unfortunately, she lives and works with a bunch of Earthlings, and her primarily fungus-based dishes (which typically resemble month-old Jello molds and have flavors ranging from "a cross between sushi and ice cream" to "cream of toenails") tend to disgust or frighten off her teammates.
- Raven, however, is simply a terrible cook — as evinced by her charred, inedible attempts at pancakes in one episode.
- Starfire is actually shown enjoying food prepared by Raven, which the rest of the team finds positively repulsive. For some reason, Starfire's opinion fails to cheer Raven up...
- The "cream of toenail" was supposed to taste nasty, though. It was Tamaranian Unhappy Pudding or something that she made because it was the episode where Robin and Cyborg had a fight and Cyborg left, and the bad taste was supposed to cleanse the sadness from them, or some nonsense like that.
- In Real Life, one can actually get "a cross between sushi and ice cream" in Japan, where (among other things), deer sashimi ice cream (containing 100% real raw deer meat) is available from the local supermarket. Go nuts, guys.
- 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.
- Pretty much any depiction of a school cafeteria in Western media is going to feature the products of a Lethal Chef. In this editor's experience, Truth In Television.
- And in this troper's, who at one point smashed a window pane with a BOILED POTATO!
- Weird Al Yankovic did a song about this, aptly called "School Cafeteria". Sample of the lyrics: "Today in the school cafeteria / They introduced a brand new malt / It's called boysenberry dysentery / Please pass the salt"
- Our chicken nuggets were always kind of bouncy. And you'd be lucky if the pizza even looked like pizza.
- Subverted with this editor's schools. Of course, it helped that the place was so crammed with Product Placement that there was a guy in a Red Baron mascot outfit walking around it one day.
- The food at my former elementary school once gave my friend food poisoning. I could also kind of feel food poisoning.
- This troper credits the horrible cafeteria food at his elementary school for his ability to eat and enjoy just about anything, up to and including peanut butter, ketchup and hotdog sandwiches. It did put him off peas and sauerkraut for years, until he found out that they actually are good when properly cooked.
- This troper's elementary school once served a so-called "cherries jubilee" which looked delicious and tasted exactly like vomit. Also, the rice at the school was well known - not only was the ice-cream-scoop-shaped mass completely solid and able to be lifted and turned upside-down with a fork in one piece, but it was often tinted with a neon greenish hue this troper had never seen before or since.
- 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. 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.
- 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.
- The titular character in Chowder managed to be one of these due to the fact that he's..well..not the brightest candle on the cake and mixed poison into one of his dishes, rather than the regular ingredients.
- 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.
Newspaper Comics
- One arc in Fox Trot has Paige attempting to learn to cook. Roger ends up mistaking Paige's brownies for barbecue charcoal in one strip, and in another, the living room ends up filled with smoke.
Other
- 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.
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