Tampering With Food And Drink / Literature

Tampering with Food and Drink in Literature.

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• 100% Match: A disgusting example. Bart Bartley repeatedly taints the food he prepares at his fast-food restaurant with ineditable items, such as cockroaches and semen. Bart also mentions that his mother died after drinking cyanide-laced tea, and Bart himself is drugged with a sedative in his tea by Sara towards the end of the book.
• The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi: Referenced — Amina confidently takes a drink from Dalila despite their rocky reunion, knowing that if a Master Poisoner like Delila wanted to drug her, she would have done it more elegantly.
• Willard Price's African Adventure. While they're on safari in Uganda, someone tries to kill Hal and Roger Hunt by putting ground-up leopard whiskers in their food.
• And Then I Turned Into a Mermaid: After Molly's falling-out with Ada, Molly's sister Margot puts cayenne pepper in Ada's ketchup, knowing how much she hates spicy food.
• In And Then There Were None, the first death is caused in this manner.
• At the climactic Elstyn family meeting in Aunt Dimity Takes a Holiday, only Simon, the recipient of the threatening notes, takes a cup of tea offered by the maid. That maid is revealed to be Derek's insane former nanny, who targeted Simon in the belief that he was trying to take Derek's inheritance. She says of Simon: "I tried to warn him, but he wouldn't listen. Won't listen, must be made to listen." Then she audibly whispers to Derek: "Make him drink his tea..." After she leaves the room, an Inspector from Scotland Yard asks everyone to avoid touching the teacup, since the police intend to have it analysed.
• In Battle Royale, Yuko Sakai, mistakenly believing Shuya Nanahara killed another classmate in an altercation (the death was actually accidental), attempts to poison Shuya's meal with potassium chloride while he's recovering at a lighthouse where she and her friends are holed up. Another friend eats the meal instead, her subsequent death causing a chain reaction that leads to all of Yuko's friends shooting and killing each other and Yuko, herself, being Driven to Suicide.
• Bazil Broketail:
  • General Hektor is poisoned along with other officers by wine Ourdhi civilians give them. A couple die and he falls into a coma, leaving General Paxion in command with a difficult time.
  • A group of dragons and dragonboys are drugged with doped beer while in Ourdh. When they fall asleep, Relkin and Bazil are kidnapped to serve as sacrifices.
• The Belgariad: This trope is the reason members of the Nyissan court take poison antidotes daily. Sadi appears to be as good as any full-time assassin at it—he muses once about having poisoned the soup course in front of his victims without being caught, and in The Malloreon he slips knockout drugs to an entire army.
• A Biggles story set during World War 2 involved the inexplicable crashes of multiple Allied aircraft flying a particular supply route. Japanese intelligence officers were slipping packets of chewing gum laced with a powerful narcotic into the cockpits of the planes, causing the pilots to pass out at the controls.
• The Prince Consort, husband of the queens and father of the princesses, of A Brother's Price was killed via poisoning while on a picnic. A Personal Effects Reveal later reveals that his son-in-law Keifer did it.
• In Carpe Demon, Kate slips holy water into normal goblets of water when she tries to catch a suspected demon-occupied person in mixed company.
• The Cat Who... Series: In book #19 (The Cat Who Tailed a Thief), Lynette Duncan is murdered when arsenic is slipped into her food by her new husband while on her honeymoon.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: Tasia is rescued from imprisonment after Linna and other surviving followers drug her guards.
• In Crooked House, one of the two murder victims is poisoned by spiking a cup of cocoa with digitalis.
• A Dearth of Choice: When the dungeon starts growing food crops, some of them turn out as normal high-quality plants, but others are corrupted by their high mana levels and the murderous System behind the dungeons, becoming rotten, toxic, diseased, or cursed with even nastier effects like turning people directly into undead. The dungeon assigns one of his minions to identifying and removing the dangerous plants, hoping to provide the healthy ones to the nearby village.
• Discworld:
  • In Interesting Times an Agatean courtier tries this on Cohen the Barbarian. It doesn't work and the courtier finds himself having a terminal case of indigestion when the tables are turned. Also worth noting that Cohen is strongly averse to this sort of thing. He'll happily kill dozens at a meal, usually by getting them drunk first and then killing them in their sleep... but you don't poison the food.
