A character is shown to have a secret stash of junk food, usually when they're supposed to be on a diet.
Expect the Big Eater to be subject to this trope.
Compare with the Porn Stash. Contrast with Going Cold Turkey. Heartbreak and Ice Cream is a possibility. See Sneaking Snacks for what happens when a person has to grab items from the main stash.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Advertising
- In an early-1970s commercial for Chunky candy bars, a man was hand casing the interior some kitchen cupboards until he found a glass dish full of Chunky bars. He was doing this in a stealth manner, apparently to evade his wife's radar. The tagline was "Chunky. You don't have to see it to find it."
- A Ziploc bag commercial shows what people keep in their Ziploc bags. One example was a boy pulling a bag of candy out from under his mattress at camp, calling it "emergency camp rations!"
Anime and Manga
- One chapter in My Monster Secret has Ryou finding Akane's secret stash of snacks during one of his "security inspection". At this moment, Akane has just lost her usual supply of snacks, and she's not happy with this. She reacts by casually blasting him with a giant explosion.
Asian Animation
- Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf:
- Joys of Seasons episode 8 shows that Mr. Slowy has a secret snack stash. The other goats find it and decide to take some food from it since what Mr. Slowy has been making for dinner lately hasn't been very delicious.
- A later episode of Joys of Seasons shows that Paddi has a massive stash of food hidden in a cave.
Comic Books
- Archie: Jughead, as a Big Eater, is notorious for this.
- In one story where Jug was the drummer for the Archies, while the band is practicing for a concert one day, Jughead adamantly refuses to play the bass drum, and won't give a reason why. The others decide to be sensitive and not press the issue any further. The last panel reveals the reason: The bass drum was "stocked" with snack food!
- Another story had Jughead wear kickers/plus-four type pants and get mocked for them, then an elevator he and some of the others are on gets stuck. Jughead reveals that the pants are for hiding a stash of candy bars, which he shares.
- Be Prepared: The other girls camping with Vera have forbidden candy in their tent and initially share it with Vera. However, once she gets them caught, it gets confiscated.
Fanfiction
- One of the reasons Karkat hates rooming with Dave in Brainbent is the highly perishable and ever expanding hoard of food that Dave keeps under his bed. Dave insists that he's just keeping snacks around, but everyone at St. Lobaf's recognizes that his hoarding is the direct result of Dave being raised by an irresponsible and totally unprepared big brother. Growing up, Dave never knew when his next meal was coming, and he started stashing away food for the times when cash was tight or his brother forgot to feed him.
Film
- The blueberry scene in The Avengers (2012) is a real-life example of this. Those blueberries were never meant to be on set, nor are they mentioned in the original script at all. They were real-life blueberries that Robert Downey Jr. had managed to sneak onto set.
- In Full Metal Jacket, the overweight Private Pyle steals and stashes a jelly donut for him to eat later. Unfortunately, it's discovered by the sarge. He forces Pyle to eat the donut while handing out collective punishment to the rest of the recruits. They later beat Pyle as revenge.
- In Heavy Weights, the kids at the fat camp all keep stashes of junk food. The former managers all turned a blind eye to it, but new owner Tony Perkis naturally cracks down.
- The Three Musketeers (1993): "It's the Cardinal's sacred snack chamber", which also carries a large amount of money. The musketeers drink the wine and champagne and scatter the coins to the commoners.
- This Is the End: When nearly all the food runs out during the apocalypse, it's soon revealed that James Franco has extra hidden away while fighting a demon. His friends are not impressed.
Literature
- Claudia from The Baby-Sitters Club hides junk food because her parents don't approve of junk food.
- Lt. Eve Dallas of the In Death novel series continually struggles to keep caches of candy in her office hidden from an unknown candy thief who keeps raiding them.
- In The Great Brain at the Academy candy isn't allowed in the school so TD sets himself up selling black market candy. He has to hide his stash so neither the priests who have banned the candy nor his fellow students/prospective clients can find it.
- Harry Potter starts keeping a stash of sweets hidden under his bedroom floorboards in Goblet of Fire, after Petunia forces the entire family to follow the same diet as Dudley (the school nurse had informed the family that Dudley needed to lose weight because they didn't stock school uniforms in his size).
- Unseen Academicals: When Ridcully forbids his staff from eating junk food and smoking in order to be in shape for the football game, he obviously doesn't consider it to apply to him. Unfortunately, the housekeeper does, and he grows increasingly dismayed as he finds every one of his caches has been found and emptied. Finally he reaches the last one, which still contains some food and tobacco, with a note from the housekeeper reading "I just didn't have the heart."
