CONFESSIONS OF A PRISON COOK: A FUSION OF FOOD & CRIME

Alan Turing, played by  Benjamin Cumberbatch in  The Imitation Game ,  chose castration over  imprisonment for the  crime of  homosexuality and  committed suicide  by  injecting an #apple with cyanide.   https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/alan-turings-apple

In the late 1800s a British man  infiltrated a Chinese #greentea factory and  discovered that they were  adding a blue and a yellow powder  to the tea for coloring which turned out to be  cyanide and gypsum; both common  components  in paint and plaster and  known  also as poisonous agents. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-british-tea-heist-9866709/

In 2016, a woman in Jakarta  murdered her friend by putting  cyanide in her #icedcoffee.  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-27/cyanide-coffee-murder-jessica-wongso-found-guilty/7971498

A dad laced #pixisticks with cyanide on Halloween and killed his son for $20,000 in insurance money. He also poisoned his daughter but she lived, along with three neighborhood children, to make it look like a more random crime.

Although it was actually  flavor-aid,  a common colloquialism  "don't drink the #Kool-Aid"  came about after the  1978 Jonestown Massacre,  when cult leader Jim Jones  asked his 900 followers to  drink cyanide laced flavor-aid  leading to their deaths.   https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/jim-jones

Japan's "Poison Candy Gang" dramatically reduced the nation's taste for Valentine's Day confectioneries when the gang has sought to extort money from confectioners by threatening to plant poisoned samples of their products on store shelves unless a ransom is paid. Poison was actually found in #chocolates made by the Morinaga Confectionery Co.  The gang unsuccessfully tried to extort ransom from three other food and candy firms. The elusive 'Man with 21 Faces' gang, which threatened to scatter #candy laced with lethal doses of cyanide across the nation to press its demands for payoffs from confectioners, ridiculed the custom of buying candy for a sweetheart. The packets were marked 'Danger. You'll die if you eat. The Man with 21 Faces.' http://articles.latimes.com/1985-02-10/news/mn-3387_1_poison-candy

A woman in India was accused in 2019 of  poisoning her in laws over  the course of more than a decade,  serving them cyanide-laced #soup in the  hope of inheriting their property and assets.  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/19/world/asia/india-koodathayai-murder.html