This page contains unmarked spoilers. You Have Been Warned!
While Food Wars revolves around Soma Yukihira and his adventures to become a top chef at Totsuki Academy, there are some frightening moments in this series.
- Subaru Mimasaka, also known as "the king of stalkers". His special skill is observing his opponent before a Shokugeki, learning everything he can about them in order to replicate their recipe and improve upon it. This means following his opponent wherever they go, sometimes even hiding in the same room as they are in order to spy on them.
- Erina's abusive and corrupt father, Azami Nakiri, is responsible for a lot of nightmare fuel. He can catch people off-guard.
- For example, he would take the young Erina into a dark room, where she would have to determine which of two dishes is superior, and throw the inferior one into the trash. If she disobeyed, he would strong-arm her into compliance. Azami effectively corrupted her into becoming the legendarily harsh food critic she is by the time the story begins. For several years, it became a Trauma Button for Erina.
- He blackmails people into helping him by twisting influence that threatens their jobs, their homes, and/or their family's livelihood, like he with Akira and the Shinomai's seminar.
- The way he recruits Tsuaka is by basically by stalking him and exploiting his insecurities. One of those occasions is by driving up to him out of nowhere and inviting him to go for a drink; that couldn't be more blatant stranger-danger.
- Monarch, the dark chef. In the world he lives in, it's either make a fantastic meal or die. He's so psychotic that he intimidated the mafia men who hired him, claiming that they were all "subjects" before his food.
- Erina getting kidnapped by the Dark Chef Saiba and becoming a prisoner before several menacing-looking dark chefs, one of which is wielding a chainsaw. No one even knows that she's gone.
- Asahi's childhood, as revealed by Chapter 289, is bleak enough to serve as a titanic Mood Whiplash for the entire story. He never knew his father, either because he died or left his mother, and his mother was an abusive drunk who would fill up the sink and shove his head in as punishment while screaming about how he should never have been born. It says something that his life only takes a turn for the better after she died, likely from alcohol poisoning.
- This is made worse when Asahi discovers his father's true identity: Azami Nakiri. That means Asahi was wooing Erina into marrying him without knowing that she is his half-sister this entire time, which would have led to Brother–Sister Incest if Soma hadn't defeated Asahi. Fortunately, Azami and Erina welcome Asahi.
- Mana Nakiri's situation caught quite a few people off-guard. Her life is an never-ending hell due to an eating-disorder born from a genetic defect in her bloodline, the "God Tongue", which rendered her incapable of experiencing taste after a overexposure to culinary stimuli through it. She can't even eat ordinary food any more, and survives each day by getting strapped up to an IV with the necessary essentials through it. Not to mention the indication that all Nakiri's born with the defect eventually end up starving to death in agony once the over-exposure reaches beyond its critical point. Imagine that life. And one of the main characters has the defect.
- Even though it was a polarizing reveal, the reveal in Le Dessert that Asahi was conceived in a one night stand with his mother is terrifying because of how it portrays it. Azami, compromised emotionally after Jōichirō left Tōtsuki due to his burnout ends up getting taken advantage of by Asahi's mother. The fact that he looks like he's still a teenager and is implied to be drunk just intensifies how scary it all is, made even worse by Asahi's mother's evil smirk and Hidden Eyes showing she knows exactly what she's doing. It wasn't enough for Asahi's mother to be a violently abusive alcoholic, she's also an Ephebophile Date Rapist.
