Food Chains

"Bite no bit, and drink no drop, however hungry or thirsty you are; drink a drop, or bite a bit, while in Elfland you be, and never will you see Middle Earth again."

— The Warlock Merlin, Childe Rowland

If you should ever happen to find yourself in a Metaphysical Place or another locale not entirely bound to this Earth, especially the realm of The Fair Folk or the Spirit World, under no circumstances should you eat or drink any of the native comestibles while you're there. The specific results vary, but you'll inevitably wish you hadn't.

This goes double for food that clearly belongs to someone else.

Most commonly, the results fall into four categories:

• Eating the food traps the unfortunately hungry person in the place from which it originated, either temporarily or permanently.
• After you eat the food, all human food tastes like dust or similar, and nothing else can or will ever be appetizing. In some cases, it may also have the nutritional value of dust, making regular meals not an option; with both versions, unless you have a steady supply of extranormal food, you're likely to waste away from starvation. Maybe it only tastes unappetizing by comparison.
• Eating the food brings you under the control of the entity in charge of the realm, who is typically a tyrant, if not an outright villain, they'll be one of the sociopathically amoral Fair Folk.
• Eating the food will turn you into something else, usually some creature of the realm. Oftentimes, it doubles as a skewed Karmic Transformation.

Contrast Sacred Hospitality; many cultures throughout history have considered harming someone who has eaten food under your roof to be something akin to parricide. Myths such as these may therefore have been meant to emphasize how inhuman The Fair Folk are. Compare to its supertrope Horror Hates a Rulebreaker. See also Phlebotinum Dependence.

No relation to food chains in nature, chains made of food, or fast food chains. Usually.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Plus-Sized Elf is an inversion where magical creatures find themselves trapped in the human world as the result of their fondness for human fast food making them gain too much weight to be allowed back through the dimensional portal home.
• Spirited Away has both an example and an inversion: The trope is played straight when Chihiro's parents are turned into pigs by the food at the abandoned restaurant, but Chihiro herself has to eat some of the spirit realm's food or else she'll fade out of existence. The difference is that her parents ate food that did not belong to them, gorged themselves on it, and transformed into pigs. Chihiro, on the other hand, only ate of food that was offered to her.

Comic Books

• Used throughout The Books of Magic, particularly when the main character's girlfriend accidentally eats a berry while trapped in Faerie and can't ever eat human food or touch human soil again or she'll crumble into dust. She goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge that sets much of Faerie on fire until the Faerie Queen confronts her and apologizes, giving her a bag of endless Faerie food and a levitation enchantment to compensate.
• Used as a central plot element in Walt Simonson's famed run on Marvel Comics' The Mighty Thor, where the Dark Elves of Asgard were revealed to be one and the same as The Fair Folk and enslaved many humans by tricking them into eating faerie food.

Fan Works

• At a Samhain revel in Spellbound (Lilafly), Felix sees the effect of faerie fruit on humans, including types 1 (trapped), 2 (addiction, believing it to be the best thing they've ever tasted, even though to Felix's eyes it's clear that the fruit is rotten), and 4 (involuntary shapeshifting into an animal such as a deer, typically followed by the fae releasing hounds and hunting them). And if a human refuses to eat it? That's easy to deal with; the fae are stronger and will just force-feed them. There may also be type 3 (control), although it's unclear whether it's direct control or merely "do as we say if you want any more of the fruit you're now addicted to."
  When she was done, she looked at the faeries and started begging for more. They just laughed and said she had to do something for them first. She eagerly agreed, without knowing what she agreed to.
  The ladybug girl let go of his face and Félix did not waste a second to avert his gaze, as the fair ones had just told the girl to strip off her clothes and get on all fours.

Film — Animated

• After George eats a faery cake in Faeries, he has to stay in the faery world until he and his sister have performed three tasks.
• Monsters, Inc.: One of the DVD bonus features explains that monsters were an ancient tribe of hominids that were driven away from the mainland by the earliest humans and stumbled upon an enchanted island and started taking on strange shapes and sizes from the fruit and vegetables growing there. Upon realizing their newfound monstrous looks, they decided it was time to take revenge on humanity by scaring them.

