Food Eats You

It's simple, we eat the Batman.

"Ah, the Leaky Cauldron. If you have the pea soup, make sure you eat it before it eats you!"

— Shrunken Head, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Food becomes sentient and begins fighting and killing. One can often expect it to be many times its normal size and armed with fangs and claws. This may be the result of It Came from the Fridge, Lethal Chef, or Raising the Steaks, and in some cases may overlap with Anthropomorphic Food.

Not to be confused with food from Soviet Russia. Subtrope of Attack of the Killer Whatever, and almost always played for laughs. Compare Edible Ammunition and Edible Bludgeon (where otherwise normal weapons are made out of food products). Often an enemy found in Level Ate. Fed to Pigs is a related trope; many people eat pork, but in this case pigs eat us.

Not surprisingly, the characters faced with such horrific hors d'oeuvres will find the best way to stop them for good is to put the malicious munchies in their place. You can always count on the cast's Big Eater or Extreme Omnivore to take care of this.

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Examples:

Advertising

• This Tums Smoothies commercial, as part of a series of similar advertisements.
• Two of the taglines for Wendy's Baconator burger were "It can smell fear." and "Eat it. Before it eats you."

Anime & Manga

• One Doraemon issue had Nobita and Doraemon starting a farm that produces sentient, living candy that becomes edible the moment they're harvested, which they kept to themselves... until Suneo and Gian, the two bullies, stumbled upon the candy farm and began stealing from them. When Nobita noted that some of their candies were missing, Doraemon retaliated by bringing out the guard dogs — giant sticks of sentient bubblegum, which gobbled up Suneo and Gian, to their horror.
• In Humanity Has Declined, headless, featherless, somewhat-intelligent, Corrupt Corporate Executive chickens attempt to do this, and fail horribly.

Comic Books

• Pig-Iron, the lancer of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!, wanders off while his teammates are talking about aliens using Earth as a dumping site for bizarre eggs, leaving a warning never to open them or else. Pig-Iron finds one of the eggs in the fridge and cracks it open to eat it, revealing an ordinary-looking egg. Which attacks him, flees out the window, and rapidly grows to kaiju-size.
• In the French comic Mélusine (the story of an apprentice witch during the Middle Ages), the transfiguration teacher reports that during a previous lesson, he made his pupils prepare a whole meal by magic. The roast suddenly came back to life and devoured all the guests. Now the school still provides cooking lessons but without a hint of magic...
• In Sturmtruppen the battalion's cook managed to cause it twice:
  • On the first occasion he experimented a bit with the lunch after reading Frankenstein, culminating in cooking with lightning, resulting in the soup mutating into a hostile blob creature that ate at least one soldier before being eaten itself.
  • On the second occasion he somehow procured living and rather short-tempered spaghetti, and when the sergeant insulted him he had the spaghetti attack him with bites.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Rykornians are an odd play on this, as technically they're giant corn aliens that try to attack the earth, it's just that the bodies that do the talking have a pyramid head and a rhombus body, while the more corn looking counterparts are more like attack tentacles.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes has this at least once — or at least, Calvin getting into a fight with his food. This actually happens in one comic that features an Imagine Spot where Calvin's supper gobbles him up, to the delight of his parents. Cut to Calvin accusing his mother of trying to kill him with her cooking.

Films — Animation

• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs:
  • The giant chickens towards the end. One of them even eats Brent. Fortunately, Brent survives and overtakes its body.
  • This continues with the "foodimals" of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. Villainous Chester V is eaten by a cheespider, leaving nothing but his bright orange vest behind.
• Pastacolypse features pasta creatures of various sizes created by Alfredo Manicotti and under his orders, violently kill anyone in their way with their sharp teeth.

Films — Live-Action

• Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Krylar offers Hank, Janet, and Hope drinks each containing a little tentacled creature that reacts in fear of getting eaten. They decline, while Krylar gulps one down. After Krylar betrays them, Janet throws a Pym Particle disc at one of the creatures causing it to grow to huge size. The last thing we see of Krylar, he's caught in its tentacles and being pulled towards it.
• Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is this trope: the movie.
• In Big Tits Zombie, one of the first signs that the Zombie Apocalypse is happening is when the main characters are attacked by zombie sushi.
• Dead Sushi features killer sushi.
• The fifth Fantaghirò movie has all fruit and vegetables attack humans on sight. After Fantaghiro defeats a bucketful of apples by stewing them into applesauce, the applesauce tries to devour a child as well.
• Night Of The Living Bread is a parody of Night of the Living Dead (1968) where a bakery explosion causes all manner of bread products to animate and smother people to death.
• In Scary Movie 2, it's "Weed Smokes You", as Shorty's cannabis plant gets possessed, grows to gargantuan size, rolls him up in his blanket, and starts smoking him like a gigantic spliff. Amusingly enough, Shorty himself is also getting high from this. The other characters convince the plant to give up Shorty by giving it some munchies.
• The Stuff is built entirely on this trope.
• Young Sherlock Holmes. Watson has a drug-caused hallucination of being attacked by bakery products.

Literature

• Time travelers have warned Thursday Next about a possible apocalypse where the entire world is covered in a strange, unidentified substance. It turns out to be Dream Topping, a food similar to Cool Whip. It would be the first time, and the last, that someone heard about the Grey Goo scenario and decided it sounded like a great way to save money on sweets manufacturing.
• This happens in Vegemorphs, a parody of Animorphs.

Live-Action TV

• On The Colbert Report, the graphic for the segment "Thought for Food" shows a brain (with eyes) thinking about a burger (with eyes). The burger then jumps from the thought cloud and swallows the brain whole.
• Played for laughs on Mystery Science Theater 3000 when Crow is inspired to write his own giant monster movie, which he titles Earth vs. Soup, in which a batch of Uranium-235 gets into some California Cornucopia Vegetable Jubilee, turning it into a giant man-eating monster.
• The Thanksgiving episode of the short-lived post-apocalyptic Situation Comedy Woops featured a giant mutated turkey.

