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Meat-O-Vision
aka: Meat-O-Vision

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"I suspect it would be like most cartoons. You know, we'd start to go nuts after a while and I would look at Homestar and he would look like a big steak. And then Homestar would look at me and I'd look like, you know, some kinda brownie sundae. So we'd chase each other around the island, trying to eat each other. And at some point, my foot would look like a sandwich, and I would put salt on it and try to eat it, and it's like 'Oh, it's my foot!'"

A character has been suffering from hunger for days or weeks, and begins to hallucinate. Is that a delicious steak dinner, a giant hot dog, or a large roast fowl sitting right next to him? No, it's one of their friends, who is now staring back at him oddly, wondering "Why Are You Looking at Me Like That?"

This most often occurs with shipwreck survivors or castaways (especially if stranded on a "Far Side" Island), but it can occur in less dire situations too, such as fasting or dieting.

Note that the particular hallucinations are always some manner of Food Porn; never has a castaway visualized their shipmates as, say, ground Tofu paste or Brussels sprouts.

To clarify, Meat-O-Vision can apply to any kind of food, not just meat.

If said character goes through with it, it transitions to No Party Like a Donner Party. Compare Vein-o-Vision and Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere. See also Delicious Distraction and Obsessed with Food. Horror Hunger can have vampires, werewolves and other monsters looking at humans like this should they go without for too long. If the would-be meal wants to be eaten, see Let's Meet the Meat. Compare Delicious Daydream for normal daydreams to do with food. This can be caused by a Winter of Starvation. May lead to becoming a Madness-Induced Omnivore.

Subtrope of Black Comedy Cannibalism. Compare and contrast Food and Body Comparison.


Ex🥩mples

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    Adv🥧rtising 
  • An Oh Henry ad showed a hungry university student seeing his English Literature professor as a giant Oh Henry bar... and chasing said professor down the hall.
  • A Planters commercial is essentially nothing but meat-o-vision; a guy sees his shipmate as a giant sea-salted peanut — except that the shipmate gets drawn as Mr. Peanut, not an actual peanut.
  • A Weight Watchers commercial has a woman on a diet seeing various pieces of work equipment (a computer keyboard, a telephone, a water cooler) appearing in the form of food. This also applies to furniture, as a booth seat and table in a restaurant appears in the form of pizza and a living room couch appears in the form of potato chips.
  • The commercial for Zombies Ate My Neighbors features a zombie whose POV is this (the cheerleader running from the zombie is a giant roast chicken, a dog is a hot dog, and so on.).

    Anime & M🥙nga 
  • Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood uses this during the survival part of the Elrics' Training from Hell.
  • In the manga version of Heat Guy J, Kyoko is dieting (read: starving herself), so that she can look good in a bikini at a pool party her crush has been invited to. She's working at her computer, and visions of ice cream and cakes come out from the keyboard.
  • In one episode of Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, Kawasaki accidentally feeds Kirby a magical spice capable of making any dish palatable. Cue Kirby seeing everything and everyone as food.
  • In one chapter of Koro-Sensei Quest!, Koro-sensei ends up unable to buy food, and starts hallucinating a wooden club he found as a chicken leg due to hunger. Played with in that since Koro-sensei is an Extreme Omnivore, he eats the club anyway with no issue.
  • The main plot of The Mermaid Princess's Guilty Meal focuses on the titular mermaid princess discovering the wonders of seafood by eating cuisine made from her fish friends. When she returns to the sea after her first meal, her guilt causes her to momentarily perceive her friends as potential food. After numerous chapters of dining, she's so far gone that she can no longer snap herself out of this trope.
  • In Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water the heroes are stranded and hungry on an island. Jean imagines Marie as a plate of cooked turkey. However this hallucination is not induced purely by hunger, but as a result of eating strange mushrooms.
  • Happens in One Piece. Most egregious example: Luffy and Sanji chasing Chopper. Even if he wasn't part of their team yet, they at least seemed to notice it was an intelligent creature, and they didn't care.
  • Played for Drama in Saiyuki, where a demon claims that he was not driven insane by the spell that causes madness and frenzy in other demons, he was imply enlightened with the mind-blowing revelation that...human beings were nothing more than prey to the demons.

