Madness-Induced Omnivore

All part of a balanced diet.

The Madness-Induced Omnivore is a character who is suffering from some degree of delusion, delirium, Sanity Slippage, or is completely off their rocker, and for whom one of the symptoms of their mental issue(s) is a desire or compulsion to eat abnormally. This can range from eating things that are technically edible but are far outside the norm for their diet, such as insects, all the way to trying to eat non-food items like rocks or metallic objects. Strange, unsettling mannerisms can accompany this drive, such as a degradation of personality or belief that there's a connection to what they're consuming. If insects or other animals are eaten, they're usually eaten raw and in a crude or even animalistic manner. This can have a markedly negative effect on their health, and is often portrayed as being shocking or disturbing to those who see the character doing the consuming.

Extreme hunger can also cause this, and in a comedic work it can be Played for Laughs, often being combined with Meat-O-Vision. Can overlap with Extreme Omnivore, Eat Dirt, Cheap, or Metal Muncher, especially in comedic instances. On the other hand, taking this to a horrific extreme can lead to the character attempting to feed on people. However, that trope should be used for such examples.

Related to Crazy Consumption (eating normal foods in a very odd way) and Too Desperate to Be Picky (eating things you normally wouldn't out of desperation rather than insanity). Can overlap with Horror Hunger, although in that case the drive to eat odd things is the focal point of their madness and is usually ravenous, insatiable, and all-consuming (so to speak).

Note that cultural differences can affect how this presents. For instance, people in some Asian and African countries wouldn't bat an eye at eating insects, but in many Western countries this would be seen as very odd, especially if the insects weren't cooked first. Also, pica is a medical condition where a person feels a compulsion to eat non-foodstuffs.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The Laughing Vampire: Miko Tachibana, as a child, liked to play with insects, and would sometimes eat them. This horrified her mother, who told Miko that she would turn into a bug if she kept doing it. Miko was scared by this but was unable to stop herself, and her mother struck her and eventually tried to kill her when she couldn't tolerate it anymore. However, this resulted in Miko becoming a vampire.

Comic Books

• Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth: Amadeus Arkham's mother Elizabeth suffered from mental illness for most of her life, and at one point when Amadeus brings her some food and asks her to eat it, she says "*mmf* Eaten. I've eaten. I've eaten." As she says this, she opens her mouth and beetles fall out onto the bed.
  Arkham: [narration] Many years later, when I became aware of the significance of the beetle as a symbol of rebirth, I realized that she was simply trying to protect herself from something, in the only way that made sense to her.
• Monica's Gang: Maggy is a little girl with a voracious appetite. In some stories, she goes insane after not eating anything for a few hours, and resorts to making food sculptures out of sand or mud to curb her hunger.
• Watchmen: The Show Within a Show "Tales of the Black Freighter" is about a castaway who loses his sanity during his arduous journey back to his hometown. One of the first signs of his madness is when he devours a raw seagull, with the action being depicted on a red tinted panel focused on his choleric face. He later kills and eats a shark, explaining in an inner monologue that the inversion of predator-prey dynamics makes him laugh out of hatred.

Film—Animated

• Fun and Fancy Free: In a parody of Jack and the Beanstalk, Donald Duck plays the role of a peasant whose dinner consists of 1/3 of a bean between two slices of paper-thin bread. The famine causes him to snap, and he furiously eats his own plate and cutlery before Mickey and Goofy restrain him.
• Grave of the Fireflies: As Setsuko's starvation advances, she becomes delirious and starts to eat mud and glass beads in a desperate attempt to find anything to fill her belly.

Film—Live-Action

• Kimmy vs. The Reverend: In one route, an exhausted Titus is walking through the forest and sees a rich feast laid out in front of him. If the player chooses to have him eat it, the next shot sees him eating dirt.
• Swallow is centered around the disturbingly real-life mental illness pica, which causes the protagonist to eat non-edible objects, such as thumb tacks...while pregnant. At one point she goes for an ultrasound, and the doctor's discovery of the objects inside her is played for complete horror.

