There’s a campaign in Witch-finders Meets NYPD Blue, I’m telling you.
Edible Effigies
This particular magical workaround occurs only in a magical tradition (we’ll call it ‘witchery,’ with apologies to benign — or very, very touchy — witches everywhere) that permits the remote cursing of individuals by the use of an effigy that has been enchanted to have a mystic link to the person being cursed. Needless to say, if that sort of thing is both demonstrable and reproducible then the practice will get swiftly banned by the local power structure, because typically the local power structure will inevitably end up being at high risk of being cursed. And when simply banning the spell’s use doesn’t work — it typically does not — the next step is to ban possession of the specialized ingredients and equipment used to create the effigies. That often can work, for a while. But it also does encourage a certain amount of creativity among the witches making the effigies, because banning this sort of thing also invariably makes it much more lucrative.
Edible Effigies are merely the latest trick in the ongoing war between the witches and the witch-finders. The witch abandons the traditional rags, hair, and blood method in favor of carefully carving out a doll resembling the target out of a root vegetable (potatoes and turnips work best, but vegetables like onions, yams, and radishes can also serve). The advantage is that the mage can tap into the potential life energy of the vegetable to power the spell, and thus use the correspondence of the likeness to the target to establish a curse-link, without a sample of the target’s blood or hair or whatnot. The disadvantage is that it’s significantly harder to make an effigy properly this way; most witches go through about six or seven tries before they get the right one. But the good news on that is that you can still safely cook and eat the evidence.
Speaking of which: the effigy, once activated, does not inflict horrible pain on the target, should somebody either eat or cook the effigy. In fact, doing so immediately breaks the link. This is because vegetables are, in an odd mystical sense, meant to be cooked and eaten — so doing so overwhelms the imposed linkage between effigy and target as a matter of course. Or courses, depending on how flavorful the effigy is.