    Asian An🌭mation 
  • Happy Heroes: While it isn't necessarily from intense hunger, in Season 5 episode 36, Happy S. imagines numerous objects around him, such as robots and tree leaves, turning into lollipops, but doesn't try to eat them. This distracts him for enough time that he nearly gets hit by a car on the street. Later, the Monster of the Week, which feeds on people's distractions, traps Happy S. in this fantasy.
  • In the Motu Patlu episode "Motu Ke Samose", Motu gulps down an entire bottle of medicine made by Dr. Jhatka, causing him to hallucinate samosas everywhere.

    C🍅mic Books 
  • Górsky & Butch: The heroes, a pair of policemen, suffer this when in the desert, seeing each other as a bottle of mineral water and cola respectively.
  • Galacta: Daughter of Galactus: Galacta can't keep herself from calculating the caloric value of every living thing she sees when she's hungry.
  • The Powerpuff Girls: In the story "Pizza My Heart", Buttercup has an obsession with garlic. It manifests itself so hard that during a fight with Mojo Jojo, she starts seeing everybody as cloves of garlic. She sees the Mayor's sash as a slice of garlic pizza and tries to eat it.
  • Happens in the Nintendo Club Nintendo comic Sag Niemals Holerö. Subverted in that they actually turned into food.
  • The Simpsons: Parodied in an issue where all the main characters are dumped on an island made of trash by Mr. Burns. Before long, Homer looks at Lenny and Carl and sees a hot dog and a hamburger with his friends' faces. Then it transpires that, searching for clean clothes on the island, they put on some fast food mascot costumes.
  • Tintin: In The Crab with the Golden Claws, when Tintin and Captain Haddock are lost in the middle of a desert, Captain Haddock sees Tintin as a mirage of a champagne bottle and throttles him, trying to remove the "cork".
  • Zombo: We are treated to a POV from the comic's hero Zombo. He sees everyone around him as walking slabs of meat.

    C🍙mic Strips 
  • The Far Side
    • A comic has a cow and man starving in a life raft. The cow pictures the man as covered in grass and flowers.
    • Another strip references this trope: two haggard-looking men in a life raft, with one telling the other that he doesn't want to make the situation worse but he's really close to laughing maniacally and seeing his friend's nose as a German sausage.
  • Happens just about every time Garfield is dieting. One particularly amusing example is in the February 20, 1994 strip, where Garfield hallucinates Jon having a sausage for a head, Pooky being a drumstick, Odie being made of fruit and his own reflection being an ice cream cone.
  • Zits: When Hector goes on a three day juice cleanse, he starts to hallucinate Jeremy's head as a giant hamburger. Pierce, also on the cleanse, sees Jeremy as a walking hotdog.

    Fanf🍡ction 
  • In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "A Haunted Christmas", Nabby starts hallucinating that he's seeing food everywhere, even his fellow Smurfs, when he eats his stash of smurfnip during a Christmas famine.
  • In Slipped Harry drinks some of Jacob's blood in an emergency situation, then pretends to go into a trance as a prank.
    He didn't like the way that Harry was looking at him, it reminded him of one of the cartoons where the wolf pictured his best friend, who just happened to be a sheep, walking around looking like a steak.

    Films 🍤 Animation 
  • In the climax of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the eponymous beast thinks that Lady Tottington is a giant carrot. To be fair to the beast, the lady's wardrobe seems to consist entirely of dresses that are deliberately colored and patterned to look like vegetables.
  • In James and the Giant Peach, a starving Centipede first sees the Grasshopper as cheese and a bottle of wine, then the Earthworm as a hot dog, and finally a seagull as a roast chicken. He almost eats the last one.
  • Madagascar: An interesting twist, in that the character in question (a lion) is looking this way at a zebra, which in the wild would have been among its prey, but they're from the zoo and don't seem to know that.
    Marty: Come on, do I look like a steak to you?
    Alex: Yeeeeeah...
    Marty: See? I told you I don't look like a—Wait! Wait, w-w-what did you say?
    Alex: Ohhhhh yeah! (growls and advances menacingly towards Marty)
  • In Minions, Stuart hallucinates that Kevin and Bob (and Bob's teddy bear) are bananas while rowing across the ocean.
  • In Return To Never Land, after the kraken has a taste of Captain Hook for the first time, it sees him as a big red codfish.
  • Winnie the Pooh (2011): Pooh Bear begins hallucinating that his shadow, his friends, and everything around him are honey pots when he's starving.