Film — Live-Action

• In Pan's Labyrinth, Ophelia is told not to eat any food while taking the second challenge. She eats a few bits of fruit off the table, and wakes the Pale Man.
• Troll 2: Anything served to visitors in the town of Nilbog will turn them into food for the Goblins that live there.

Gamebooks

• Completely averted in Book 11 of the Lone Wolf series. All of the food Lone Wolf finds during his stay in the Daziarn is delicious and nutritious despite being unlike anything he's ever eaten in his plane of reality, and there are no consequences whatsoever after eating it. The people in the Daziarn who offer him food and drink are pretty friendly too. Ironically, Lone Wolf is more at risk accepting food and drink from others in his own dimension since it tends to be drugged/poisoned.

Literature

By Author:

• Piers Anthony
  • A variant occurs in the Mode series — if you eat something in a universe which isn't your own, that makes it harder to leave that universe for a few hours, mostly because you can't transport anything across modes that doesn't originate from an anchor mode meaning that you will "drop" the half digested food at the mode boundary. You can wait for it to digest completely but you should avoid doing that too often because your body will slowly become made up of enough of that mode's substance to cause you to lose your connection to the virtual mode and get trapped there.
  • The same trope appears in the Xanth series: eating the food in the dream world traps a person there (at least, that's what they always said...) No one was ever trapped in the dream realm in the books, but after Nada Naga drank a few drops of wine there, she wound up having to work for the demons. When she threatened to quit, they told her that she was obligated to the dream realm for drinking the wine, and that they'd "acquired the option" on her service. It was implied that if the demons hadn't needed her, she'd have been stuck in the dream realm for a few years, and that if she'd had more than a few drops it could have been permanent.
  • Referenced in On a Pale Horse, where Zane refuses to eat anything in Hades, fearing this.

By Work:

