Edible Ammunition

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Peanut gun2 8618 — Exhibit A: The Peanut Popgun

Otacon: Wait, here's the best part. You see them lying on the ground after he shoots? If you pick up some of those peanuts, they'll restore your health a little.

Snake: Hmm. Edible ammunition, huh... Times sure have changed.

—Super Smash Bros. Brawl

A Sub-Trope of Abnormal Ammo, basically it's any type of food used as ammo, whether it be thrown or launched. May have additional effects.

Examples of Edible Ammunition include:

Anime and Manga[]

Sailor Moon used a Pizza once in place of her Tiara in the final season (mostly since that version of her outfit was the only one without a Tiara).
In One Piece, Wanze shoots dry ramen noodles out of his nose. Although it is technically edible, it is highly unlikely that anyone would want to eat it.
In Kore wa Zombie Desu ka?, Maelstorm sometime uses bowls of ramen.
The animals from Kimba the White Lion sometimes hurl watermelons at their enemies.
In Ranma ½, foods, such as Okonomiyaki, Watermelons, and Takoyaki, are used as a weapon a number of times. The first of them is particularly frequent since okonomiyaki is Ukyo's whole schtick.

Comic Books[]

In Lucky Luke, a family of angry Scotsmen would throw cabers (which somewhat makes sense, since a caber is more or less a telephone pole) and haggis (which doesn't) at their enemies.
- If frozen, a haggis would make a good object to throw at someone.
In Twisted Toyfare Theatre, Hawkeye was revealed to have scotch arrows that he used to make Iron Man fall off the wagon.

Spider-Man: You carry a scotch arrow?

Hawkeye: You'd be surprised how often they come in hand. Want one? I've got single- and double-malt.

In one of the Street Fighter Legends series, Sakura has a training method that involves Shoma batting hotdogs at her so she can catch them with her mouth.

Film[]

Shrek 4ever After features a Chimichanga stand with a high-velocity launcher, no doubt to make the process of feeding hundreds of ogre warriors quicker, but doubles as a great anti-witch catapult as well.
The kids' gangster movie Bugsy Malone substituted rapid-fire custard-shooting "splurge guns" for real machine guns.
The Wizard of Oz (1939): The Scarecrow tricks the apple trees into throwing their apples at himself and Dorothy so Dorothy can have something to eat.
In the Dragonslayer Junior series of short videos, a gun that fires chicken eggs.
One very entertaining film on Galileo had his student and a skeptic dueling over the validity of Galileo's theories with a very long salami and a baguette.
Hook: the Lost Boys have makeshift egg-cannons.
Charlie's Angels: Alex's blueberry muffins are weapon-grade. They smash holes into wooden doors when thrown.

Bosley: What do you call this?

Dylan: Chinese fighting muffin.

Bosley: That's not funny. A friend of mine took a fighting muffin in the chest; they sent him home in four Ziploc bags.

Ernest Goes to Camp features two Lethal Chefs trying to defend their summer camp from greedy miners using a prototype food processor on wheels that apparently digests and spits out the processed food at high velocity. It's no mach for a bulldozer, though.
- Ernest Scared Stupid has kids using a catapult that flings pizzas to fend off some bullies. Later on they face trolls, and upon learning that they are vulnerable to milk, fill their Super-Soakers with dairy products.
In The Return of Hanuman, Maruti throws mangoes plucked from the gangsters' HQ's mango trees against the gangsters. Mangoes vs. Real Guns? The former won.
In Pirates of the Caribbean, Marty and Gibbs are loading the cannons when Gibbs takes a swig from his flask. Marty snatches it and puts it in the cannon. The flask almost hits Jack, who tries to take a swig from it.

Literature[]

In Discworld, some varieties of dwarf bread are designed to be thrown, though calling them "edible" is being generous.
When Morelli makes the mistake of hiring Mooner to handle his home security (long story) in Fearless Fourteen, Mooner and his assistants employ potato guns (tomatoes and melons are also fired. Eggs are tried, but don't work). They even calibrate their ammo by type and how cooked it is.
Xanth has pineapples and cherry bombs. Both explode like their mundane counterparts, but in a shower of juice instead of shrapnel.
The La Reine Margot have the scene of the Rue Cloche Percée where characters defended themselves with a bowl full of orange and lemon marmalade and a leg of venison.

