Food Fight



""Food fight!""

- Everyone, ever.

People (usually High Schoolers during lunch period) start throwing food at each other. Expect someone to get a cream cake in the face, someone to yell "Food Fight!" (either the school delinquent or a random background character), and the person who comes in and tries to stop it to get the last piece of food thrown at him. Also, if this school has a comedic fat kid in the cast, he will invariably be tasting various stuff that got thrown at him. Expect food that isn't even served at the school or that particular lunch to be thrown.

Usually leads to one or more parties getting Covered in Gunge. Not to be confused with Level Ate, in which fighting is done on top of food. A less chaotic variant is Produce Pelting. See also Edible Ammunition.

Anime

 * At the end of episode 4 of Ichigo Mashimaro, Miu and Nobue's fight (while the latter is working part-time at a restaurant) degenerates into this.

Comic Books

 * Like in The Perry Bible Fellowship entry below, this is deconstructed in this strip by Quino.

Fanfic

 * Chapter eight of Piracy The Genetic Pirate Opera has a food fight between the Supernovas and the Capricorn Pirates that ends in an off-screen Furo Scene where they wash up after the food fight.
 * Two separate ones occur in "Camp Blues" and "Chaos to My Ears" in Calvin and Hobbes: The Series.
 * Ed, Edd, and Eddy fight off Kevin with ice cream in the "Water Week" episode of Calvin at Camp.

Film
"Smashley Simpson: FOOD FIGHT!"
 * A truly spectacular example (and equally marvellous send-up) is the kung fu dinner theatre sequence from Meet the Robinsons.
 * Ben 10 Race Against Time: Ben turns into Grey Matter and rigs a contraption to launch food at the bullies who were making fun of him.
 * National Lampoon's Animal House had Bluto start one in the Faber cafeteria.
 * Tony Hancock's film The Punch and Judy Man.
 * The Great Race: the famous pie fight scene, including Natalie Wood in her undies.
 * More pies! More pies!
 * I'm getting a new tucker-inner... banished, banished, banished!
 * Happens in Hedwig and The Angry Inch, at the Bilgewaters towards the end of the performance of Angry Inch
 * How can we forget the great amazing legendary pie fight in Blazing Saddles?
 * The giant "imaginary food" food fight in Hook.
 * The cafeteria food fight in Max Keeble's Big Move, is started, not surprisingly, by the title character as part of The Plan to ruin the Principal's chances of getting promoted to Superintendent before he moves out of town.
 * Eddie's Million Dollar Cook-Off has two food fights. One ended up actually serving the plot. The fight happened in a Home Ec. class, and with all the foodstuffs randomly mixing, it somehow made a delicious sauce purely by coincidence. The protagonist, who by the way plays on the baseball team, ends up replicating this sauce to enter into a cooking contest so his Jerk Jock buddies can mock him for being a cook.
 * In The Parent Trap rip-off It Takes Two (Staring Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen) there's a rather funny food fight that was started when one of the twins tripped a boy carrying a bowl of macaroni to cover her escape. The bowl flies through the air (in Slow Motion) and lands on Steve Guttenberg's head. Kirsty Alley can't cover her laughing, and he flicks a tab of butter at her. She stands up, and declares "FOOD FIGHT!"
 * Comes up in Whip It. Iron Maven flicks a ketchupy chip at Babe Ruthless. Babe throws some banana cream at Maven. Maven dumps a chocolate shake on Babe's head. Hilarity Ensues. What is even more hilarious, is that this appears to be an actual eating establishment that they destroy with ketchup, mustard, etc. Presumably the poor owners are then left to clean up the mess, oh what innocent fun.


 * The Wild Thornberrys movie had one such scene when Eliza went to boarding school and where her simian friend Darwin followed her.
 * The original ending to Dr. Strangelove. No, seriously. Wim Wender's Wings of Desire also improbably ended with a pie fight.
 * The silent Laurel and Hardy short The Battle of the Century culminates in a massive pie fight.
 * I can't possibly be the only one here that has witnessed In The Sweet Pie And Pie.
 * A number of other Three Stooges shorts featured winner-take-all pie fights.
 * With generous supplies of both airborne pastries and Stock Footage from the aforementioned film.
 * There was one in the Bratz movie, infamously known for the fact that you can hear the director clearly say, "Throw the food!" before the fight starts.