    Films 🍫 Live-Action 
  • Cat's Eye has a tobacco variant. In "Quitters, Inc.", Dick attends a party where he has a bizarre hallucination of everybody smoking in very strange ways, and sees two women as giant packs of cigarettes.
  • In the movie City Hunter, Jackie Chan hallucinates that a woman's bodily parts are food (the breasts are burgers, the legs are chicken legs). The woman is pulled away before he can even attempt to eat her.
  • Oddly enough, the first example of this trope was in live-action, in the 1925 Charlie Chaplin film The Gold Rush where a starving Big Jim starts to see Charlie as a giant chicken. Every use since is directly or indirectly inspired by this scene, making it a rare example of ur-example, trope maker, and codifier all in one.
  • Another live-action example in a Little Rascals short where Stymie and Spanky are living on the streets Stymie briefly imagines Petey the dog as a hotdog.
  • In Roman Polański's Pirates, we don't see the raft-stranded Captain Red hallucinating his seaman Frog as food, but he licks his lips as if he saw food while looking at Frog and clearly projects to eat him until a Spanish galleon crosses their path. He also calls Frog "little pig" while he's at it.
  • Strange Brew: When Bob and Doug forget to feed their dog Hosehead, the dog sees the duo as giant steaks.
  • Vampires Suck has Becca's face morph into a hamburger during a parody of the papercut scene from New Moon.

    Lit🥠rature 
  • Comes up in Dinoverse. Pragmatic Janine, after Mike is put into the body of a Tyrannosaurus, sets up a first priority for the group.
    "The way I see it, we need to get him fed so he doesn't go native and start picturing us wrapped in hot dog buns."
  • From The Paranoid's Pocket Guide to Mental Disorders You Can Just Feel Coming On's entry for Wendigo psychosis:
    You love your wife. Your beautiful wife. Your beautiful, succulent wife. Your beautiful succulent delicious wife. Your succulent delicious steak. You love your steak so much. Rare.
    Hang on a second. Were you just imagining your wife as a steak? You should know better then that. You should never imagine your steak as a steak. Steak. Eat steak.
  • In Joseph L. Schott's No Left Turns he mentions a two-man FBI field office where the agents involved grew to hate each other so much that they put a plywood partition in the middle of the office. One of them explained how this came about.
    "You remember that old movie The Gold Rush where the two guys were playing poker in a cabin during a blizzard and they were so hungry one of them began to look like a big chicken to the other?"
    "Yeah."
    "Well, one day I was thinking about that in the office, and I said, 'Frank, you know what you remind me of? A chicken, that's what. A big funny-looking chicken.' And he says to me, 'Sid, you remind me of a duck. You walk like a duck. You talk like a duck. By God, you must be a duck.' Next day we had the wall built. We even paid for it ourselves."
  • A non-cannibalistic example in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, when Big Eater Ichabod first visits the Van Tassel family's extremely prosperous farm, and imagines all the livestock as food.
    In his devouring mind’s eye, he pictured to himself every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce. In the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon, and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey but he beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savory sausages; and even bright chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back, in a side dish, with uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter which his chivalrous spirit disdained to ask while living.

