Tampering with Food and Drink in Anime and Manga.
- Attack on Titan: Zeke's spinal fluid allows him to Titanize Eldians at will, utilizing wine that had been laced with his fluid and served to numerous higher ups within the military, essentially making all of the infected his hostages.
- Blood-C: One of the reasons for Saya's frequent memory loss is due to Fumito putting drugs, sometimes blood which would help with Saya's blood dependence, in her coffee and marshmallows.
- This is a rather common killing method in Case Closed. However, more of the cases are actually subversions of this trope since the poison was not put on the food directly but in objects the killer knows their victims would touch before eating their foods.
- A filler Valentine's Day episode has a mother try to collect insurance money by poisoning her Jerkass-ish adopted son's coffee. The antidote was in the cake's icing—the lad, being on his uni's tennis team and professing hate for all kind of sweets, didn't eat the cake. Additionally, she also poisoned a half-eaten bar of chocolate and switched it with one that was given to the victim as Valentine's gift by his crush, in an attempt to frame the girl, since the lady knew the victim would take a bite of his chocolatey "enemy" to please her. And even more: a "friend" of the victim tried to tamper with the guy's cigarettes via poisoning the filters, but the would-be victim just cut said filters off in a whim and thus he failed.
- One example of such a subversion happens when a Jerkass Idol Singer falls dead after eating some rice balls... but the poison was not originally in said snacks. It was placed in a specific spot of his jacket: the killer knew that the guy liked to melodramatically take off said jacket during a certain part of a song, so they put it in that spot so he'd touch the venom and "transfer" it to the rice balls when he grabbed them to eat them.
- In the first Fatal Fury anime special, Geese forces his sort-of protegé Lily to give Terry a bottle of poisoned wine. Lily, who has fallen for Terry and feels terrible because Geese used her to kill Terry and Andy's father years ago, cannot bring herself to let Terry fall in the trap and stops him from consuming it. Then she explains what happened and gives him Anguished Declaration of Love.
- Subverted in Fullmetal Alchemist. When Roy Mustang gets offered tea by Fuhrer Bradley, who knows that he knows that he's a homunculus and tried to tell Central Command about it, he wonders if it's poisoned, but is told that it is not.
- In Gankutsuou, Heloise receives a ring that contains poison from the Count. She uses it to poison some water she tried to give to Valentine, but Albert ends up drinking it instead. She also poisoned some lemonade which one of the household staff ends up drinking. She later mentions that she wanted to poison more people this way as well.
- In The Heroic Legend of Arslan, Arslan reveals to Gieve and Elam that his nursemaid and her husband died of drinking too much nabeed (wine) one day when he was younger, just prior to him starting to live at the palace. However, since they both died at the same time in a suspicious manner and it's later revealed Arslan is not even Andragoras or Tamahine's son, Gieve quietly suspected they were actually poisoned.
- In Honoo no Alpen Rose, Mathilda tries to do this to Jeudi by contaminating her food and tea during breakfast. Luckily, Printemps sees this and attacks her, saving his owner. It turns out this is how she routinely drugs Jeudi's mother Helene, slipping tiny quantities of poison in her tea to keep her permanently ill and vulnerable.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Stardust Crusaders: The Oingo Boingo attempt to trick the heroes into drinking poisoned tea, but then Iggy steals some random stranger's food, prompting all of them to Spit Take and foil the brothers' plans.
- Diamond is Unbreakable: After his conversation with Yukako ended awkwardly, Koichi takes a sip from his drink to find it suddenly filled with Yukako's hair.
- Golden Wind: In a flashback, Formaggio assassinated a government figure via dropping a microscopic car in his drink; once the target left the establishment, the car resumes its full size inside of him, bursts him open, and incidentally crushes his dinner date.
- Stone Ocean: When a female prisoner refuses to pay her back for using the prison phone, Jolyne uses Stone Free to break a coin into pieces and drops it into the woman's drink, giving her a Potty Emergency with Jolyne keeping the bathroom locked until she gets paid back.
- One chapter of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War has Miko refuse Kaguya's offer for a cup of tea on the suspicion that she would poison it.
- Putting harmful substances in food happens quite often in The Kindaichi Case Files. For example, in "Santa's Slayings (European Hotel Murder Case)", a stage actress is murdered after drinking wine during a play in a scene where her co-performers also chooses randomly from a bunch of them. The killer wrote a footnote in her script to pick a certain glass during that part. Since the victim could memorize lines only from reading once, the killer had no trouble disposing of it.
- In Monster, Director Heinemann, Dr. Oppenheim, and Dr. Boyer are found dead after being mysteriously poisoned by candy left by Johan Liebert. Candy which was not only wrapped but in a sealed bag.
- In Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok, Skuld tries to do this to Loki on two occasions and fails miserably both times (in one incident, the person she brainwashes into delivering the poisoned food proceeds to explain what the food had been doped with immediately after delivery). She isn't very good at assassination—her heart just isn't in it.
- In Naruto, Tsunade poisons Jiraiya's drink, leaving him unable to fight at full strength against Orochimaru. It is implied that she was leaning toward accepting Orochimaru's offer at the time, then changed her mind later.
- Night Head Genesis: Naoto and Naoya's parents drugged their melon sodas to subdue the boys so they could give them away to the laboratory.
