Carnivore Confusion / Live-Action TV

• Subverted, handwaved and lampshaded a lot in various Muppet productions, usually involving the Swedish Chef:
  • In an episode of The Muppet Show the Chef tried to make a Thanksgiving dinner. Trying to make turkey doesn't work since the turkeys can talk; trying to make pig stew is as bad, with pigs in the cast. He goes for "veggy weggy stew" but the vegetables can talk and fight him. In the concluding scene the Thanksgiving dinner consists entirely of vitamin pills.
  • In another episode he tried to boil a Lobster until the Lobster's brothers rode in Mexican-Bandito style, shooting up the kitchen with their revolvers and rescuing the main course.
  • He had a similar problem making Christmas dinner for A Muppet Family Christmas. The Chef invited the Turkey (from Dorchester, MA) for dinner. The Turkey convinces the Chef to roast up Big Bird instead. Big Bird unwittingly saves his own life by befriending the Chef, and in the words of this reviewer, "The Chef ends up preparing shredded wheat and cranberry sauce, which is terrific. Until the cranberries start singing 'Silent Night'..."
  • A good way hit Miss Piggy's Berserk Button is to mention any kind of edible pork products in her hearing.
  • In The Muppet Christmas Carol, Rizzo the Rat is about to eat some vegetables prepared by the Swedish Chef...but they join in song, and he shakes his head and relates his mother's advice: "Never eat singing food."
  • Then there was the frog's legs skit, the duck soup episode...once his spaghetti tried to crawl away from the plate while he was checking on the tomato sauce, and ended up attacking him when he slapped it back. Another time, bread dough started inflating and finally took him over. And each and every time it was absolutely hilarious.
  • In Muppet Treasure Island, Mrs Bubberidge the innkeeper announces tomorrow's special is "roast suckling..." and when the appalled pigs turn to her, she concludes "...potatoes". And then she has to apologise to a talking potato...
  • In the Julie Andrews episode number The Lonely Goatherd, one must wonder what the lonely goat herded (especially since no flock was shown on screen). No wonder he was lonely!
  • Averted altogether on Sesame Street, where the issue is simply avoided. When Elmo inquired about what wild animals eat, he was told about herbivores and insectivores, but meat-eaters were never discussed, even though (talking) tiger and lion Muppets were right next to him.
  • In the The Muppets (2015) episode "Generally Inhospitable", Miss Piggy says the reason she hates being sick is that when she was growing up on the farm, injured pigs disappeared, and the next time you saw them was in the butcher's window. This is played absolutely straight.
  • In another Swedish Chef sketch, he was getting ready to prepare frog's legs. The frog in question ended up being Robin! Kermit immediately rushed on stage to rescue him.
  • The "Økeÿ-Døkeÿ Køøkïñ" skits on Muppets Now are hosted by a turkey named Beverly Plume, who has zero problem with the guest chef making poultry-based dishes.
• In Dinosaurs, everyone (except, ironically, humans) acts like people, which means the characters will frequently have conversations with their meals.
• In The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss, the Cat in the Hat has a bird friend named Terrence.
• The Tales from the Darkside episode "Love Hungry" takes this concept to the very extreme. A malevolent "diet company" gave a woman the power to hear food talking. Any food, vegetable, or animal. So whenever she bit in, it screamed. She starved to death in the end. Puzzling, in as much as fruits (and many so-called vegetables, such as tomatoes and eggplant) are not whole organisms; they are in effect fertilized ovaries, deliberately cast off by a plant in order to facilitate its reproduction.^note Even if you pluck an apple from a tree instead of waiting for it to fall, you're not killing (or indeed hurting) anything. The seeds are designed to pass through an animal digestive tract unharmed and viable. Processed meat certainly wouldn't be able to speak, either, so both must just be a trick.
