As Josh Mandel has noted, Sierra had two kinds of dead ends. The unintentional ones, which were oversights, and the intended ones that were part of the game play. The later were usually avoidable with a little thought. In KQ5, eating the food in Serenia leads to a couple of dead ends later, but why would someone eat their inventory if there was not some indication that Graham needed to? Dead ends that resulted from not picking up an inventory item earlier in the game from an area that can no longer be accessed is unintentional and is simply bad design.