Cured Meat Bludgeons: A Hollywood Guide To Weaponized Food
Learning how to fight by watching choreographed routines in action movies is like learning how to deliver pizzas by watching porn – the two are not nearly as related as you think they are. Movies exist in their own magical world where silencers sound like gerbil farts, concussions aren’t a thing, and a martial artist in a three-piece suit can clear out an entire room of enemy agents in 15 seconds somehow using kung fu and Cheetos.
But before we laugh too hard at the absurdity of grabbing whatever random food item is handy to attack your enemies, let's first look at the few times Hollywood was, perhaps even accidentally, not terribly far off the mark.
The Equalizer 2: Exploding Baking Flour
The Scene:
The Equalizer franchise tells the story of former military intelligence ass-kicker Robert McCall, who comes out of retirement to fight injustice right in its stupid face using his training and creative booby traps like a cross between John Wick and Kevin McCallister. Case in point: In the sequel, McCall uses a fan to spread flour around an abandoned bakery so that when a bad guy throws a flash bang grenade inside, he blows himself up.
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Badass? Sure. Corny? Well, it was probably wheaty (heh), but it was a little hackneyed, even for an action flick. If flour really was that dangerous, it would come with warning labels and the The Great British Bake Off would be a very different show. Not necessarily better, just diff— no, it'd be better.
The Reality:
You can definitely blow yourself up with flour.
Any fine powdery substance is actually a potential explosive, including dust, grain, powdered milk, or even coffee. You can safely stick a lit match into a bag of Folgers or whatever because most of the particles have limited access to oxygen all packed in like that. But throw the powder into the air, giving everything some room to breathe, then introduce fire into the equation, and it's basically your standard dust explosion. Like this one.
Nowadays, you'll mainly see it in practical special effects or school science experiments, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, you also saw it in obituaries. In 1878, a flour explosion actually obliterated the Washburn A, the largest mill in the world at the time, killing 14 people. The resulting fire then spread to two adjacent mills, which also exploded. And then …
You know what? Maybe I'll just give up baking.
Law Abiding Citizen: The T-Bone Shiv
The Scene:
In Law Abiding Citizen, Gerard Butler loses his wife and daughter in a home invasion and goes on a killing spree that extends beyond his family’s killers to politicians and lawmakers that he believes have corrupted the justice system. Part of his plan involves being arrested and sent to solitary confinement, which he achieves by manipulating Jamie Foxx into bringing him a steak dinner and then using the T-bone from it to stab his cellmate to death in the neck. In a movie where a guy builds a secret Matrix-esque armory underneath the prison, this actually might have been the least silly part of Law Abiding Citizen.
The Reality:
It actually doesn’t take much to shiv a person to death. The human neck is like some sadistic level of Minesweeper. Poke the right spot, and everything just goes to hell. You don’t even need anything super sharp. Prisoners have famously known this for years, successfully constructing deadly shivs out of everything from toothbrushes to National Geographic magazines, soap, and salt. Also T-bones.
In his book Alcatraz Screw: My Years as a Guard in America's Most Notorious Prison, Alcatraz guard George Gregory recalls a prisoner, Curly Thomas, whose preferred method of killing was severing the carotid artery using handmade weapons such as a sharpened crochet-type hook normally used to make brushes. He had also, at one time, been found with a T-bone shiv on him like a nightmarish Tim Burton version of Cubone. Thomas was an expert in neck pokes, and if he thought that a piece of bone could be used to kill, then it absolutely would be. After that, the kitchen started taking all the bones out of the prisoners’ steaks, and presumably keeping a closer eye on Thomas to make sure he didn't get his hands on any rat femurs or something.
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm: Cured Meat Bludgeons
The Scene:
Anyone discussing the best Joker portrayal and not at least mentioning Mark Hamill is automatically wrong. Also ugly. Hamill’s animated Joker was simply the full package, as seen in the Mask of the Phantasm where he murders a mob boss in one scene and in the other beats the badass Phantasm over the head with a log of bologna. It's pefectly Joker; especially how cartoonishly goofy it is.