• Alice in Wonderland: Any food or drink Alice takes in Wonderland makes her grow or shrink.
• Bone Chillers had one issue "Back to School" involving a school cook who serves extremely delicious and addictive food. It's eventually revealed that the cook is a giant insect who puts larvae in her food for the school children to eat, incubating in the hosts' bodies until they're ready to burst out once they've served their purpose. The cook is only stopped by the efforts of the protagonist (who was infected with the larvae) and a fellow schoolmate who was allergic to anything besides specially prepared lunches.
• Callahan's Crosstime Saloon: In "Mirror, Mirror, Off the Wall", we're The Fair Folk in the equation: when the reverse-timeline Robert Trebor visits our world, he can eat our food but not metabolize it. He has to keep a small stash of his own world's food on hand to keep from starving. He plans to market reverse-timeline food as a diet aid.
• The Chronicles of Narnia
  • Subverted in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The heroes find a feast in the middle of some ruins on an island near the end of the world, along with three sleeping men who have obviously been sleeping there for a long time. The heroes, reasonably enough, assume that the men's enchanted sleep was caused by eating the food; because the men are the missing lords Caspian was searching for, they also resolve to sit at the feast all night in case that could break the enchantment. Turns out, the men never ate any of the food; their sleep was punishment for attempted violence in a holy place. The owner of the island and his daughter tell them how to break the enchanted sleep and invites them to winter on the island, which most of them end up doing, with no ill consequences.
  • The Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, binds the eater to the White Witch. When Edmund eats it, Aslan has to pay a steep price to free him.
  • And the Forbidden Fruit in The Magician's Nephew grants your heart's desire but, when eaten without Aslan's permission, also causes despair.
• Discworld:
  • In The Wee Free Men, if you eat when a drome has trapped you in a dreamworld, you'll never get out.Unless you're one of the title characters. They can get out of anything... though taverns, they will admit, are occasionally a problem.
  • Eating in Fairyland itself seems to be safe, though; Wentworth and Roland are able to leave despite having both been stuffed with sweets by the Elf Queen.
• Dragonback has the concept of the squatter poison; once it's fed to you, you need to be given the antidote daily or die. Dragon and Slave does not say whether it has an expiration date.
• Dragons in Our Midst: In the third book, when Billy and Bonnie are traveling through the seven circles of Hell, they are warned that no food is safe to eat past a certain point. They encounter the Tree of Knowledge from the Bible, which always has one fruit hanging from it for each person around. Billy encounters a man at a table where Impossibly Delicious Food is regularly brought and has no interest in leaving or doing anything but eat and wait for more food. In the next book, Bonnie says that when she died and went to heaven, she learned she was going to come back to life when an angel warned her not to eat from the Tree of Life, because mortal food would never taste good again if she did.
• In Andre Norton's Dread Companion, the local food both acts as a Forced Transformation and gives a distaste for human food.
• The Dresden Files:
  • In Summer Knight, Harry tells Billy to not eat or drink anything while they meet with some Sidhe, a fairy species. Accepting food or drink counts as accepting a favor, and it's an excellent way for them to get their claws into somebody. Apparently, however, you can use the ice cold water to bring your libido to its senses without it counting against you.
  • In Cold Days, Harry's working for the Winter Court. Since he's spending that time officially within Queen Mab's hierarchy, he can gain and perform favors and services without accruing a running debt, something that was hinted at throughout previous works. Another fae, Cat Sith, was appointed to be Harry's "butler", meaning he could request a perfectly mundane sandwich and can of Coca Cola without it counting. The same book also implies that Faerie food has enchantments on it to ensnare people.
• Dune: The Harkonnens poison Thufir Hawat with a poison that will kill him unless he takes an antidote (whose supply they control) every day for the rest of his life.
• Discussed in Everworld: while escaping from Hel's domain (which, yeah, is pretty much hell), Christopher stops to drink some water coming from the cave wall. Senna casually says "Persephone," and Jalil immediately stops him, explaining the story. At that point, everyone but Senna is too afraid to drink anything, despite their thirst.
• The Fifth Sacred Thing has a non-magical example similar to the Dragonback example above: the Steward's armies are reliant on a certain 'chip' mixed with medicine that'll kill them if they stop taking it, keeping them from desertion. It comes back to bite them when the City's scientists find a way to nullify its effects.
• Fairy food in The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making constitutes a binding magical contract that means the person who eats it has to return once a year.
• Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti has the 'tastes like dust' variant.
• In Delia Sherman's short story "Grand Central Park", the Queen of Central Park offers the protagonist food. She refuses because she reads fairy tales.
• The namesake short story of Instead of Three Wishes has an Inverted version in play. Selene (a human) does a small favor for the Elf Prince Mechemel, but rejects all of his attempts to repay her with ostentatious and impractical gifts. Mechemel disguises himself as a human and rents out the spare room in Selene's house to gain insight into what sort of gift she might accept. After avoiding "disgusting" human food for some weeks he tastes one of Selene's homemade scones and becomes enraptured by her baking. Mechemel finds reasons to extend his stay in the human realm and continue enjoying Selene's cookery until he finally hits on the idea to provide a scholarship for Selene to attend a prestigious culinary school she couldn't otherwise afford (on the condition that she spend summer breaks working as his personal pâtissier).
• Journey to Chaos: When Eric travels from his mundane world of Threa to the magical world of Tariatla, he is amazed at both the flavor of the food and drink he finds and how it invigorates him. When he makes a return trip to his homeworld, the native food and drink is both tasteless and unsatisfying. This even applies to the air, so he constantly feels like he's suffocating. This is his most visceral motivation for finding a way back to Tariatla.
• Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales frequently invokes this, not just because eating Fae food will bring you into their thrall, but because it's likely that the delicious-looking food is really just a glamorized rock or pile of old mushrooms.
• In "Continuing Education", a short story in The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity, a tribe of The Fair Folk are recruiting dissatisfied humans (to learn about the modern world, and teach their ways) by posing as faculty at a college MBA program. Accepting food from one of them constitutes acceptance of their terms. One of the fae tries to trick the protagonist into eating, as it was done in the old days, while another reprimands her and explains the process openly. The protagonist accepts his food in an informed decision.
• October Daye: In Chimes at Midnight, Toby gets a Pie in the Face from her enemies and becomes addicted to goblin fruit.
• In The Once and Future King, young Wart and Kay go into Morgan le Fay's castle, which is made entirely of food, with specific instructions not to eat any of it for this reason. Fortunately, they don't.
• In Paranormalcy, Faerie food is like this. Jack is a changeling taken as a baby, and because of that, human food tastes bad to him.
• Mentioned in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, when Percy is warned by Zoe Nightshade not to eat anything from the garden of Hesperides. The characters also briefly see some of the pomegranates that Persephone ate.
• Rivers of London:
  • Peter Grant goes to interview Mother Thames, and is told not to eat or drink anything while he's there or he'll fall under her power. She keeps trying to feed him, but seems to view it more as a game than anything, and is in no way insulted when he refuses.
  • While it is played almost for laughs with Peter, Mama Thames has a servant who used to be a Bailiff that came around in the 1970s and accepted a cookie. The book is set in 2012.
  • Mama Thames' daughter Tyburn also tries to Mind Control Peter into drinking water from her fountain and binding him to her will.
  • In general, people in the supernatural world are very serious about reassuring guests that taking food or drink from them won't put them under an obligation. One of the books suggests that nobody (the Rivers themselves included) is entirely sure it's necessary every time, but they aren't taking chances.
• In The Spiderwick Chronicles, Lucinda Spiderwick had made the mistake of eating Faerie Food, and is no longer able to eat human food. But that wasn't in the Faerie Realm. This is clearly the "tastes like dust" or "Impossibly Delicious Food" variety, though - the mere sight of it is enough to make one of the other human characters go into a trance-like state and muse "What's the harm in a single bite?"
• Inverted in Thornhedge: Toadling was taken by the fairies as a newborn before she consumed any human food, even her mother's milk, so her new life in the Land of Faerie caused her to become a fairy.
• In Ruth Frances Long's The Treachery of Beautiful Things, food found in the Land of Faerie is fine. It's when any of The Fair Folk prepare it — even without ill will — that it chains you.
• Under the Pendulum Sun: Food in the Land of Faerie is made safe by salt from human lands, poured by human hands. Some dishes literally give up and lose their Glamour as the salt touches them. One character tried receiving communion unsalted as a gesture of faith, and was bound to the Faelands as a result.
• Variation in Welkin Weasels: the weasels are trapped in Hunters' Hall, which they are told is the land of the dead, and that once they have eaten the food they can't leave. It was an illusion created by an evil witch. The food is heavily drugged, which makes them too lethargic to attempt escape without being caught.

