Basic Trope: Tricking someone — usually a child — into eating vegetables (or anything else that needs to be ingested but tastes bad, such as Foul Medicine) by hiding them in something else or lying about the ingredients.
- Straight:
- Alice and Bob's son, Carl, doesn't like vegetables. To get him to eat his vegetables, Alice and Bob will hide chopped-up vegetables in food he does like.
- To get Carl to eat his vegetables, Alice and Bob call the food by a name that sounds more appealing.
- Exaggerated:
- Carl is such a Picky Eater that Alice and Bob have to hide food he doesn't like in every dish they serve him.
- Carl is an adult and his parents still have to resort to hiding vegetables in his food because he won't eat them otherwise.
- Downplayed: Alice and Bob are honest about the ingredients, but they prepare the vegetables in a way that Carl will like the taste of better, such as applying more seasoning to them.
- Justified: Alice and Bob want Carl to eat healthier.
- Inverted: Carl likes healthy foods much better than unhealthier foods, and so for some reason his parents Alice and Bob intentionally sneak candy into his vegetables.
- Subverted: Carl notices chopped bits in his mashed potatoes, but they were only spices.
- Double Subverted: Blended cauliflower was mixed in with the potatoes, so Carl still ate them.
- Parodied: Alice breaks into a McDonald's and pours blended cabbage into all of their food. She gets charged for Tampering with consumer products but then later gets kicked out of the prison for escaping solitary confinement and repeatedly doing the same thing to the cafeteria.
- Zig-Zagged: Carl's food was a plain salad. When Carl traded it away for a peanut butter jelly sandwich, the trader dies from an ice cream allergy. Carl almost goes to prison but Alice and Bob were found guilty after DNA tests showed his prints to only be on the bag while their prints were on the actual sandwich. Alice and Bob admit that they knew of the allergy and intentionally got her killed. This was an attempt to scare Carl away from trading away his veggies and try making him eat them himself. Carl is now deathly afraid of vegetables and dies of a heart attack 3 decades later.
- Averted: Alice and Bob don't hide vegetables in Carl's food.
- Enforced: "We need the parents to show that they care about their child, but we also need to show how ready they are to violate boundaries."
- Lampshaded: "They better not start hiding brussel sprouts in my food like the last time I threw them out."
- Invoked: A chef uses vegetables in many of his otherwise unhealthy recipe to try normalizing vegetables being in everything.
- Exploited: A company markets their vitamin powder by how it is tasteless enough to be snuck into food. This campaign fails due to the resemblance to similar, far more malicious drugs.
- Defied: Alice and Bob find better ways of getting Carl to eat healthy, such as finding vegetables he does like.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "I saw a TV show where they got the kid to eat vegetables by hiding it in something else. I wonder if that would work for real kids."
- Played for Laughs: Alice and Bob are really bad at hiding vegetables in Carl's food. For instance, they hide an entire carrot inside a loaf of bread, or they continue to try to call food by a more appealing name despite the fact that he's old enough to know the difference.
- Played for Drama: Someone lies to Carl about the ingredients in his food and (accidentally or otherwise) tricks him into eating something he's allergic to.
Hey, who hid broccoli in this page?