- Happens plenty of times in Ōoku: The Inner Chambers:
- Hisamichi slipped poison into the food and drink of Yoshimune's older sisters and the closest rival to the throne to ensure that Yoshimune got the shogunate. She has to clarify that she did not do that to Ietsugu, as Ietsugu was sick and not expected to make it to adulthood.
- Tokugawa Harusada, mother of Shogun Ienari, is quite fond of doing this to pick off rivals and control people. Her Moral Event Horizon is when she slips poison into her grandchildren's sweets to kill them and turn her son's wife (Shigu) and favorite concubine (O-Shiga) against each other. What's worse is it's implied she did that because she was bored.
- However, Shigu and O-Shiga quickly figure out Harusada was behind those deaths and play a long game to poison Harusada in revenge. Part of that involves O-Shiga, now Harusada's taster, poisoning herself to ensure that Harusada would eat the poisoned food. She dies not long after the poisoning finally incapacitates Harusada.
- Unfortunately, this left a nasty legacy on Ienari's reign: his concubines quickly realized poisoning rivals was a quick way to get ahead, with the result that only about half of Ienari's numerous children made it to adulthood.
- The sociopathic protagonist in Suehiro Maruo's short Poison Strawberry
puts thumbtacks in her classmate's milk. What happens next is horrific. - In Pumpkin Scissors, one episode features a visiting princess from a neighboring country, with a particularly draconian rule of succession: Whichever royal child survives takes the throne. Poison is a favored means of sibling rivalry, and she reveals that on her 10th birthday, the cake was poisoned, causing the death of her favorite maid. The fear of poison is so in-grown in her that even when eating a hot dog at a street-stand, where nobody knows who or what she is, she can't take a bite until somebody has tasted it for her first.
- Kodachi Kuno of Ranma ½ is a good cook who prepares elaborate meals, and she often uses culinary expertise to her advantage by placing poisons, toxins, serums, and other strange substances in her victims' food to attain something she wants from them.
- Reborn! (2004): Bianchi, known as "Poison Scorpion Bianchi" in the Mafia underground, specializes in poison cooking; food items that contain poison and have a nasty color to them. Her food also has a tendency to melt its surroundings.
- Rebuild World:
- There is a Running Gag of the Mundane Luxury of good food putting The Paranoiac Akira into a daze of happiness, since he grew up in the slums with no access to decent food. When Akira is scheduled to meet a government executive over dinner, Akira’s Eccentric Mentor Kibayashi points out how sometimes high level hunters have their food tampered with to make them more pliable for negotiations, which prompts Akira to panic and demand the executive visit him in his Home Base in the slums instead, creating some misunderstandings about Sheryl’s gang in the process.
- And then there's The Reveal that the reason Akira became a Differently Powered Individual able to connect to the old world domain was because the Rebuild Institute put their Nanomachines in the food of the slums as part of a bungled experiment that resulted in most subjects dying thanks to Power Incontinence that was also responsible for Akira's Dark and Troubled Past of being constantly betrayed.
- Sakura Gari:
- At one point, Sakurako feeds Masataka a piece of sushi. He quickly spits it out, revealing that Sakurako snuck in a piece of glass.
- It's later revealed that Sakurako, who heavily resents her father for locking her away, convinced Katsuragi to slowly poison Lord Saiki by slipping him little bits of poison in his food. Had Katsuragi not gotten his "just desserts" at the hands of Souma and his own wife Asayo, the old man would've eventually died of both poisoning and his already present bad health.
- Subverted at some point: Sakurako ties up Masataka to a chair and force-feeds him, with Masataka expecting her to have slipped stuff in it again... but it's perfectly untouched food, and she made him believe it was tampered with to bully him.
- Sakura no Ichiban!: In chapter seven, the third-year girls of the Sakura Blossom Club have their tea poisoned by the other members of the club so that they can become closer to Tsukiko and her wealth. Sanae is framed for the incident due to being from a poor family and generally disliked by most of the girls in the club.
- Raji of Snow White with the Red Hair poisoned a basket full of apples before sending them to Shirayuki. His plan was for her to be kidnapped and brought to him after the poison left her unable to fight back, but to his horror, he ends up poisoning the prince of the neighboring country instead.
- In The Story of Saiunkoku, Shuurei is the subject of repeated poisoning attempts during her time as Imperial Concubine. In the most notable instance she's presented with a cup of poisoned sake during a banquet; immediately suspicious but aware that refusing the offer would be a grave insult, Ryuuki drinks it in her place, counting on his better constitution and Acquired Poison Immunity to get him through it. It still makes him quite sick for a while, and when Shuurei finally finds out, she's torn between being impressed that he basically took the bullet for her, and being angry at him for taking such a risk. (Not because she's got feelings for him, or anything—it's just that the civil war that would result from his death would be really bad for the people. That's all, really!)
- Tales of Wedding Rings: In the Land of Water arc, the fortune-teller first tries to get rid of Satou by having assassins poison his dinner. This fails because Saphir is wise to the fortune-teller's ways and warns Satou not to eat, with Alabaster confirming that the food has been tampered with a moment later. Hime and Nefritis then bring Satou an alternative meal which they prepared themselves and is thus safe to eat.