Literature

• Captain Underpants: In "The Terrifying Return of Tippy TinkleTrousers", when a Gang of Bullies see Tippy TinkleTrousers' Robo-Pants, they freak out and go insane. One of the bullies named Loogie starts eating some dirt and earthworms.
• Dracula: In a twisted variant of vampirism, Dracula's servant Renfield is consumed by a delusion that eating live animals would allow him to absorb their life force. While cooped up in the sanitarium, he would catch flies, spiders, and birds and eat them, and even asks for a kitten at one point.
• The Lord of the Rings: As Sméagol's mind is twisted by the One Ring, his behaviour becomes similar to that of a wild animal. He develops a taste for raw flesh, and is later shown to be disgusted by the Hobbit food he used to eat.
• Misery: The antagonist, Annie Wilkes, is a severely mentally ill woman who paradoxically expresses pity for those she kills. At one point, she picks up a rat that had been killed by one of her traps and, noticing some of its blood on her hand, licks her fingers while mourning the animal.
• In Dean Koontz's Life Expectancy, Punchinello seems to think a spider that made the mistake of attracting his attention makes a nice snack, which doesn't exactly reassure hostages Jimmy and Lorrie about their captor's mental state.

Live-Action TV

• The Big Bang Theory: In "The Werewolf Transformation", Howard goes to NASA for astronaut training, but he responds very badly to the survival training exercises. As he tells Bernadette in a video call, he got so hungry he ate a butterfly.
• The Brittas Empire: Downplayed in "We All Fall Down". When Helen's twins fail to be picked for a nappy advertisement, Brittas mentions her going Laughing Mad whilst eating burnt toast.
• CSI: NY: While searching a suspect's apartment in "Night, Mother", Mac and Stella find a bowl of half-eaten cigarettes. Turns out the woman was eating them while sleepwalking due to Post Traumatic Stress from witnessing paramedics attempting to revive her young son by massaging his heart after he'd been in a car accident. She had sleepwalked to the crime scene and was actually trying to revive the victim in the same way, not kill her.
• M*A*S*H: Exploited by Corporal Klinger in "38 Across" when one of his Section 8 schemes involves him attempting to eat a Jeep piece by piece. He manages to eat some nuts and bolts (dipped in motor oil), a windshield wiper blade, and several other bits before he ends up in tremendous pain from indigestion. He has to have surgery to have all the parts removed.
• Yellowjackets:
  • Taissa is a sleepwalker, and at one point she eats dirt from her garden. This is strongly implied to be a regression to her past time in the wilderness, where she was starving to death.
  • In the time after the crash, Shauna is shown to be the first girl who commits cannibalism— by eating Jackie's ear while starving and slipping into madness.

Professional Wrestling

• George Steele would play up his "The Animal" moniker by tearing open one of the turnbuckles during his matches and eating the stuffing.

Video Games

• Aisle: You can command the player character to eat the uncooked pasta straight off the supermarket shelves. He will do so, deluding himself into thinking that he is back in Rome, eating delicious cooked pasta.
  The pasta is a seething mass of off-white food. You tear at the plastic bags until the curls and tubes and twists and shells cascade onto the floor and into your hands. Scooping up a collection of different shapes you cram the pasta into your mouth. It is dry, it is hard. That's what your body is saying. But you learnt something a while back—that your body (your eyes, your hands, your heart) isn't always right. No, you've learnt to listen to your mind. And your minds says: soft, warm, slightly salty pasta. Tangy sauce. What a feast!
  They spoil your fun, they take you away—or so your body says. Your mind knows better; you're still in Rome eating pasta, drinking wine—everything is fine.
• The Bright in the Screen: One of the unsettling slideshows shows a crude stick figure sitting in a restaurant, with the text "My steak is not completely cooked... but the raw bits taste better. Waiter! I want my meat RAWRER!" After a transition, the stick figure is sitting cheerfully at the table again with a splattered red smile.
• Fallen London: Seekers of the Name of Mr. Eaten develop an obsession with forbidden secrets that takes the form of a literal hunger for knowledge, represented by the quality "Unaccountably Peckish". It often manifests as a hunger for other things while they struggle to figure out a new secret to sate it—rats, and ink, and candles, and raw meat. One story event has you dine on the article documenting you as a notable member of London high society... whereupon everyone forgets who you were.
  Soon the teeth in your jaw will reside cosily in your gut. Oh God. It will almost be as if you have two mouths. You will be able to consume—consume—
• Final Fantasy XIV: Vauthry, already a despotic Manchild obsessed with hedonism, shows he's gone off the deep end for sure when the Warrior of Light and companions walk into his chambers to witness him eating his pet Sin-Eaters and massive amounts of meol, including a shot where he swallows his food whole, fork and all.