Live-Action TV

• Subverted in Beyond the Walls: The only way to keep your sanity and resist the House is to eat the bread you find in there.
• In Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod and Abbie enter purgatory and find themselves in a Lotus-Eater Machine where they never became Witnesses. If they eat the food offered they are trapped in purgatory forever, but by rejecting the food they break out of the dream.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Kai Opaka journeys to a planet where she is killed, but microbes in the atmosphere bring her back to life and heal her. The catch is that, in order to continue living, she can never leave that planet.
• In True Blood, any human who eats the light-fruit can never leave Fairyland without turning to dust.

Myth, Legend and Folklore

• The Forbidden Fruit from The Bible, which trapped Adam and Eve (and all their descendants) in sin.
• When the title hero of "Childe Rowland" goes to Elfland to rescue his kidnapped sister, Merlin warns him that eating or drinking anything in Elfland will render him unable to return to the human world forever.
• Chinese Mythology features a literal example. Once there was a Goddess, Shui Mu Niang Niang (roughly meaning "Old Water Mother") who was constantly, and rightly antagonized by the Celestial Bureaucracy due to her hobby of causing devastating floods with her magic buckets. After the latest attempt to stop her by having a disguised god use his donkey to try and fail to drain one of her buckets dry, Shui Mu retaliated by overturning her other bucket and casually obliterating a city, Ssu-Chou, forming what is now the Lake Hung-tse. The Goddess of Mercy, Guan Yin, was then tasked to subdue the Water Mother. Guan Yin did this by disguising herself as a noodle vendor, and convinced Shui Mu to try some of her noodles. When Shui Mu was halfway finished, all of her noodles turned into iron chains, including the ones she had eaten. The chains then magically dragged the Water Mother down a well, fastening her to the very bottom. People visit the well where Shui Mu is still imprisoned, and it's often said that when the well water is very low, you can see the ends of her chains.
• Classical Mythology:
  • The Metamorphoses: When Proserpina has been carried off by Pluto and her mother Ceres asks Jupiter to order Pluto to release her, Jupiter declares that Pluto must let Proserpina go unless she has eaten anything in the underworld, claiming this condition has been imposed by the Parcae (Fates). It turns out a certain Ascalaphus has seen Proserpina eat seven pomegranate seeds in the underworld and he tattles it to Pluto. On account of this, Proserpina is forced to spend six months out of every year in the underworld. Ceres, goddess of the harvest, gets depressed when she's gone, and now we have seasons.
  • The Odyssey: When Odysseus and his crew encountered Circe, the men who ate Circe's food, which they were magically compelled to eat, were transformed into beasts, notably pigs. Odysseus himself only escaped this curse because Mercury, the messenger of the gods, provided him with an antidote beforehand. Despite his rage, he had to act in a perfectly civil and polite manner, as befits Sacred Hospitality. Because Circe could not harm him directly, she made one night, where he was outright commanded to sleep with her in exchange for changing his crew back into men, into seven years for the outside world. Odysseus understandably put a knife to her throat and left her island quite bitter and angry.
• Gesta Danorum: Passing through the realm of the giant Gudmund on their journey to Geirrodsgard, Thorkill warns his companions that any mortal who eats the food offered by Gudmund will lose his memory and can never leave Gudmund's realm again. Gudmund meanwhile invites them to a banquet and urges them to try the fruits in his orchard, forcing Thorkill to contrive excuses for not eating anything.
• Izanami from Japanese creation mythology is forced to remain in the underworld (Yomi) after eating there when Izanagi tries to rescue her.
• There is a Swiss legend about a man who falls into a crevice in the mountains and couldn't get out. To his horror, he notices that there are two dragons living in the hole, but he is surprised that they don't attack him but instead feed on the salt (or gold) that covers the cave's walls. The man survives for several months by doing the same, and when spring comes, he manages to escape by clinging onto one of the dragon's tails when they leave the crevice. But when he returns home, he finds that normal food doesn't taste good anymore, falls ill and dies soon. In at least one version, people find a big amount of gold in his stomache after his death.
• In Filipino folklore, be wary of eating food in strange homes. If the host is an aswang, the food they would serve is infected, and would turn you into one of them.

Tabletop Games

• Changeling: The Lost: One of the ways in which a mortal might catch the attention of the True Fae (resulting in kidnap and durance) is by eating food the Fae's claimed as its own. Also, some of the fluff indicates that humans transform into Changelings in Arcadia, in part, by eating the food, drinking the water, and breathing the air; this is because Arcadia operates under contract law, so in order to gain nourishment from any of those elements, you must become a willing signatory to their respective Contracts — and, in doing so, become an entity of Arcadia.
  • This trope shows up a lot in the game. One of the major forms of consumable magic items are various forms of Goblin Fruit — ie, fruits grown by goblins, or fruits that are goblins. Generic fruits are usually benign, either healing damage (in 1e) or providing Glamour (2e), but there's a large variety of potential effects, from "useful" to "useful but with a drawback" to "mostly a drawback but some upside" to "horrible curse." There are bad fruits that resemble (or are outright indistinguishable from) good fruits, and fruits with the most potent effects are invariably either found out in The Thorns, are claimed by someone/something, or both. Eating random Goblin Fruits you come across in The Hedge can be quite a crapshoot without some occult knowledge. Eating nothing but Goblin Fruits for a period of time is bad for a person's mental Clarity, even if you're subsisting on benign fruits, and eating Goblin Fruits that are claimed is a good way to rack up Goblin Debt, even if you never meet the owner. Caveat comestor.
  • The Chalice Regalia introduced in "Kith & Kin" has a Contract called Feast of Plenty that creates a grand banquet out of thin air with food that has magical effects (or is just tasty)...and then puts everyone who eats the food you created in your debt.
• In GURPS Time Travel, Time Agents need to be very careful not to eat or drink anything in past-time. Sure, you can leave past-time whenever you want ... but matter from past-time stays in past-time, even if it's been broken down into proteins and incorporated into a Time Agent's body. The consequences are ... messy.
• In Exalted, this is one of the rules Guild traders must obey when visiting Goblin Bazaars, lest they will be forced to stay along with the slaves they came there to sell and get their souls drained. Note that this isn't anything special or metaphysical, Raksha just want more slaves and built it as a trap into the agreement - and only in the Bazaars, other Freeholds are free to do whatever they want.
• Warhammer 40,000: The Palace of Pleasure, realm of the Chaos God Slaanesh, is made of six concentric circles that tempt travelers with different vices. The second, the Circle of Gluttony, tempts them with the most lavish feast they had ever seen. Everything from the most exotic fruits, rich breads, and the finest meats all arranged on collection of islands atop a sea of intoxicating wine. As soon as any of it touches your tongue, you won't be able to stop yourself. You'll either sink drunkenly into the wine and drown or sit at the table forcefully stuffing yourself until your body gives out. The feast is littered with countless corpses, which often become part of the feast itself.