Literature

 * The Star Trek novel How Much For Just The Planet?, by John M. Ford, has one of these, with most of the main cast from the show involved in a pie-fight with a bunch of Klingons.
 * In the third Percy Jackson and The Olympians book, one is started by Grover so they can escape from the monsters in Hoover Dame (It Makes Sense in Context).
 * The Doctor Who book The Monsters Inside has one, started deliberately by Rose to create a distraction. Rose credits a former boyfriend with teaching her the proper technique for starting a Food Fight: apparently, there's an art to it.
 * In Twelve Sharp, a food fight breaks out at the bonds office when Joyce barges in looking for trouble while Stephanie, Connie, and Lula are eating lunch. It gets settled by new file clerk Melvin zapping Joyce with a stun gun.
 * One happens in Dinosaurs Ate My Homework. Notably, all of the participants are superevolved carnivorous dinosaurs, and it takes place in a verse where they are the equivalent to humanity. And, somehow, they are throwing such things as mashed potatoes, milk, and spaghetti.
 * One happens in one of the CHERUB Series books.
 * The members of PG Wodehouse's Drones Club frequently indulge in these, generally with rolls.

Live Action Television

 * It's turned up in Basil Brush.
 * Lizzie McGuire as well. In fact, this was the basis for an homage to The Breakfast Club.
 * Brothers and Sisters features a food fight between Holly and Nora (since both women are probably in their late 50s/early 60s, this makes it one odd Cat Fight). The obligatory cream cake ends up in Holly's cleavage, since Nora wasn't a very good shot. Considering that the cake got mentioned frequently throughout the episode, it's definitely Chekhov's Gun (or maybe "Chekhov's Gunge") as well.
 * Several episodes of Soap.
 * NCIS has one, but it's only dry nuts involved.
 * An early episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was named "Food Fight" and featured... well, a food fight.
 * It contains two "food fights". The Exactly What It Says on the Tin food fight was caused by Bulk throwing a pie at the school's principal, and missed hitting his partner, Skull which says "food fight". The other food fight is the Power Rangers trying to stop Rita's Pudgy Pig from eating all of the Earth's food.
 * Another food fight breaks out in "Return of an Old Friend Part 2", after the parents are freed and returned to the Parents Day party. A pie misfire by Bulk and Skull hits Jason's dad, which starts off a chain reaction of the parents throwing food at one another. Miss Appleby, after having taken a pie to the blouse, says to Principal Caplan, "Well, you know what they say. If you can't beat them... join them!" and pies him in the face, causing him to join in too.
 * In the Sorority Forever episode "Sluts will be Pigs", a food fight gets out of hand.
 * In Waterloo Road, pupil Janeece is left to supervise the school's "breakfast club" as Melissa Ryan has not fully got her head in gear after revising PSHE with Eddie. A food fight commences. Not only is she powerless to stop it- she eventually joins in. The head chef is not impressed.
 * In an episode of Mr. Show, an angel and a demon participate in a Nickelodeon-style food fight game show.
 * Nickelodeon's Salute Your Shorts had a couple, two involving cake, and one involving the whole camp.
 * Wild and Crazy Kids also had one; originally intended to be a "camp kids vs. counselors" contest, it quickly turned into a free-for-all.
 * In an episode of I Love Lucy Lucy and Ethel had taken jobs at a chocolate factory and eventually Lucy and another woman start throwing chocolate at each other.
 * An episode of the current series of Let's Make a Deal featured a large pie as a Zonk; when it was revealed, Wayne Brady went down to the pie and pulled a real one out from behind it, with which he hit Jonathan Mangum. At the end of the Show Mangum got his revenge, at which point a curtain opened revealing an entire rack of pies, resulting in a pie fight among the entire cast.
 * On Boy Meets World, Eric, Jack and Rachel have one in their apartment, complete with a Pie in the Face at the end.
 * Happens at the end of Community episode The Art of Discourse.
 * Made funnier by the list of college experiences that Abed has been trying to complete throughout the episode. He stops trying to set them up and says they have to happen organically, and right afterwards the food fight, which was on the list, breaks out.
 * A (probably incomplete) list of foodstuffs routinely thrown over the contestants in Dick and Dom in da Bungalow: tinned tomatoes, mushy peas, baked beans, tapioca, rice pudding, custard, chocolate custard, mashed potatoes, mango chutney, spaghetti hoops. Oh, and from time to time they might get put in a bowl and have the ingredients for some recipe added to them (flour, lard, eggs etc). As one of the hosts put it; "You'd still be finding dried bits in your hair until the next week's show."
 * It's happened several times on Glee, along with frequent slushies to the faces of unpopular students. (Why Principal Figgins still allows them to be sold at the school is a mystery.)
 * Apparently it's not recognized as a form of bullying, so it's okay to do so.