Live Action TV[]

WKRP had the Turkey Drop episode, where manager Arthur Carlson tried to feel more involved in the station's daily activities by setting up a turkey giveaway promotion at the Pinedale Shopping Mall. Thankfully, the carnage was implied via verbal depiction as Carlson's ignorance of certain facts about domestic turkeys had him deliver them by dropping the birds out of a helicopter from 2000 feet up. As the man said himself at the end of the fiasco, "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." Disturbingly, this has been tried in real life...
Humorous example in an episode of Ugly Betty. The audience at Betty's BLOGGY award (Black Lesbian/Latina and Others Group) ceremony brings burritos to throw at Daniel because he treated Betty like a jerk. Betty tries to talk them out of the burrito-pelting, but the crowd just wants a weird demonstration and the attention and so Betty and Daniel both end up on the receiving end.
The Myth Busters confirmed an old story about a naval battle using cheese as makeshift cannonballs. With the right sort of cheese, it's solid enough to punch holes in sails. (Kari, pregnant at the time, was snacking on the ammunition.)
- When they were using salami as rocket fuel, Jamie did the same thing. He wasn't pregnant, though.
The A-Team, rather notoriously, built a cabbage cannon in one episode.
In The Goodies episode "Bunfight at the OK Tearooms", the final showdown is staged using ketchup squeeze bottles.
In Stargate SG-1, Teal'c at one point throws a can of vegetables 50 yards and KOs a purse snatcher with it.
In British sketch comedy show "The Two Ronnies", one gag at Christmas time was the invention of the sage-and-onion bullet, "so you can shoot the turkey and stuff it at the same time".
The Amazing Race famously began their 17th Season with teams launching watermelons out of slingshots at suits of armor. The "famously" part happened when one racer's slingshot backfired, the watermelon smacking her in the face.
The Legend of Dick and Dom has an episode wiith a Wacky Wayside Tribe defending themselves by flinging catapult-loads of mashed potato.
Dad's Army: the Home Guard platoon are taking part in an initiative exercise where they have to cross an obstacle course, retrieve some dummy ammunition and load it into a cannon in time to repel an advancing platoon. Realizing they're too old to make it over the course, they load some black market onions into the cannon and fire them off.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: in "Selfless", a flashback shows how Anya turned her lover Olaf into a troll, presented in the form of a Swedish movie with poorly translated subtitles. At one point the villagers drive off the troll with the line, "Hit it with fruits and various meats!"

Real Life[]

The Turkey Drop episode of WKRP was possibly based on a real thanksgiving event in the late 1940's in Yellville Arkansas. After the first couple of years, the Turkey Trot festival simply got out of hand as some wit thought it would be neat to actually toss a few poor gobblers out of a low flying plane. This went on until a National Equirer photo of the event forced the promoters to can it in the face of severe disapproval from many quarters.
NASA and other research labs have 'chicken cannons', which use compressed air to fire whole raw chickens at aircraft parts to test how they handle in-flight collision with birds.
- A popular Urban Legend states that British Aerospace once borrowed such a gun, only to fire the chicken right through the plane's windshield, the captain's chair, and end up with it embedded in the wall of the cockpit. When they explained the event and asked what went wrong, NASA told them that they should thaw the chicken out first.
  - This actually happened at least once; a supermarket ran out of fresh chickens and a student, who'd been sent there to buy a chicken but not told why, bought a frozen turkey instead. This is recounted in Measuring The Earth With a Stick by Bob Macdonald.
  - Mythbusters made the exact same mistake running the exact same test. Only then it was rendered moot later when it turned out the windshields they were using weren't rated for bird strikes, frozen or squishy.
Potato launchers are a popular backyard tinkerer's project- usually it's nothing but an air cannon with a potato (or any other fruit/vegetable) crammed in the barrel.
- Designs which use hairspray or other aerosol sprays as explosive propellants tend to be popular as well.
- Marshmallow guns, too.
Two words: Pumpkin Chunkin'.
Some types of C4 plastic explosive are designed to be safe to eat, and have been disguised as biscuits.
And, in a bizarre reversal, lead was an ingredient in Roman sweets long before it was made into bullets. Although people did eat it, it's not strictly speaking edible.
- In that time and in the Dark Ages, lead was also used in dishware for the wealthy. The problem being that acidic juices from tomatoes leached lead into the food, leading to many cases of lead poisoning. Even worse, the connection was missed and the people of the time decided tomatoes were poisonous. As it is a relation to belladonna, it took a while for that mistaken belief to go away...
- In recent years, some candies made in Mexico have been found to contain dangerously high levels of lead.
"Humans Vs. Zombies," best described as a capture-the-flag game with LARP elements played over a period of days or weeks, allows the humans to use marshmallows to stun the zombies.
Technically, paintballs are entirely safe to eat, since they consist of nontoxic, water-soluble dyes encased in a shell of gelatin. They just don't taste very good.
Woman fends off bear by throwing zucchini.
Someone once used packet jelly to make an edible laser.