    Live🥫Action TV 
  • The Colbert Report
    • Stephen Colbert, while reporting on a food shortage, becomes increasingly hungry and starts eyeing up his stage manager Bobby. Soon, Bobby becomes a giant chicken rotisserie. An interesting example in that Stephen is already established as an occasional cannibal — and then we come back from the final commercial break to find him licking barbecue sauce off his fingers. Bobby, it turns out, has tendered his resignation, and in a later episode, Stephen eats Bobby's ghost.
    • When the New York Times reported the number of weeks' pay that a worker would receive for losing a limb, Stephen chopped up the article with a paper cutter... then started seeing his fingers as giant dollar signs. In the end he decided not to do it, because he needed his hands to cut off the other things.
  • Father Ted
    • Played with in an episode: for Lent, Ted tries to give up cigarettes, and makes Jack give up alcohol and Dougal give up rollerblading. About halfway through, Ted sees Jack as a giant cigarette, Jack sees Dougal as a giant pint of Guinness, and Dougal sees Ted as a giant rollerblade.
    • Weirdly subverted in another episode, "The Mainland": when Ted and Dougal are lost in the caves, and Dougal declares "Ted! I'm so hungry I'm beginning to hallucinate". Ted then steps into the shot having turned not into food but Abraham Lincoln.
  • Frasier:
    • Referenced in a Thanksgiving episode: "Is baby Alice dressed as a turkey, or am I just hungry?"
    • And again in "Frasier-Lite": before the final weigh-in on the weight-loss challenge, Noel says he sees giant steaks with legs. Kenny explains that the Beef Council dancers are on the next segment.
  • In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will discovers Ashley's singing talents, and briefly sees her as a giant singing dollar sign.
  • Referenced in an episode of Friends. Joey and Chandler have been waiting a long time to be served at a restaurant, and Chandler quips, "If this were a cartoon, you'd look like a ham by now."
  • In Glee, Mercedes starts to see her fellow students as food just before she passes out when she is on Sue Sylvester's starvation diet. Also, Quinn asks her if she saw everyone as food before passing out, explaining that the same thing had happened to her.
  • In It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Frank starts to hallucinate with hunger and see Mac as a rum-soaked ham after they find themselves adrift at sea. About 30 seconds after they find themselves adrift at sea.
  • Jessie: While Jessie and the kids are trapped in the Rosses' emergency panic room, Luke sees Mrs. Kibling as a plate of chicken and Mrs. Kibling sees Stuart as a rat.
  • Married... with Children: The episode "At The Zoo" has Al seeing Buck as a roast turkey after the dog eats his dinner.
  • Parodied in an episode of The Mighty Boosh, when the main characters are trapped on a deserted island; before long Howard wants to eat Vince and the camera flashes to Vince made of food. Then the camera goes to the regular Vince, who says "Hey, Howard, why don't we eat this guy? He's made of eggs and sausages."
  • In My Name Is Earl, when Randy went a day without food, he started describing Earl's body as different foods.
  • The NewsRadio parody of Titanic (1997) ended with Bill and Matthew on a liferaft in the middle of the Atlantic sizing each other up as a hamburger and a soft drink.
  • In the "Quad Court" episode of Nicky, Ricky, Dicky, and Dawn, after being deprived of sweets, the quads see Mac holding a cinnamon bun. They then see him as one as well.
  • Sabrina the Teenage Witch: After getting hooked on pancakes, Sabrina's attempt to go cold turkey results in her seeing Salem as a stack of pancakes asking her if she's hungry. Not to mention Mrs. Mapleton, the giant syrup dispenser...
  • In Seinfeld, Newman pictures butter-covered and sunburnt Kramer as a roast turkey - after reading a book about cannibalism.
  • The X-Files: In "Hungry", a brain-eating mutant starts seeing other people's heads this way. Also inverted when he hallucinates that the hamburger patties he's cooking look like little brains.
  • In Yellowjackets, a pregnant and starving Shauna has a dream about giving birth to... a delicious fried chicken and eating it. The fact that the chicken is screaming like a newborn baby adds to the mood.
    • In season 2, this trope is in full effect as the survivors imagine themselves at a lavish Dionysian feast as they turn to cannibalism for the first time by eating Jackie's corpse.

    Mus🍬c Videos 
  • In the music video for "Learn to Fly" by Foo Fighters, a fat woman on an aeroplane looks at another passenger and his head turns into a hamburger.

    New M🍔dia 

    Professional Wr🍰stling 
  • Parodied by Scott Steiner in TNA during his feuds with Samoa Joe. Steiner would claim that the reason why Joe had it out for him is because the "fat bastard" would look at him and envision Steiner as a twinkie, hamburger, a piece of bacon, etc.

    Puppet Sh🍪ws 
  • The Mr. Potato Head Show: When Queenie goes on a diet, she starts seeing other cast members this way (who, let us remember, are almost all Anthropomorphic Food to begin with): she sees Mr. Potato Head as a baked potato, and she sees Baloney as a sandwich—a sandwich that turns to the camera and says "Not in any way good."
  • Sesame Street: In the Avengers: Age of Ultron parody "Aveggies: Age of Bon Bon" on the episode about focus, Cookie Monster (as Dr. Brownie) keeps getting distracted from stopping the alien spaceship and seeing his teammates' equipment as snack food. He sees Captain Ameri-cauliflower's shield as a giant cookie and The Mighty Corn's hammer as a marshmallow and eats both of them.
  • In the Under the Umbrella Tree episode "Singing Telegrams", Holly and Iggy deliver a telegram to congratulate a woman's success on her diet, dressed as a giant hamburger and order of fries. But the woman is so hungry that when she sees them in costume, she thinks they're real food and chases them down the street to try to eat them.
  • Done rather strangely in the Wonder Showzen episode "Oceans." Stranded at sea, Chauncey envisions Wordsworth as a roasted chicken. Wordsworth then envisions Chauncey as a female roasted chicken (with wig and lipstick). Instead of trying to eat each other, the two begin dry humping instead.