• An especially odd example: During one of his Headlines segments, Jay Leno showed a newspaper article with tips for a fun camp-out. For maximum strangeness, the picture for the article showed three anthropomorphic marshmallows roasting an inanimate marshmallow over a fire.
• There was one variation of this trope in TV Funhouse, a satire of kid's shows. Except for one human, most of the cast are animals. Some of the animals are played by puppets, others by actual animals. In one episode, all the animals went to this restaurant where the whole gimmick was that you eat what you are. The cats can eat cats, lobsters eat lobsters, and so on. They had a real life pig, and real food, and they showed the pig eating bacon. Not as disturbing as it sounds, as pigs are omnivorous and happily eat anything. Among livestock, pigs are infamous for cannibalism, especially eating their own young. Many other animals do this as well^note even animals that are normally herbivores, such as rabbits, particularly when under stress from overpopulation or malnutrition.
  • In one episode Robert Goulet accompanied them to the restaurant and, presumably, had some long pork chops.
• One sketch on The Young Ones had a couple of rat puppets chatting in the background. Spotting them, and apparently not understanding their language, Rick smacks one with Neil's guitar, killing it. A quick scene of the surviving rat eating the dead one follows, in which it Hand Waves this trope, remarking: "It's what he would have wanted".
• On Arrested Development the Bluths' Frozen Banana stand has as its mascot Mr. Banana Grabber, a giant talking banana that steals and eats regular-sized, non-talking bananas. The implications are not lost on Michael.
  Michael: Why would a banana grab another banana? I mean, those are the kind of questions I don't want to answer.
• In a rather silly example, Animal Planet's Weird, True and Freaky featured a story on chimpanzee "cannibalism." Anyone familiar with chimps knows that the males tend to kidnap and eat the infants of rival troops. Shocking, yes, but that's not what the story is about. It's about chimpanzees, apes, hunting for monkey meat. And the narrator says it's cannibalism. That's as cannibalistic as a polar bear eating a seal!
• Walking with Dinosaurs:
  • Walking With Dinosaurs of all things, has a tendency to do the "evil scavenger" variant of this trope; while the predatory animals do have a more ominous mood to their presence, they're still depicted in a way that makes them at least somewhat admirable and interesting creatures. Some are even the "protagonists" of their respective episodes. The same cannot be said about Coelophysis (opportunistic protagonist predator from "New Blood"), Eustreptospondylus (the token land-lubber in "Cruel Sea"), young Ornithocheirus (scavenges the dead protagonist in "Giant of the Skies") or Didelphodon (an annoying, hyena-like mammal from "Death of a Dynasty"), all of which are depicted in a rather negative, or at least macabre light.
  • Its spinoff, Walking with Beasts is also guilty of this; the "Sabre Tooth" episode of the former paints the terror birds as carrion-eaters (their actual diets were made almost entirely of live prey) to make the sabre-tooth cats more likeable. This is not only biased but also completely incorrect, as terror birds are very poor scavengers and superb predators.
• Played very straight in the Dutch children's show BiBaBoerderij (can be translated to FiFaFarm), which teaches small children about various aspects of farm life. In this show, every creature that farms normally use for food production also displays sentience, including the vegetables and fruit and live in an idyllic setting in which everyone gets along just fine. And yet, the characters frequently eat food onscreen, which includes products made from the very animals and vegetables that are also portrayed as sentient characters. Off course, with this series being aimed at small children, this is never addressed.
• Discussed in a Seinfeld cold open when Jerry and Elaine dissect a movie concession stand bumper.
  Jerry: I just don't understand the Raisinets. [...] The box of Raisinets runs up to the concession stand, buys another box of Raisinets.
  Elaine: ...So?
  Jerry: Box of Raisinets eatin' another box of Raisinets? It's perverse.
  Elaine: He's not gonna eat them. He's buyin' 'em for his Pepsi girlfriend.
• Barney & Friends: Despite being a Tyrannosaurus rex, Barney is mostly vegetarian, with his favorite snack being peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

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