The Reality:
Meat should never be your first weapon of choice in a fight (regardless of how cool the second TMNT movie made it look), and is probably somewhere behind battle pipes, but if you ever find yourself trapped inside a deli and have to haphazardly club your way out, you could do worse than a log of bologna or salami. Cured meats can actually make good disposable bludgeons given their thickness and blunt shape. They aren’t super durable, though, so you can't really work someone over with one. Joker had the right idea – he hit his opponent in the face with his sausage (heh!) to stun and disorient them, and then used the resulting confusion to make a run for it.
A very similar thing happened to an unlucky home invasion victim in 2008 when he … well, I’ll let the police report take it from here:
“Santiago said on 9-6-08, at about 0800 hours, he was asleep on the front porch of his father’s home, when he felt something hit him in the face. Santiago said he struggled to wake up and saw an unknown male bent over him. The male continued to strike him in the face and head area with a sausage. Santiago said the sausage was about 8” long and he was hit hard enough for it to hurt. Santiago then saw the suspect run west towards the home’s breezeway.”
I’m not rooting for the criminal, obviously, but he did pull that Jokeresque meat-and-flee technique off quite well.
Midsomer Murders: In The Study, With The Block Of Cheese
The Scene:
Midsomer Murders is the British TV show that your single aunt watches when they cancel the reruns of Poirot. It focuses on Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby (later John Barnaby) who solves crimes in the seemingly quiet but actually deadly villages of the fictional Midsomer country (unrelated to the Swedish horror movie Midsommar despite the thousands of letters I wrote to make that crossover happen.)
In the episode “Schooled in Murder,” Barnaby investigates the death of a woman who was killed by being smashed on the head with a block of cheese. You have to understand, this was during the show’s 15th series and after so much time, literally any detective drama would start running out of plausible murder ideas.
The Reality:
Cheese is not only hard enough to beat someone to death with, it can supposedly even be fired out of a cannon. There have been stories of an 1865 naval battle between Brazil and Uruguay, during which the latter’s ships ran out of cannonballs and, in a moment of desperation, loaded their guns with Edam cheeses. And it worked, with the stale hunks damaging an enemy vessel’s sail! Of course, back then the most popular drinks around the world were beer and mercury so who knows how much truth there is to any of that.
Well, as it turns out …
Now, it did work, but with Garrotxa instead of Edam like in the story. Still, you have to consider that 150 years ago, most food probably contained a fair amount of rocks and sawdust, so the stories could very well still be true. In any case, cheese could definitely be used to bludgeon someone to death. Plus, you could have a fondue party later to get rid of the murder weapon.
License to Kill: Stabbery Via Swordfish
The Scene:
There’s a scene in License to Kill where 007 fights a bunch of goons in a bar when one of them comes at him with a stuffed swordfish. Not only does this seem to legitimately worry James Freaking Bond, but the fish is apparently sturdy enough to go through a bar chair. Which is … holy crap. I’m kind of confused by a lot of what’s going on here.
The Reality:
A swordfish’s bill is definitely capable of killing a person, which we know for sure because it happened to Randy Llanes at Honokohau Harbour in Hawaii, when he jumped in the water to spear a swordfish but tragically the reverse happened. There are a few more stories like that floating around the internet, which we won’t spend a lot of time linking to, but rest assured they very much point to the fact that the swordfish was not named ironically.
If you’re thinking, “Wait, what does this have to do with food?” then you’re not using your imagination enough in an article that discusses the plausability of defending yourself with a salami. Maybe you’re at a fish market that’s a front for the mob, and ninjas attack so you hurl a few sea-urchin shuriken (surchiken), ready a nearby octopus for use as a bola, and pull Swordfish Excalibur from its icy home so you can wield the most impractical bladed weapon since the urumi.
Look, it’s your ridiculous version of an already ridiculous thing, so it can be whatever you want. But it definitely could happen, or it could involve a narwhal tusk or who even knows anymore.
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