    "Barbarians didn't poison food. You never knew when you might be short of a mouthful yourself."
  • A similar thing happens in Mort. The Grand Vizier tries to poison the Emperor, but he tries to do it in a very elaborate way: he claims he found the poisonous object in his own food, but that only the Emperor is worthy of it. They go back and forth on who should eat it for quite some time (Mort, because he can't leave until someone dies, even says "Would someone just eat it?"), but finally the Grand Vizier has to eat it, then tries to leave, leading to this:
    Grand Vizier: Urgent matters of state, my lord.
    Emperor: Would these be the urgent matters of state in a little bottle marked "Antidote" on your dresser?
  • Tampering with food and drink was also a popular tactic of the wizards in the early books (before they mellowed out and became a satire of modern academia). There was even a saying: When a wizard is tired of looking for broken glass in his dinner, he is tired of life.
  • In Unseen Academicals, Glenda, a Supreme Chef, visits Vetinari with a homemade pie. One of Vetinari's advisors suggests that Glenda may have poisoned the pie, an idea that Ventinari correctly dismisses, as she treats cooking almost like a religious vocation and would regard this as a crime against food. (Lord V remembers Glenda's grandmother as being cook to the Assassins' Guild when he was a student, and even the Assassins wouldn't poison one of her pies for fear of what she might do.)
  • This trope is referenced but ultimately averted in Feet of Clay. The candle wicks are laced with arsenic instead, releasing the poison into the air as they burn down.
  • There are two references to this in Nanny Ogg's Cookbook: Lord Vetinari's recipe for bread and water is mostly concerned with randomising what slice of bread and glass of water you get, and making the people who prepared them try the others. Lord Downey's recipe for mint humbugs has a legal disclaimer that, while the head of the Assassins' Guild may find arsenic a suitable additive, it is not advised for anyone else.
• Dragonvarld: Evelina poisons Lady Izabelle's wine to murder her so she can have Marcus. It works out in his favor, as unbeknownst to her Alora is possessing Izabelle's body and leeching away his magic, so the death of her host body broke the spell, freeing Marcus.
• In The Dresden Files, all food and drink offered by one of the Sidhe is dangerous. It's not necessarily poisoned, though it could be, but taking anything the Fae offer is a spectacular way to put yourself in their debt: they've given something to you, you must now give something to them.
• Nobles in the Dune universe so frequently used poisoning to further their schemes that they had different terms for poisons used this way: poison someone's drink, and it's called chaumurky, but if you put poison in solid food it's chaumas.
• Egil's Saga: At Atloy-Bard's feast for King Erik and Queen Gunhild, Egil provokes Bard by making biting remarks about Bard's stinginess and implying he is not serving him enough ale. Bard complains to Gunhild, who then conspires with Bard to put poison into Egil's drink. Presumably it's not meant to kill Egil, but rather to make him sick and thus take him down a peg. Egil however detects the poison and reacts by killing Bard later the same night.
• Downplayed in The Egg Hamburg Steak Knows, where a truck driver of the meat processor, in a Lethally Stupid way to Poke the Poodle, spiked some of the beef shipped to the plant with pork out of spite. The bad news is it caused allergic reaction on a certain Kazuomi Wakatake...
• Eisenhorn: Malleus opens with the titular Inquisitor having been poisoned this way three days prior, and has him launch a desperate raid on the poisoner's hideout in search of an antidote.
• Simon Ark: In "The Faraway Quilters", the Victim of the Week has her drink spiked with chloral hydrate, which causes her to pass out and fatally wreck her car.
• In The Fraternity of the Stone, a monk notices that a mouse that he's been feeding has died. His food was poisoned along with everyone else's in the monastery—he's a former Professional Killer who had a Heel–Faith Turn and was the intended target.
• A Dearth of Choice: When the dungeon starts growing food crops, some of them turn out as normal high-quality plants, but others are corrupted by their high mana levels and the murderous System behind the dungeons, becoming rotten, toxic, diseased, or cursed with even nastier effects like turning people directly into undead. The dungeon assigns one of his minions to identifying and removing the dangerous plants, hoping to provide the healthy ones to the nearby village.
