Food as a Weapon or Why I'm an Unlikely Thriller Writer

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I’ve been thinking. My cousin's daughter has been blogging about her bread recipe. She describes it as producing soft, fluffy, aromatic bread. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

But, me? I like substantial bread. The more nuts and seeds, the better. Does it have heft? If I hurl it at an intruder, will it make an impression? Concussion?

As a writer of murder mysteries, I find myself thinking about these things.

While I’m eating tender, juicy, perfectly grilled pork tenderloin, I think about how using a little too much Tony Chachere’s Original Creole Seasoning could make a guy gasp for breath and clutch his throat, giving me time to whack him over the head with a roll of frozen cookie dough.

How quickly would a person die, choking on a boiled egg? Okay. So it might be hard to get someone to let you force a boiled egg into their throat and you’d still have to do something to block their nose.

Maybe a peanut – it could get lodged in their trachea. Deprive them of air from both the mouth and the nose with one little nut.

Stab him with a steak bone? A frozen carrot? It could work.

Blunt force trauma from proper application of any frozen food, right? Well, maybe not peas.

I don’t think I’m unusual in this. Agatha Christie must have contemplated the different kinds of poisons on a regular basis. Can’t you just see the wheels turning? At breakfast. “A three-minute egg, dear. And toast.” And strychnine (which she would pronounce stric-neen), or a dash of arsenic, antimony, ad nauseum.

Maybe I'm more chemistry challenged than she. But it seems to me that, lacking those more difficult-to-come-by chemicals, one could, if properly thought out, do a villain in with whatever came to hand.

Frozen peas? You could scatter them on the floor, the baddie would then slip and fall hitting his or her head on the brick fireplace. If you get to them before they thaw, they should be pretty easy to sweep up. The peas, that is. The villain and the blood on the brick fireplace probably not so easily disposed of.

Slit someone’s throat with the sharp edge of peanut brittle? The lowly peanut again. But honestly a pecan praline would just not be hard enough.

Then there are foods that are too good to be used as weapons. I can’t imagine wasting dark chocolate or a nice wedge of cheesecake. And everyone is safe around me if I am armed with a cappuccino. Unless they get between me and it.

You see? Food as a weapon is not so fetched.