Toys[]

Bionicle: the Thornax fruit of Bara Magna is both sustenance to Bone Hunters as well as ammo used by them and most other beings on the planet.

Video Games[]

One of the most famous examples is Super Mario Bros 2, where the player uproots large vegetables and throws them at enemies (and even defeats the final boss by making him eat them).
- In Super Mario World 2, there are green watermelons that have seeds in them. They can be used to dispatch or knock back baddies and stunning them temporarily.
Super Smash Bros: the Trope Namer is from a codec conversation between Snake and Otacon on Diddy Kong, the two get on the subject of Diddy's Peanut Popgun (which originated from Donkey Kong 64).
- Also in the series, the Green Greens stage has Whispy Woods dropping apples that can either heal or be used as a throwing item (which is also what he did in Kirby's Adventure in Kirby's fight against him).
- One of Princess Peach's special attacks involves pulling a very large turnip out of Hammerspace and throwing it at somebody.
Donkey Kong 64: except for Tiny Kong, all of the playable Kong's weapons launch things such as coconuts (Donkey), peanuts (Diddy, as stated), grapes (Lanky), and pineapples (Chunky). There are also explosive oranges used by Kong and Kremling alike.
Donkey Kong Country Returns: Peanut Popgun once again by Diddy Kong.
Crash Bandicoot has the wumpa fruit launcher in later games. Also a Cast From HP of sorts since the wumpa fruits it fires provide additional lives when you collect enough.
In a Tiny Toons game for the Game Boy, you can play as Buster Rabbit, Plucky Duck, and Hampton J. Pig. Each character can (in addition to the standard Goomba Stomp) wield a form of edible ammunition for long-distance attacks: Buster shoots carrots in a ballistic arc, Hampton uses watermelons as bowling-balls for a ground-tracking attacks, and Plucky Duck throws pineapples which travel diagonally and bounce off walls.
Both of the video game adaptations of Disney's Aladdin gave Aladdin apples to throw at enemies. In Aladdin Virgin Games, enemies could be defeated with apples alone, but in Aladdin Capcom apples were only good for stunning enemies before taking them out with a Goomba Stomp.
In Plants vs. Zombies, most of the ammunition your plants produce are this type.
Worms has its infamous Banana Bombs.
Bully lets you, eventually, use a potato gun on ... well, OK, they don't approve of you shooting anyone other than your own peer groups, but still.
Tyrian has the Banana Blast, the Banana Bomb, the Hotdog Front, the Orange Juicer, the Bubble Gum Gum, the pretzel blasters, etc. To top it all off, the enemies in the final stage of the final chapter all fire rather deadly fruit at you.
When Prototype's Alex Mercer grabs an enemy, he can either consume them or chuck them at something.
In an old Christian video game, Spiritual Warfare, most of the "weapons" were pieces of fruit, representing the "fruit of the holy spirit." It sort of makes sense in context (though that context isn't particularly expressed in game...)
Dungeon Keeper had a chicken gun as hidden weapon, available through searching the internet and looking up how to reach a hidden bonus level.
There's a game called Mr. Nutz, where the main protagonist is a red squirrel... that throws acorns.
Kirby 64 The Crystal Shards: the Ice + Spark power turns Kirby into a refrigerator that throws food, which also can be eaten to regain health.
Ema Skye and her snackoos.
- Don't forget Victor Kudo and his seeds. They are technically bird food, but that doesn't stop him from eating them... When he isn't throwing them at pigeons or people.
The old-school arcade game Food Fight combines this with Robotron2084-style run-and-gun action, from the near-useless peas (short-range and weak) to the all-mighty rapid-fire watermelon.
In amongst Zombies Ate My Neighbors' Abnormal Ammo are popsicles (useful against blobs) and soda six-packs (which act like grenades).
All the Chef-magi's attacks in Kingdom of Loathing are edible noodles or sauces. There are also projectiles weapons like the potato pistol, the curdflinger, and a beer bong.
The Dancing Banana from MUGEN shoots and throws giant bananas at his opponents, which can actually hurt quite a lot.
In Heroes of Might and Magic V, cyclops can use goblins as both ammo and food.
In Burger Time, Peter Pepper is armed with a pepper shaker.
Judging by Aya and Hatate's comments in Double Spoiler, Minoriko Aki from Touhou uses sweet potatoes as Danmaku.
Somewhat akin to the examples from the show proper below, Pinkie Pie's level 1 super in My Little Pony Fighting Is Magic has her jump up and fling a barrage of cupcakes, followed by a pie, at her opponent.
Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa has flying pink elephants dropping explosive onigiri.