• Girls Don't Hit: Joss uses poison she's placed surreptitiously in targets' drinks to kill them more than once.
• The Girl Who Drank the Moon has a scene where Ethyne offers Gherland a cup of tea. Gherland then perceives Ethyne as fearsome and is easily plied for information.
• Goblins in the Castle: One of the goblins' pranks, the night they're freed, involves this — they filled the sugar bowl on the dining room table with salt. William doesn't discover it until he's spooned some into his coffee and taken a sip.
• In one of The Great Merlini short stories, the poison is added to the sugar packet the victim adds to his coffee.
• In the Harry Potter series:
  • In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Professor Umbridge attempts this by adding what she believes to be truth potion into Harry's drink.
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:
    • Ron Weasley swallows a poisoned drink that was actually meant for Dumbledore and almost dies. (And this was just after Ron ate a love-potion hidden in candy that was meant for Harry; don't side-kicks ever learn they're just fall-guys?)
    • Dumbledore discloses to Harry in one of their private sessions about a more deadly example of this. Hepzibah Smith, the featured character alongside Tom Riddle Jr., AKA Voldemort in the Pensieve Flashback during said session, died from a poisoned drink mere days after the scenario shown in said Pensieve Flashback took place. Her personal House Elf, from whom Dumbledore procured the memory, was tried and convicted of Accidental Murder, but Dumbledore suspects (and Harry agrees) that said House Elf was merely framed for Hepzibah's murder and that the Ministry of Magic officials didn't bother looking more closely into the case "because she was a House Elf".
    • Harry exploits this trope to make Hermione and Ron think he added his good luck potion to Ron's drink. Thinking he has good luck on his side gives Ron the confidence boost he needs to win the Quidditch match.
• ''Hercule Poirot":
  • In The Mysterious Affair at Styles it's subverted. One of the characters believes poison was put into the first victim's drink and tries to cover up any clues that would led Poirot to this conclusion.
  • A nonlethal variant is done to Poirot himself in Death on the Nile: the killers drug his wine to make him sleep heavily, ensuring he cannot witness the scene of the murder.
  • The victim of Five Little Pigs had poison put in his drink. He also had a harmless but unpleasant substance put in another drink, which confuses the issue.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries:
  • Quinn Kirkland from Last Writes dies after eating a doughnut covered in rat poison.
  • Marybeth Olsen from The PMS Murder is killed by guacamole laced with peanut oil, triggering a fatal allergic reaction.
  • Bunny of Death of a Trophy Wife dies when her martini is spiked with weed killer. It's revealed that it wasn't meant for her martini to be poisoned, but rather Lance's.
  • Joy Amoroso of Killing Cupid is killed from chocolate injected with cyanide. It's meant to be poetic justice, as she had poisoned Skip Holmeier's cat Miss Marple by feeding her chocolate.
  • Dean Oliver from Murder Has Nine Lives is killed from eating diet cat food sprayed with a can of odorless Raid.
• James Bond:
  • Bond is saved from being eaten by wolves in Brokenclaw thanks to his ally Rushia, who threw steaks dosed with Chloral to their cage beforehand.
  • Staying at a hotel in Death Is Forever, Bond and his partner Easy order sandwiches. When they are about to eat them, they find out that someone has planted eggs of poisonous spiders on them, which were supposed to hatch and kill them after ingestion.
  • The bad guys in The Facts of Death attempt to kill thousands of northern Cypriots by spraying anthrax inside a ship full of food cargo.
  • The rations of a Chinese mountaineering expedition in High Time to Kill are destroyed by contaminating their food with piss and setting the sacks containing them on fire.
• In The Killers Cousin by Nancy Werlin, Lily accidentally killed her sister by putting cleaning solvent in a glass of water. It was supposed to have been a prank, as she didn't think her sister would really drink it.
• The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester: Carl murdered Billy by putting peanut oil on his popcorn ball, as Billy was deathly allergic to peanuts. Decades later, he puts Sam's dad in the hospital by secretly adding walnut extract to his "nut-free" coffee cake.
• Murder to Go had poison added to the seasoning mix for a spicy fast-food chicken dish. It wasn't supposed to be a lethal dose, but that's not the most precise method of faking a mass foodborne-illness situation. The mastermind should consider himself lucky only one person died.