    Video G🍨mes 
  • In Cathys Crafts, Cathy's best friend comments that a cat which wandered into the shop must've been starving, judging by the way it ate. This prompts Cathy's boyfriend to remark that they probably all look like giant pieces of meat to it.
  • At the end of Crash Twinsanity, Victor and Moritz, two birds, meet Evil Crash during their escape, and the latter sees the former through this. Moritz, being Moritz, simply says, "I love roast chicken!" Victor, panicked, says, "Well, this is one heck of an ending."
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair features an (unseen) variation. In Chapter 4, the surviving students are all trapped inside a funhouse with no food and have to commit a murder to get out before they all starve to death. At one point, it affects Sonia to the point of Dessert-O-Vision, as she starts seeing Hajime and Chiaki as desserts.
    Sonia: My goodness, Hajime... when did your face become Mont Blanc all of a sudden? Um... just the corner is fine, so... may I take a bite out of you?
    Chiaki: ...You'd get a stomachache.
    Sonia: Oh my, now there's an adorable shortcake.
    Chiaki: I'm not a shortcake... I'm Chiaki.
  • Hungry Lamu: Lamu perceives the world around him as bright, sunny and cheery (even when it's clearly not) and all the inhabitants are friendly fruit people playfully teasing to be consumed. Lamu sees the world this way in an attempt to sate his endless hunger without guilt.
  • Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards. Extreme Omnivore Kirby and the rest of his Five-Man Band are traveling in the desert when Kirby starts hallucinating his buddies as food. Good thing Adeleine can paint things to life!
  • In League of Legends' teaser for the release of Tristana's Dragon Trainer skin, there's a field guide on dragon care. The first tip included is to keep your dragon fed, with an illustration of Riggle seeing Tristana as a roast chicken with her pants, hair, and goggles.
  • In Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, an optional conversation during the third dungeon shows Yusuke questioning on whether there's food around the robot factory and imagined Morgana's tail as an eel before taking a bite of it.
  • In Puyo Puyo!! 20th Anniversary, Lemres abstains from candy for a few days and slowly starts to go insane from it. He eventually comes across Dongurigaeru and, in a slight variation on the trope, mistakes him for a gumdrop and tries to eat him.
  • Implied in Tales of Vesperia during a skit that appears if you go too long without cooking anything, Estelle mentions noticing a steak on Repede's back.
  • In WarioWare: Get It Together!, in Ashley’s stage intro, she and Red are sitting at the table starving. Ashley then turns to Red and hallucinates his head as a hamburger, though Ashley is hesitant.

    Web A🍒imation 
  • Referenced on Homestar Runner in the Strong Bad Email island, where Strong Bad remarks on what it would be like if he and Homestar were to be stranded on a desert island.
  • In the Meet Buck short a hunter — a homage to Team Fortress 2's Soldier — sees his daughter's boyfriend — an anthropomorphic deer — as a veal steak. An insolent cackling steak. He spends most of the short trying to shoot him.
  • Stephen Merchant from The Ricky Gervais Show tells a story about how, after buying a PS2, he realizes too late that he missed out on a deal that would have saved him $20, and has this same reaction afterwards (though in his case, he's seeing money instead of food).
  • A short in Sonic Shorts sees Sonic rescuing a pig, who lands in his hand and thanks him for doing so. Cut to an evil grin from Sonic, who makes out a chili dog from it. It asks why he's looking at him like that, and he responds by licking his lips.