Webcomics

• In Clan of the Cats, one of the signs of Chelsea's werecat nature breaking through is ordering a steak in a diner, then remembering when it hits her stomach that she's a vegetarian. When she gets home, she proceeds to try to tear her roommate's turkey dogs open with her bare hands.

Web Series

• In Tribe Twelve: as the protagonist Noah descends into madness he starts to eat bizarre things like money, paper, crabs (found on the ground and eaten while the exoskeleton is still there) , and at some point in the future he eats bird entrails.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Picnic", Gumball and Darwin are lost in the Forest of Doom after failing to listen to Miss Simian's directions to the picnic and must survive. They become so hungry they eat tree bark, and Darwin at one point eats all of Gumball's clothes.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: In "Laugh Ed Laugh", Eddy loses his sanity because all the other kids in the cul-de-dac got chicken pox but him and his friends. In his madness-induced state, Eddy at one point says "Ham and eggs with buttered toast" and takes a bite out of a fence, and mistakes a fire hydrant for a jawbreaker, rips it out of the ground, stuffs it in his mouth, and then proceeds to suck on it. Also, when Edd tells Ed to discreetly hide the key to the shed's lock, he puts it in a sandwich and eats it.
• Family Guy: In "Deep Throats", Peter and Lois take marijuana to get some "inspiration" for their old folk singing act. Peter ends up becoming so high that he starts eating his guitar; later, the two hallucinate that they're in a candy wonderland and lick Chris, thinking he's an ice cream sundae.
• Futurama: In "That's Lobstertainment!", the Planet Express ship sinks into the La Brea Tar Pits, leaving Fry and Leela stranded underground, and Fry worries that he'll grow hungry enough to start eating his shoes. When Leela does end up finding a way out, Fry says he still wants some shoe and starts eating.
• Gravity Falls: Old Man McGucket is a Crazy Homeless Person who is shown to be an Extreme Omnivore on a few occasions. In one episode, he is shown eating books while informing some children around him that pioneers also ate books for sustenance. When Swallowed Whole by a pterodactyl in another episode, he survives by eating his way through it. Additionally, a picture in a newspaper shows him eating a (possibly live) raccoon.
• Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids: "A Tangled Web" revolves around a boy named Nigel, who has a number of odd tics such as rolling his eyes, making tongue clicks, and standing around with his mouth hanging open, and has a penchant for eating flies. This later turns into an obsession with killing spiders.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: In "Space Madness", Ren succumbs to the titular Space Madness and eats a bar of soap, mistaking it for an ice cream bar.
• South Park: In "Tsst", Supernanny is hired to discipline Eric Cartman. The ordeal leads to her being admitted to a mental hospital, where she is shown eating her own excrement.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Mermaid Man & Barnacle Boy VI: The Motion Picture", Patrick tells SpongeBob he neglected to remove the lens cap of his camera while they were recording their movie. Realizing that they have no footage, SpongeBob has a mental breakdown and begins eating worms he finds on the ground nearby.
• Teen Titans (2003): In "Crash", Cyborg is infected with a virus that gives him Horror Hunger and causes him to see inedible objects as delicious treats. The delusions cause him to spend the entire episode eating garbage, machines and money.
• Total Drama: In "Top Dog", after Duncan gets lost in the woods and goes insane, he eats Courtney's 32-page-long contract that Courtney wrote for him in order to correct his flaws before entering a serious relationship with him. Eating the contract didn't get rid of it for good since Courtney made copies.

---