• One victim in A Night Too Dark is killed when her cookie is spiked with peanut oil to induce a fatal allergic reaction.
• The Pool of Fire: The Weaksauce Weakness of the alien Masters is discovered accidentally when a drunken guard pours his booze into the food being taken to a Master who has been captured by La Résistance. Attempts have been made to discover their vulnerabilities, but the Master has always detected the poison and refused to eat, so the protagonist just takes the food in, expecting the Master will reject it as usual. He falls into a coma instead. However, actually getting the alcohol into the Masters' water supply proves exceptionally difficult, as it means infiltrating their Domed City and distilling alcohol in an alien environment. And even once this is achieved, they have a city full of sleeping Masters who might rouse at any moment, and the small infiltration force has no idea what to do next.
• In The Queen's Thief, the new King of Attolia has to put up with having sand in his food all the time as a prank by his attendants (and the kitchen staff, who prefer the queen). When this is revealed to the guard captain, it raises the possibility of more sinister things being added to the plate. Attolis puts up with it to build evidence against one of his queen's enemies, and finally puts a stop to it by visiting the kitchen staff two books later to reveal that he was once a phony kitchen boy that bit their previous, hated head chef.
• Francesca tries multiple times to unnerve her interview subjects or throw off her coworkers like this in Rama II, once leading to a false diagnosis of appendicitis in the team leader for an expedition, hoping that Brown would get to go instead and fulfill a term in their backroom contract with an outside entity. Since the robot surgeon killed the man when Rama made a sudden maneouvre during surgery, her plan killed him. She covers up his murder, and might not be remorseful for it; her plan worked in that, following the leader's death, Brown did go on the sortie.
• In Red Seas Under Red Skies, Archon Stragos serves Locke and Jean cold cider after several hours in an overheated room. The cider itself is fine, but the glasses were dosed with a poison that only Stragos has the antidote for, ensuring their service.
• In River of Teeth, Hero sneaks poison into the iced tea they offer Houndstooth during their first meeting, then demonstrates that it's safe by drinking from the same glass. Since Houndstooth wants to hire Hero due to their reputation as a Master Poisoner, he is not fooled and refuses the drink.
• the secret lives of Princesses: Palace quarrels are sometimes settled with poison. That is why princesses have tasters.
• In the first book of A Series of Unfortunate Events:
  • Violet thinks miserably that she should've poisoned the sauce she's serving with the pasta for Count Olaf and his troupe, considering how they are acting rude and refuse to eat the food the siblings made for them because they wanted roast beef instead.
  • Violet believes Count Olaf poisoned the oatmeal he serves to her and her siblings one morning because he's frankly a horrible guardian who was never nice to them in the entire time they've known him. He quickly proves them wrong by eating one of the raspberries on top of the oatmeal, convincing the siblings that it's safe to eat.
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story Shadows In Zamboula, Zabibi slips her lover something. It drives him into a frenzy, which is not the effect she intended. (What, exactly, she did intend—well, the stories thrown about are numerous.)
• In The Ship Who... Won, when Ozran mages dine together in a group they are attended by furfaces who serve as tasters - the mages are a quarrelsome, backbiting lot who constantly teleport poisons into each others' food and drink. Conveniently these poisons act instantly. The mages are so used to tasters dropping dead that dinner is not interrupted by it and don't even raise the issue of who left them the poison, they just teleport in new, unfortunate furfaces.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • The Plot-Triggering Death of the series, that of Jon Arryn, was done via this. Jon was given a drink mixed with the Tears of Lys, a difficult-to-trace poison designed to kill as fast as possible, while making the victim look as if they die of natural causes. His wife, Lysa, tells her sister, Catelyn Stark, that this was done under the auspices of the Lannisters, who want to usurp King Robert by eliminating people close to him. The Lannisters really do want to usurp the throne, but killing Jon wasn't part of their plan. It was Lysa herself who poisoned his drink; she was seduced by Petyr Baelish to betray her sister by misleading her, thus deliberately dragging the Starks into the conflict.