Web Comics[]

The PISSS tanks in Sarah Zero shoot pineapple grenades.

Western Animation[]

The pizza-loving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles also once use pizza as weapon. Leonardo and Michelangelo cast several pizzas aften two kimono-stealing thieves. They partly succeed - they rescue all of the kimonos except one, master Splinter's.
An episode of Codename: Kids Next Door had the kids using nacho cheese weapons against monstrous lice after it was discovered that it's the only thing they're weak against.
- Food based weaponry is a major component of the KND's arsenal. They have gumball submachine guns, chili rays, and orbital mustard cannons, to name a few.
Countless cartoons have several instances of characters squeezing a banana and having the entire fruit shoot out perfectly intact at high velocity, usually into the character's mouth:
- Disney's The Jungle Book has King Louie shoot several bananas into Mowgli's mouth as he sweet-talks the boy into teaching him how to make fire.
The movie version of Horton Hears a Who has one scene where the Wickersham brothers turn entire bunches of bananas into rapid-fire machine guns by squeezing them under a big gorilla's armpits.
In Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, the planet Rhizome which runs on 'vege-technology' has devised plant-based guns. These produce their own ammo in the form of round, pink fruits or seeds which make "an excellent mid-skirmish snack".
In Hero 108, Lin Chung uses bamboo shoots as darts. They normally aren't eaten, but the Too Dumb to Live Anti-Air troops seem to think that eating his ammo mid-combat is a good idea.
There was an entire episode of Chowder revolving around using food as ammunition. And weapons. And soldiers.
PBC Potato Cannons and potato guns.
Energon in Transformers technically counts, if only because the robots use it as a power source. And currency.
An army of Lucy Liu-bots use popcorn seeds as ammo on Futurama. The Liu-bot Fry is dating uses a film projector's light to pop the seeds, blowing up the other bots.
In My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, pies are preferred ammunition of settler ponies in Appleloosa. They are surprisingly effective against charging buffalo.
- Pinkie Pie tries to protect the bakery by throwing cakes at a rampaging aged-by-greed Spike in "Secret of my Excess". It isn't nearly as effective — the rampaging Spike just steals all of the cakes, leaving poor Pinkie Pie in a state of shell-shock as she looks at the ruined and empty bakery.
- Applejack can kick apples as projectiles.

"I'm not giving him cake--I'm assaulting him with cake!"

Adds a whole new level of meaning to "eat hot lead", doesn't it?

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