Puppet Shows

• Happened regularly to the Swedish Chef in The Muppets, though one can question the sentience of the food (it does have something against being cooked and eaten). Not only did live animals he was trying to cook fight back, but so did spaghetti, and so on...

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons adventure Castle Greyhawk, Level 3 "Too Many Cooks". Magic cooking instruments are used to create food monsters that attack and try to kill the PC party.
• The Toon adventure "Mars Needs Creampuffs" has a Martian baker named Do-Nut as its Big Bad. Cooking up killer food to help destroy the Earth is his entire schtick.
• The Hungry Burger card in Yu-Gi-Oh! sometimes gets described as this in any video game where it receives a description at all.

Video Games

• BurgerTime has the poor burger chef menaced by giant hot dogs, eggs, and pickle chips. Their slightest touch is instant death.
• Played for Laughs in the Fate/Grand Order event "Saber Wars II". The Master's crew landed on an out-of-the-way restaurant after being robbed by monkeys and is treated to a meal of still-living monsters that tried to eat them, courtesy of the cook who is an amnesiac Gawain.
• In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, the bros have to fight the Chuckolator, a monster made of living cola that grows stronger whenever it's told jokes. It's an interesting setup for a boss battle, that's for sure.
• Miitopia has Mii-eyed hamburgers as enemies which can swallow your party members. Gross.
• In Paper Mario: Color Splash, Mario has to cook a huge steak for some renowned food critic (later revealed to be Larry of the Koopalings) at Tangerino Grill. Easy as pie you might say. Except the steak apparently isn't pleased with it and starts fighting you.
• Super Mario RPG has Bundt, a living wedding cake that inexplicably comes to life after the main party crashed the reception to rescue Princess Peach. The chefs who made the thing are every bit as surprised as you are.
• In the Team Fortress 2 video "Expiration Date", the mercs accidentally turn a loaf of bread into a giant abomination that attacks them and swallows Scout and Miss Pauling. (They're all right after the rest kill it and cut them out, as said abomination didn't actually have any sort of digestive system.)

Web Original

• The page image comes from El Cid's short, "Hotdog Eats a Batman", which makes marginally more sense if you're aware that it's a Just the Introduction to the Opposites followup to an earlier short, "Batman Eats a Hotdog".
• Gummy Neopets are described as the creations of a mad scientist who envisioned them as companions that you could eat as snacks. The first example was perfectly harmless ... until the scientist decided to use it for its second purpose. Food Eats You, indeed.
• One of mark3611's Youtube Poops, Big City Sliders Attack Your Family.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time has killer hotdogs and killer hamburgers in one dungeon. (Any evil Candy People don't count.)
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: when DNA from a giant moth monster is accidentally mixed with a tray of brownies in Frylock's cloner, the team is attacked by a swarm of brownie monsters.
  • Of course, the Aqua Teens themselves—walking, talking fast food items—aren't all that nice, either. They're usually not genocidal, at least...
• One episode of Archie's Weird Mysteries featured a Blob Monster made of tapioca pudding that, akin to The Blob (1958), sought to devour the entire town and grew every time it got it's pseudopods on a fresh victim. Thankfully, unlike The Blob, the victims it devoured were still alive, albeit running out of time as the air pockets inside the creature wouldn't last forever.
• In one episode of Arthur, Binky has a nightmare that he's being chased by giant living burgers, which presumably want to eat him.
• Sokka has a nightmare about this in an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender and is terrified it might come true.
• In the Dan Vs. episode "Dan Vs. Vegetables", Dan sets off a gene-scrambler in a field of broccoli, creating a giant broccoli monster, whose first instinct is to eat Dan.
• Happens several times in Dave the Barbarian. There's the Pretzel-men (created by a villain), the various evil foods Dave makes via the evil Cuisinum Mysterium cookbook, and a pair of giant muffin monsters, whose presence is never explained.
• DuckTales (1987): In "Nothing to Fear", a giant banana monster threatens to eat Doofus Drake. It Makes Sense in Context.
• Hambuster is a CGI short film depicting a carnivorous-hamburger apocalypse. It just gets worse from there...
• In Regular Show, a group of sentient, Faux Affably Evil hot dogs try to eat the gang as revenge for their fallen brethren.
• An the "Black Hole" episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show, Cadet Stimpy serves Commander Hoek a nice, stinky head of Space Cabbage while they are lost in the titular hole. As Hoek attempts to take a bite, the Cabbage suddenly comes to life, roars, and chomps down on his head first.
• In one episode of the 1993 Secret Squirrel revival Super Secret Secret Squirrel, the antagonist is a living gingerbread man named Greg with a grudge against children since his leg was bitten off by a hungry child. To this end, he created a gigantic golem made out of candy that would eat children and tried feeding Secret and Morocco to it as its first meals. Unfortunately for Greg, the golem is still ultimately made out of candy — Secret and Morocco defeat it simply by eating it.
• The Simpsons has a few examples:
  • In a school educational film about the food chain host Troy McClure tells a child "if a cow ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about!"
  • In a Treehouse of Horror episode, Homer gets eaten by a giant donut.
  • Referenced in "Bart vs Australia" when Lisa sarcastically tells Bart that hamburgers eat people in the country of Rand McNally.
• Steven Universe: The climax of "Together Breakfast" involves Steven's Together Breakfast being possessed by a malicious entity and attacking the Crystal Gems. Later, they decided not to eat waffles for a while and ordered a pizza.

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