Music Video

 * The Travis video "Sing" is entirely made up of a food fight at a wedding.
 * It's a formal dinner party, but I don't think it's a wedding. Considering how the one girl appears to be entirely dressed in white at the end, it's an understandable mistake...
 * Ditto No Doubt's "Simple Kind of Life".
 * Pink Floyd's video for "Corporal Clegg" starting from 1:42.
 * One early MTV video, "It's Inevitable" by Charlie, is set in a pastry-bakery in which a truly epic pie fight takes place.

Professional Wrestling

 * At the end of the Thanksgiving 1999 episode of Smackdown!, D Generation X were pulverising Shane McMahon in the ring with Vince McMahon standing helpless on the stage due to D-X restraining order shenanigans. His solution? To call down not only other wrestlers who had beef with D-X, but most of the midcard roster to get some revenge. Of course, this being a Thanksgiving episode, tables of food had been placed all around ringside...

Radio

 * Adventures in Odyssey: Liz and Heather start one at the end of a week of camp at the Timothy Center, just to annoy Connie.

Tabletop RPG

 * Dragon magazine #44 had a game called "Food Fight" which provided rules for staging one of these in a school cafeteria.
 * "Food Fight" was the title of the sample mini-adventure in early editions of the Shadowrun game rules. Subverted in that, while it's set in a convenience store and lots of food gets blown to bits or tossed around, the scenario assumes that everybody's shooting guns.

Video Games

 * The 80's arcade game Charly Chuck's Food Fight in which the player, as Charly, had to eat an ice cream cone at the end of the stage before it completely melted. But four angry chefs wanted to stop you at any cost.
 * There were finite piles of food that included pies and tomatoes, but some foods had special properties:
 * Peas were like buckshot (they scattered if they didn't connect), bananas were like boomerangs, and hugh chunks of watermelon never ran out.
 * You lost a life if the ice cream completely melted (you were out of time), you fell into one of many holes on the playing field, you got hit by something a chef threw at you, or worse..
 * ...a chef caught and touched you, in which case your eyes spun, you got an Oh Crap look on your face and the food magically homed in on YOU, burying you in a messy pile!
 * The Three Stooges videogame has the characters raising money for an orphanage. One dayjob minigame requires serving a large number of pies to three fussy customers, and you need to remain professional by not getting pie in your face.

Web Comic
"Florence: I do not see this ending well."
 * A more cynical view of the food fight is found in this Perry Bible Fellowship webcomic.
 * Unbelievably, according to Nicholas Gurewich, some people actually thought that strip was making fun of starving people.
 * The crew of Pv P once had a LARP session in the woods descend into a pie-fight between them, a group of Civil War Reenactors, and an army of Klingons. It was a GOOD day to pie!
 * An altercation between Sam Starfall of Freefall and a baker takes a predictable turn when he pursues the baker into the Planetary Strategic Pie Reserve Warehouse. The addition of a Bowman's Wolf, a Red Shirt, a French Ninja Waiter, several policemen and a cigar-chomping mayor to the mix only serves to further stir the pies...