    Webcom🥓cs 
  • The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: Referenced in "Spooky Stuff". Benjamin Franklin has a condition that causes him to need and hunger to eat human hair, but he couldn't take any with him on an airplane. Then he sees a pilot with such gorgeous long hair that Even the Guys Want Him. It's not visually shown in the comic, but the Alt Text says "What Ben sees is a man with dreadlocks made of fried chicken legs."
  • Awkward Zombie: Breath Of The Wild Link appears in Smash Ultimate, and notices Fox.
  • Brawl in the Family: "He's a threat to Popstar, to my succulent, golden-brown skin..."
  • In this Camp Weedonwantcha strip, one of the perpetually starving campers sees another as a pair of chicken wings.
  • One strip of Cat and Girl might be considered a subversion. As much as a trope like this is subvertable.
  • Cyanide and Happiness played it straight.
    • Used again in this strip.
  • In this Jake Likes Onions strip, two men are stranded on a raft in the middle of the ocean, and one of them sees the head of his companion as a giant ham... then he looks startled as his friend shouts "Oh my God, my head turned into a fucking ham!"
  • George Washington suffers from this in the 26th century in Mountain Time.
  • Oglaf has a non-food variant, naturally involving sex because it's Oglaf. In "Longitude", a group of seamen who have been stranded on a small boat too long are so horny that they can't tell whether they've finally spotted land because they keep seeing only sexual imagery when they try to look at it through a telescope. Then inverted when one of the sailors suggests asking a mermaid on deck to look on their behalf; the captain assumes she's another case of this trope, but it's implied she's real.
  • Parodied in this One Giant Hand comic. A starving homeless man sees a bystander as an anthropomorphic hot dog, but it turns out he actually has turned into a giant hot dog: "The curse is real! I should never have stolen that amulet!"
  • The Order of the Stick:
  • Sheldon: When there's no candy in the housenote , Sheldon starts seeing candy everywhere. He imagines a coffee table as a peanut butter cup, a lamp as a piece of candy corn, and Arthur as a gigantic marshmallow Peep. In the next strip...
    Marshmallow Peep!Arthur: Champ, you're not thinking straight. You're going through sugar withdrawal.
    Sheldon: Whatever you say, Mister Peep.
    Marshmallow Peep!Arthur: I'm not a Peep! That's your mind playing tricks. You're just CRAVING a Peep.
    (Beat)
    Marshmallow Peep!Arthur: But that can't be right. No one EVER craves a Peep.
    Sheldon: Cause the secret ingredient is classroom chalk.
  • In the Team Fortress 2 comic "A Cold Day in Hell", Soldier, Pyro and Scout get lost on a Russian mountain looking for Heavy. Soldier suffers from hypothermia-induced hallucinations and envisions the wildlife as a Thanksgiving dinner, his hands as halves of a grilled cheese sandwich, and Scout as a giant hot dog. Except that last part is a subversion: Scout snaps him out of it, revealing that Scout really is wearing a hot dog costume, which Pyro found for him in the long-lost remains of Amelia Earhart's plane, along with loads of honey.

    Web Or🥖ginal 
  • On World Cup of 2014 in Brazil an Uruguayan football star Luis Suárez bit Italian player Georgio Chiellini. The incident wasn't his first biting, but it attracted worldwide attention. A lot of photoshopped images and caricatures appeared online, depicting Suarez as a dog, a vampire or a cannibal. Seeing the other team as food was there too.
  • Pissed Off Angry Gamer: He seems to suffer from this. He says that a game disk looks like a chocolate chip cookie.
  • StacheBros: In "Yoshi Eats His Friends", when a hungry Yoshi tries to get himself an afternoon snack only to find no food in the house, he hallucinates and sees Luigi as an artichoke and Mario as a can of tomatoes.