Theatre

• In Jasper in Deadland, Lethe-brand water slowly erases the memories of anyone who drinks it, a fact that almost no one in Deadland knows because they keep forgetting that the memory loss is caused by the water and not Deadland itself. This is particularly dangerous for Jasper because after drinking it, he has to get out of Deadland with his friend Agnes before he forgets who she is or who he is.

Video Games

• In Arthur's Knights - Tales of Chivalry - on both paths - upon ending up in Avalon, Branwyn's squire accepts a gift from a fairy. The guy got turned into a giant mushroom for it.
• Planescape: Torment has a sensory stone called "slowly dawning horror," featuring a wine so good that once someone has tasted it they'll do anything for another taste.
• Beware The Faerie Food You Eat has it right in the title, and an unusual interpretation of the classic myth: if you are silly enough to accept the offered faerie-water, literally anything from the Faerie realm becomes Impossibly Delicious Food. The faeries naturally take advantage of this and find it hilarious to feed you rotten apples, leftovers, garbage, and similar. Oh, and while they're impossibly delicious, no-one said anything about their nutritional value improving...
• Subverted in Final Fantasy VI. Sabin and Cyan can eat a meal aboard the Phantom Train which ferries the dead to the other side; Cyan expresses great alarm due to this trope, yet Sabin seems unworried. It turns out to not only be harmless but equivalient to sleeping in a Trauma Inn.
• An interesting sci-fi example in Mass Effect 2 occurs when Jacob discovers the full story of what happenned to his father: his ship crash-landed on a remote planet faraway from any sort of civilization, and, while the native plantlife was perfectly edible, it had nasty side-effects such as amnesia, reduced mental capacity, and vulnerability to suggestion. Rather than avoid the food completely and try to survive off their ship's own rations, however, the command staff, Jacob's father included, instead elected to keep the rations for themselves and make the lower crew members survive off the native food, more or less intentionally turning them into simple-minded slaves. The initial rational is that the command staff need to maintain their mental faculties in order to repair the distress beacon, but after the the beacon was repaired they didn't turn it on and all the command staff besides Jacob's father died "mysteriously". Jacob's father then spent the next few years using the women of the ship as his personal sex slaves. Jacob is...less than pleased with his father when he finds out.
• The "meol" given out by Eulmore in Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers rather obviously controls the populace by being the bread in a Bread and Circuses scheme. Since most of Norvrandt is destroyed thanks to the Flood of Light and the sin eaters that spawned from it, its economy barely even exists anymore, making a relatively easy source of food incredibly appealing to anyone. Less obviously, meol infects all who eat it with primordial Light due to it being made out of sin eaters, slowly turning the people eating them into sin eaters themselves and making them susceptible to Vauthry's ability to mind control such creatures.