- In The Vor Game the protagonist (undergoing military training, and temporarily assigned to sewer maintenance detail at a training base as punishment for an equipment-damaging screw-up on his part) finds a dead body wedged into a drainage culvert—he later discovers that the young private had stashed a "care package" of pastries from back home in the adjacent culvert, went into the wrong culvert in the darkness of a heavy rain storm, and was trapped and drowned.
Live-Action TV
- In The Closer, Brenda keeps a massive stash of cakes and candies in her bottom drawer. She rushes to it whenever she is in distress.
- An Asshole Victim of the Week on CSI: NY was a Jerkass movie executive that (ironically) had his wife treating him with an iron fist about his weight. The executive had some candy concealed on the balcony of his apartment...and died on a day he was treating everybody at a party at his house like crap because his weight weakened the handrail he needed to climb on to reach the stash, dropping him several stories to an awning below. Danny wonders aloud why his weight didn't cause him to fall through it to the pavement...which would've made their retrieval of the body much easier.
- Frasier: Daphne starts putting on weight during season eight due to recent emotional stress (and to hide Jane Leeves' pregnancy). She eventually agrees to try a diet and exercise plan but also starts hiding sweet snacks around the living room. When Niles helps her put her coat on a candy bar falls out of the sleeve exposing what she's been doing to the whole family.
- Hurley on Lost had a secret stash for some time after the Dharma hatch and its attendant food supplies were discovered.
- Kevin from The Office (US) kept a stash hidden in the ceiling. When the others look for it, they find a nest of rats instead.
- Played for drama in Roseanne. Dan was hiding junk food where the cleaning products were (because Roseanne never bothered to try and clean the house) so he can eat without Roseanne knowing, because Dan suffered a heart attack and Roseanne made him eat healthier foods, and he was getting tired of them.
- Also played for laughs in the second-season episode "I'm Hungry", in which Roseanne stashes junk food in the bathroom. Dan just raids the freezer while Roseanne's "having a bath".
- Geraldine on The Vicar of Dibley has multiple chocolate stashes, including a hollowed-out Bible. This proves to be problematic for her when she gives up chocolate for Lent.
Music
- The whole point of the song "Junk Food Junkie" by Larry Groce. If he isn't raiding a stash, he's making covert late-night convenience store runs.
Video Games
- While finding a century-old stash now and then in Fallout games is pretty common, one stands out in Old World Blues. Sifting through a lab's emails reveals that one researcher has been keeping several stashes of various unhealthy foods, including the very rare Nuka Cola Quantum and Victory.
- In Kirby Super Star, in the sub game Revenge of Meta Knight, Kirby can solve a certain puzzle that lets him access a door in the battleship Halberd; if he enters it, Mace Knight (one of the crew) will shout "No! My secret stash of food and 1-ups!" which Captain Vul responds by "So that's where you hid them, you scallywag!"
- Quake Champions: Keel's artifact, obtained as the last piece of his Lore Codex, is a piece of cake he hides in his suit for "a very bad day".
Visual Novels
- An extra file in Virtue's Last Reward jokes that the box-like side-panels on Quark's helmet are actually missile launchers ready to defend him at a moment's notice, before revealing that he actually stashes candy in them (befitting his being the only child involved in the Nonary Game).
Western Animation
- Bump in the Night: In one episode, Mr. Bumpy needs to lie low, and he begins to tap into his large secret stash of dirty socks, which he eats as food. He says those socks will last him into the new millennium, but he promptly gorges himself on them and they run out in seconds.
- "Der Fuehrer's Face": In Donald Duck's brief All Just a Dream stint as a factory worker in Nazi Germany, his morning routine involves tapping into a secret stash of food that he'd enjoy rather than the painful hardtack that the Germans have provided for him. Downplayed, in that his "stash" amounts to a single coffee bean that he dips into water to make some semblance of coffee, and a perfume bottle containing the aroma of bacon and eggs.
- In a Cutaway Gag on Family Guy we see Sesame Street's Cookie Monster at a Rehab clinic; a bed check reveals that he has a plate of cookies under his mattress.
"I don't know how they got there...Derek was in here earlier, he was making the beds, he probably put them - I was in the john."
- Megas XLR has Coop replace the EMP missiles in Megas' hands with minifridges full of Pop Rocks and Cola. These fridges become very important in stopping a bad guy Coop unwittingly summoned.
- Scooby-Doo and Shaggy have several hidden stashes of scooby snacks and other edibles.
- The Simpsons: In "The Heartbroke Kid", Bart keeps a stash of junk food hidden inside a hole behind a Krusty poster in his room.
- In the Lilo & Stitch: The Series episode "Frenchfry", Pleakley has various secret compartments in his room just for hiding junk food.
- In the Johnny Test episode "Johnny Bee Good" when the Bee Keeper steals all the candy in town, Mary and Susan let Johnny and Dukey in on the secret stash of junk food they have in their lab.