    Western Animati🥨n 
  • The Amazing World of Gumball:
    • In "The Pizza", the Wattersons are waiting for a pizza to arrive and Gumball sees Darwin as a sausage. Darwin is so hungry he can't hallucinate properly and sees Gumball as a purse. Meanwhile, Anais appears as a cupcake, Richard is a burger, and Nicole is an ice cream cone.
    • Parodied in "The Founder" when Richard is so hungry that he tries to hallucinate that a security guard is food, but it doesn't work because he's already a talking hot dog.
  • In Slappy the Squirrel's first appearance in Animaniacs, itself a parody of early Looney Tunes episodes, Walter Wolf experiences this upon sneaking up on a younger Slappy. (Worth mentioning: she's bent over at the time, the meat is labelled "rump roast", and is 69 cents a pound.)
  • An episode of Filmation's The Archie Show has Jughead training for a school track meet. He motivates himself into running faster by using "mind over matter" — imagining Archie's moving car to be a giant hamburger on wheels. During the actual track meet, he does this again, this time envisioning fellow track-runner Archie as a huge hot dog with legs. Juggie's snapping teeth made Archie run faster, too!
  • In the Arthur episode "Locked in the Library!", while Arthur and Francine are locked in the library, Arthur is shown reading a gourmet magazine, and he imagines a set of books as a turkey. When he realizes the truth, to satisfy his hunger, he takes a page off the magazine and chews it up.
  • The Beany and Cecil episode "Beany Meets the Monstrous Monster" has the titular Monstrous Monster see Captain Huffenpuff's boat the Leakin' Lena as an ice cream sundae, with Cecil being the spoon.
  • Beavis and Butt-Head: In "Bedpans and Broomsticks", an overweight man named Billy Bob, who is wearing a cowboy hat and smoking a cigar, who is on a treadmill while being hooked up to an EKG and is being told by a doctor how he has to eat healthy, suddenly hallucinates the doctor's face turning into a plate with two eggs as "eyes", two slices of bacon as "lips", and hash browns under the bacon, that says, "Eat me! Please eat me, Billy Bob! Have a big moist and delicious slab of Canadian Bacon! With butter and maple syrup on top! And powdered sugar, too!" He also imagines a burger prop at a fast food restaurant coming to life and talking to him.
  • Bob's Burgers: In "Burgerboss", Bob becomes obsessed with winning an arcade game where the player battles food items. While high on pain killers, he hallucinates that the two boys bullying his young mentor Darryl are enemies from the game and chases after them shouting "Chicken leg!"
  • Happens in an episode of Bugged Trapped in the desert, Murphy sees Puck (the eponymous bug) as a bottle of water and attempts to drink him. Puck bites his tongue.
  • Bump in the Night
    • "Nothing but the Tooth" had Mr. Bumpy's teeth, which had gotten out of his mouth and tried to eat everything in its path, see Bumpy and Squishington as socks as it tried to eat themnote . Bumpy also starts hallucinating Squishington as a sock when his lack of teeth preventing him from being able to eat drives him nuts.
    • In "Water Way to Go", a dehydrated Squishington hallucinates Mr. Bumpy as a bottle of spring water and attempts to drink him.
  • On Camp Lakebottom, when McGee and Buttsquat are lost in the wilderness and starving, they start to hallucinate all kind of things as food, including a pile of leaves as a giant plate of nachos and a tree stump as a giant sundae.
  • Parodied in the Camp Lazlo short "Marooned Maroons", where Chip and Skip think they're stranded on an island when they're actually on a wooden raft not far from camp. After attempting to stave off their hunger by eating pieces of the raft, one of the twins sees the other as a giant piece of the wooden raft and looks like he's going to eat his brother, but instead has him swim to get food.
  • Captain Flamingo: In "A Burr in the Hand", due to the spare outfits that Milo gave Lizbeth and Max are shaped like T-bone steaks as their real clothes were covered with sticky burs, it got the attention to several dogs as they mistaken them as real meat, causing them to start biting their outfits.
  • In one episode of CatDog, Dog suffers this after going on a diet, hallucinating the Ingrid twins as pizzas.
  • Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers has an episode where Monty sees Zipper as a piece of cheese while attempting to go cold turkey on his Trademark Favorite Food after his addiction puts Gadget's life in danger.
  • In the Codename: Kids Next Door episode "Operation: A.F.L.O.A.T.", after fleeing from the annual "We Hate the KND Barbecue" and subsequently being stranded in a sea of asparagus, Numbuh Four starts seeing Numbuh Three's Rainbow Monkey as a cheeseburger. Before you suggest "just eat the asparagus", if any of them actually liked the prospect of eating the stuff we'd still be having this dilemma due to the sheer quantity of it all. And let's not forget that Wally STILL wants to go after the "cheeseburger" when the team comes under attack from a GREAT WHITE ASPARAGUS.