Webcomics

• A variation/subversion in Sluggy Freelance: the demon food in the Dimension of Champagne does not tie you to the dimension (the demons do that with, y'know, chains) but its calories can never be exercised off afterwards. Women in particular do not take this revelation very well...
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: The trope gets an implied passing mention when Reynir gets offered a hot drink in the spirit world by a dead Christian priest, and asks Onni if it's okay to drink it. Onni says it's okay and actually helps himself to some cake a little later.
• In A-gnosis' comics on Greek myth, Persephone is curious about invoking the trope with the food of The Underworld, as the metaphysical link to the realm of the dead could be a perfect Fantasy Contraception without any side effects that would matter to her.

Web Original

• Like in the original myth about Persephone and Hades, in Receiver of Many eating the food of the dead binds one permanently to the Underworld. But how long someone may be forced to spend there each year appears to depend on the amount of food eaten. It's suggested that Persephone's six seeds aren't enough to keep her in the Underworld for six whole months, even if the Pomegranate Agreement states that she shall spent half a year with her husband underground and half a year with Demeter on the surface.
• The HitRECord urban-fantasy Moonflowers involves The Wild Hunt. The Hunter (their leader) disguises himself as Alima's friend Malachy and gives her an orange, before saying he'll drive her home. Once the Hunter reveals himself and escapes her attempt to stab him, a police officer finds Malachy's car in a freeway ditch, with Alima semi-conscious. The officer mentions that people have been looking for her for an hour.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-1323 ("A County Fair") appears to be a carnival run by The Fair Folk and anyone who eats food there has a 17% chance of becoming a permanent employee.
  • When exploring the forest that should not be named, one should only consume the rations brought in one's own backpack. It's safe to accept food given by a native entity, but this should only be used to feed another inhabitant of the forest.
  • SCP 294 can, if a "perfect drink" is requested from it, produce a drink that falls into the second category of this trope.
• In Dimension 20's A Court of Fey and Flowers campaign before meeting Gwyndolin no one took the time to reassure the Wanessa, human "guest" of the Sea Foam Court, that she can eat without being somehow indebted or ensorcelled, so the only thing she's had is the trail mix she brought with her. She is very hungry.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time:
  • In "Dad's Dungeon", Finn almost eats an apple that's part of a "flower trap", but Jake grabs it from him and forces one of the witches there to tempt them to eat it instead. Apparently it turns the eater into a giant fruit, which is then consumed by the other witches (for an added Nightmare Fuel bonus, when they finish eating you can see bones sticking out a fleshy-looking core). Finn was savvy to do this, but was put off by a feeling of despair (the dungeon was created by their father to toughen Finn up and Jake reluctantly complying with their father's wishes, though, tells Finn soon enough).
  • In "Death in Bloom" Jake wants to drink from a river in the Land of The Dead, which turns out to erase your memory.
    Talking Skull: Yesss... drink the water.
    Finn: Whoa. Okay, Jake, don't drink the water!
    Jake: Aww, c'mon, I'm so thirsty!
    Finn: Dude! That skull wants you to drink the water! It's bad water!
    Talking Skull: Don't drink the water.
    Jake: See? That means good, right?
  • The episode 'Puhoy' deals with Finn getting trapped in an alternate pillow-world and living an entire life there. While the food itself isn't to blame, its not a coincidence that the last scene we have with young!Finn is him eating some pillow-food.
• In Rick and Morty "The Wedding Squanchers", while never clearly stated, the way that Rick bats the food out of Summer and Morty's hands on cob planet before fleeing in a panic suggests that either ingesting the food there or even spending too much time there might have biologically dire consequences.
• On Sabrina: The Animated Series, some fairy friends of Sabrina's come to the mortal world disguised as humans, but don't like Chloe or Harvey. They secretly lure them to the fairy world (disguised as just an ordinary room) and try to trick them into eating so that they'll never be able to come back. Sabrina finds out and stops them before it happens.

Other

• In Egypt there is a very common saying ("Law sherebt min Nilha", " If you drank from [her] Nile") which implies that anyone who has drank water from the Nile is bound to love Egypt and return. It is also the name of a very famous song.

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