Web Original

 * There's one in the Whateley Universe too. When Tennyo gets a job as a cafeteria worker on-campus, some people who don't like her start one with her as the (first) target.
 * A Rooster Teeth short has two of the coworkers in a fight when an observer (who had just returned from getting lunch from a nearby restaurant) asks them what they're doing, and then they explain the rules like it's a sport. At a couple points a combatant will say in a deep, echoing voice, "FOOD WAR!".

Western Animation
"Eddy: *chucks a sandwich at Lee* Tell your stupid SISTER to stay away from our FRIEND!
 * Rugrats when Didi takes Tommy to the high school where she teaches.
 * Happened again when the Dummi Bear creator was invited to dine with the Carmichaels and friends.
 * The first episode of Danny Phantom. Danny starts it to create a distraction.
 * Chowder: In "A Taste of Marzipan," Mung Daal and Endive get into a fight over who makes the best dish that escalates into a military skirmish, complete with foxholes, civilian casualties (Gazpacho), and heavy artillery (Schnitzel jumps off a roof and lands on Endive's camp).
 * An entire episode of Codename: Kids Next Door involves this, as the titular kids fight Grandma Stuffem and her mutant food items. To rock opera style musical numbers no less.
 * In an episode of Kim Possible, Ron starts one of these in the school cafeteria; it's the first sign that all of Dr. Drakken's evil has been accidentally pumped into his brain.
 * An entire episode of Recess. A hidden culprit started a food fight. Gus was the only eyewitness but his friends warn him not to break the code by telling Miss Finster who started the food fight.
 * In one episode of The Critic, a food fight breaks out at the United Nations International School. Jay wanders through it, catching and eating various food.
 * Then the French kids' table is hit by a single roll and everyone sitting there immediately surrenders.
 * The Simpsons (Homer Loves Flanders): Homer starts a food fight during a family picnic with the Flanders.
 * It's also invoked in the video game Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly. Surprisingly, this was also one of the more lethal cases of the trope (Bart has to defend himself from the other campers by throwing various food items that are strongly implied to be at best unappealing and at worst completely inedible without getting caught [if he does get caught, he's forced to eat all of the food he currently has on his person], and the other campers throw, not food, but knives and forks at Bart).
 * Total Drama Island: there aren't any food fights on the Island itself (probably because the contestants find it too cruel to throw Chef's horrible food at anyone) but Duncan and Courtney are shown having one at a restaurant in the TDA special, resulting in messy Camera Abuse.
 * In Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy's Valentine's Day special, Ed and Eddy and Lee and Marie start a food fight over Edd and May.

Lee: *chucks two hotdogs at Eddy* Tell your stupid FRIEND to stay away from our SISTER!"


 * In the intro for El Tigre, Manny and Frida start one of these. They subsequently sent to detention.
 * In The Proud Family, two food fights occurred in the episode where BB and CC got baptised. The first was when the two families were dining at the Red Clam (they were dining there because Samo and his brother ended up eating all the food on the table while the families were in prayer), where, after the seafood came down on the dining family (apparently this happens a lot in that restaurant), the two families (the Prouds, and Trudy's family) ended up having a huge food fight, while the families were bitter towards each other. Penny and Trudy attempted to stop them. The second time was at the end, where Samo and his brother inadvertently caused it when fighting over mashed potatoes. This time, it was a bit more friendly in nature.
 * In the Fairly Oddparents movie Abra-Catastrophe, Timmy instigates one in his school cafeteria to keep Crocker from finding a Rule-free wish-granting muffin. and since it's Muffin Monday, the result is hundreds of muffins flying everywhere. And one muffler, but that's neither here nor there.
 * In the first episode of Ultimate Spider-Man, some villains break into the school and demand that Spider-Man give himself up. Pete promptly calls a food fight and sneaks away while it's taking place.

Other

 * Subverted in a PSA about nutrition: several junior high school students are seen grabbing fruits and vegetables and fondling them as if getting ready to throw them, interspersed with title cards: "Ready. Aim. Chew." And instead of throwing the food, they eat it, because their "food fight" is against poor eating habits.

Real Life

 * La Tomatina
 * During filming of Jaws, the cast members, about to lose their minds due to the Troubled Production, decided to have fun by starting one.
 * Deconstructed by an incident in Ohio.