  • An indirect example in A Game of Thrones. Robert Baratheon is gored by a boar during a hunting trip, where he is more drunk than usual, and dies. In A Clash of Kings, Tyrion Lannister finds out that before the hunt, Robert was given a fortified wine three times its potency by Tyrion's cousin Lancel, who was given orders to do it by his sister and Robert's wife, Cersei. The boar was optional; all Cersei needed was Robert performing a reckless act that would kill him.
  • Per Robert's orders, Varys sends an assassin to kill Daenerys Targaryen by gifting her a poisoned wine. However, the plan is thwarted by Jorah Mormont, who was the one spying on Daenerys for Varys in the first place, but has had a change of heart after spending time with her, by preventing her from drinking it. It ultimately results in Khal Drogo's furious march to the west, his untimely death, Dany's meeting with Mirri Maz Duur, and the blood magic ritual she unwittingly uses to birth the dragons back to the world.
  • In the prologue of A Clash of Kings, Maester Cressen attempts to kill Melisandre using wine mixed with the Strangler, an extremely lethal poison which can induce choking on its drinker within seconds. Melisandre, being a powerful priestess, drinks most of it and comes out unharmed, then urges Cressen to drink the rest (he originally offered her to share the drink). He tastes a sip and dies instantly.
  • King Joffrey Baratheon is poisoned during his wedding feast in A Storm of Swords, in what the fans dub the "Purple Wedding". As it turns out, he was poisoned using the Strangler, as well; the crystals were hidden in a hairnet given to Sansa Stark by Ser Dontos, who in turn received it from Baelish. Olenna Tyrell discreetly took one of them from Sansa, then dipped it into a wine Joffrey was about to drink.
  • In the closing days of the Dance of the Dragons, Aegon II Targaryen was poisoned less than a year after he fed his half-sister Rhaenyra to his dragon. Who exactly did the deed is unknown, but it's likely a conspiracy to assassinate him brewed when he refused to heed Corlys Velaryon's advice to abdicate, instead threatening to cut off and send Rhaenyra's son Aegon (the future Aegon III)'s ear to her ally Cregan Stark as a warning, therefore dragging the conflict further. Many people, both Blacks and Greens, were tired of the war and just wanted to end it already.
• So This is Ever After: The Vile One tried to poison Arek early on, but Rion ate the soup first, with them stopping after he got violently sick. Luckily it was poorly done, so Rion survived.
• In the Lord Peter Wimsey novel Strong Poison the victim died of arsenic poisoning. It was put into the cracked egg that was made into an omelette, which he shared with his cousin (the murderer, who had built up an immunity to it over time so he could vouch that the poison wasn't in that particular meal).
• In Summers at Castle Auburn, the Crown Prince is poisoned at his wedding feast, despite his using a taste tester and without anyone else at the feast dying. Only two people figure out who did it, and only one of them figures out how: The poisoner put the poison in the main course, of which the prince was certain to have a large helping. The poisoner then put the antidote for the poison in the water pitchers. Since the prince never drank water (due to a paranoid belief that someone had tried to poison the well years previously, despite considerable evidence to the contrary), he was the only person at the feast who took the poison but did not take the antidote as well.
• In The Sword-Edged Blonde, it's done to a whole village with poisoned wine. The poison doesn't kill directly but incapacitates well enough that one mercenary can kill the whole population without resistance.
• The Syrena Legacy: When Emma and Chloe were in ninth grade, they baked laxative-laced cookies for their science teacher so they could get more time to study for an exam.
• Tea Shop Mysteries:
  • In Death by Darjeeling, Hughes Barron is killed when the murderer slips poison into his tea.
  • In Dragonwell Dead, Mark Congdon suffers what appears to be a heart attack after drinking some iced tea. It's latter confirmed that there was a toxic substance within his drink.
• Testament opens with the protagonist noticing that his cat has dropped dead after drinking from its bowl. He suddenly realises the milk has been poisoned (this was when milk was delivered to your door in bottles) but is too late to stop his wife from feeding their baby son from his baby bottle. Things don't improve from there as his family is being targeted by a right wing terrorist organization.
• Tortall Universe:
  • A friendly(?) example happens in Song of the Lioness. Alanna can't sleep before her Ordeal of Knighthood, so George slips something into her drink that sees her pass out and get some rest.
  • The Immortals has this happen several times. When Numair dines at Dunlath, the mages serve him heavily-drugged wine. Expecting just such a trick, he uses sleight of hand to get rid of it. Kaddar has an enchanted bracelet that neutralizes drugs and poisons in his food and has saved his life five times by the time he explains it to Daine. Ozorne feeds Daine pomegranate juice dosed with dreamrose to get her out of the way - he is genuinely fond of her, and thinks that their shared interest in his animals means she'll rapidly forget what he's doing to her human friends.
• In the Cormoran Strike novel Troubled Blood, this is revealed to be the M.O. of Janice Beatty, the serial poisoner who is ultimately discovered to be the culprit in the Margot Bamborough case.
• In The Underground Empire by James Mills (which may or may not be a true story), it's mentioned that a drug dealer had a habit of giving guests a bottle of Château Latour as a parting gift that he'd spiked with cocaine, LSD and orange sunshine, so they'd drive off the road to his mountain estate and crash.
• Universal Monsters: In book 6, Gavin Hurlbut recalls how Captain Bob did this to another student at the start of the school year as a prank — he stuck live earthworms into his spaghetti and then swapped his tray with a senior's, which the older student didn't discover until he found half an earthworm wiggling around in his lunch.
• The Vazula Chronicles:
  • In A Kingdom Submerged, one of the other trainees tries to kill Merletta by tricking her into eating poisonous pufferfish, which the merpeople mostly use as pest control. Sage recognizes the "unusual looking fish" and stops Merletta from eating it.
  • In A Kingdom Discovered, the villains feed hallucination-inducing bream to merpeople including Merletta.
• The Romance Novel Whisper To Me Of Love has a young woman's maid placing poison in her milk. Poison that she thinks is an antidote to a drug supposedly being given to her by her lover to trick her into a relationship with him (she has been told all this by the novel's villain, who wants to kill the heroine in order to claim her inheritance). What saves her life is the arrival of the hero, just after she's poured some milk out into a saucer for the cat. As the two sit and chat, he is horrified to see that the cat has died after drinking the tainted milk.
• In Wings of Fire, Peril has been told by Queen Scarlet that she needs to eat coal or she'll die. When Peril stops eating coal for a day, she gets sick. It isn't until later that Peril learns that she's perfectly healthy. On that day Scarlet had poisoned her food to make her go back to eating coal.
• In The Witches, the Grand High Witch gives Bruno Jenkins a candy bar laced with Formula 86, which turns people into mice. She tells him to come to the ballroom in two hours to get more chocolate; when he does, the potion kicks in. The Witches' plan is to poison enough candy to turn all of England's children into mice, but in the end, they only succeed on Bruno and the boy protagonist, who comes up with a plan involving some food tampering of his own to defeat the witches.
• Warrior Cats:
  • In Shattered Sky, Violetpaw hides poppy seeds in the prey meant for Darktail and his henchmen in order to make them fall asleep, but unfortunately she's seen doing so and they don't eat it.
  • In The Raging Storm, Juniperclaw sneaks deathberry seeds into the prey SkyClan caught in the hope of killing them. One cat falls ill but survives.
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle: The event that drives most of the plot involves a sugar bowl containing rather more arsenic than is traditional, which reduces the Blackwood family down to Merricat, Constance, and Uncle Julian, with the third only surviving the incident by a narrow margin. Constance was found innocent of the crime but is widely assumed to be responsible. It was actually Merricat, who chose sugar because she knew Constance wouldn't have any at the fatal dish.
• Wilder Girls:
  • The reason Welch throws away most of the food that arrives in the boat drops, even though the girls at the school are going hungry: to sabotage the government's efforts to conduct tests on the girls via contaminated food.
  • Headmistress has been holding back supplies and food and keeping them in her office, in case she needs to escape. Reese and Hetty are set to distribute the bottles, but notice that they have broken seals and a black powder in the bottom. It's gunpowder, which will kill whoever drinks the water.
• Whiteout (aka In Deep) by Duncan Kyle. The commander of the Eerie Arctic Research Station has an Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! moment involving his fountain pen. When the protagonist brings it up later the commander can't even remember the conversation, and they realise that the unknown villain who's been committing various acts of murder and sabotage must have spiked his food with LSD.

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