  • In the Dennis the Menace episode, "Mr. Wilson's Diet", Mrs. Wilson puts Mr. Wilson on a diet when he gets too big for his clothes, despite his objections. After having nothing to eat for several hours, Mr. Wilson hallucinates a truck as a hoagie, a flying bird as a roast chicken, and Henry's boss, Simon Gordo, whom Henry calls "The Big Cheese", as a sentient wedge of cheese.
  • Doug has a rather peculiar example. In "Doug's Dinner Date" when Skeeter tries to hypnotize Doug into liking liver and onions, it fails and instead has Doug hallucinate and see Skeeter as a giant Honker Dog. His hallucination once again comes back to him at Patti's dinner when he realizes that Patti was only joking about having liver and onions, and in the end, Porkchop even ends up hallucinating and sees Doug as an ice cream cone after accidentally hypnotizing himself.
  • Toot, the show's Extreme Omnivore, has these sometimes in Drawn Together, like in "Wooldoor Sockbat's Giggle-Wiggle Funny Tickle Non-Traditional Progressive Multicultural Roundtable!" (the episode with the Terminator).
  • The Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop episode "Dances the Hula" has Dr. Zitbag hallucinate that his skeletal canine companion Horrifido is a pumpkin when he's starving in the desert.
  • In one episode of Ed, Edd n Eddy, the neighborhood is flooded, and after having gone without food for a while, Rolf imagines Jonny's head as a turkey. Even though there was a cow, goat, pig, and several chickens on board the raft with them.
    Rolf: If we do not find dry land soon, I will be forced to feast upon your succulent noggin!
    Jonny: O-kay...
  • The Fairly OddParents!:
    • An interesting spoof is used in "Mighty Mom and Dyno Dad". When Timmy's parents are given superpowers, Timmy's Dad gains "meat vision" (to complement his wife's heat vision). Basically, he can now make meat products appear at will just by looking at some empty space and squinting. Instant hot dog! (When they were forced to give up their powers, Timmy's Dad said this power is what he would miss the most.)
    • The episode "The Hungry Games" has a desperately hungry Wanda hallucinate that Cosmo, Timmy and Chloe are turkey legs.
  • In an episode of Family Guy, Quagmire gets a case of this that makes everything look like an attractive woman — except Meg.
  • The Flamin' Thongs: When Narelle is attempting to paddle to Switzerland, she hallucinates a whale as a giant ice cream cone.
  • In one episode of The Flintstones where Fred was on a diet, it was driving him so nuts, he couldn't sleep. He told Barney, "I tried counting sheep, but they kept turning into lamb chops!"
  • Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends:
    • Parodied in the episode "Dinner Is Swerved", in which Bloo, lost with Mac in the seemingly endless hallways of Foster's, pursues a running chicken drumstick in a fit of delirious hunger. Bloo seems to actually recognize the trope, as he refers to the chicken as "Mac"... except it really is a chicken-drumstick-shaped imaginary friend (Kids stuck in diet camps can get rather single-minded, it seems).
    • Parodied again in one of the last episodes, "Read Em and Weep". Sam Burger, an imaginary friend who is a cheeseburger, is stuck on a deserted island with a Ronald McDonald expy who sees him as a chicken drumstick.
  • Futurama: In "Obsoletely Fabulous", Bender is stranded on a desert island without any alcohol. Seeing a gaggle of ducks with a six-pack ring stuck around their necks, he hallucinates that they are a six-pack of beer and attempts to drink them.
  • The Garfield and Friends episode "Box O' Fun" features Garfield playing with a cardboard box in various scenarios. When he imagines the box to be a lifeboat adrift on the ocean, he imagines Odie as a club sandwich. He briefly imagines a side order of onion rings, too, until he changes his mind.
  • The Garfield Show episode "The Last Word" has Garfield make a bet with Nermal that he can go an entire hour without eating. When Garfield starts to go crazy from having to refrain from eating for a longer time than he is used to, he eventually hallucinates Odie as being a hot dog and Nermal as being a cupcake.
  • In the Gravity Falls episode "Boss Mabel", the money-hungry Grunkle Stan views the tourists visiting the Mystery Shack as giant walking wallets. Then one of them gets carsick and vomits change.
  • In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy's episode "Which Came First?", when Billy and Mandy's class is stranded in the desert, Pud'n freaks out, saying that they'll have to eat each other to survive. Sperg looks at Billy and Irwin, seeing their heads as a drink and a burger, respectively.
    Billy: What are you lookin' at, Sperg?
    Irwin: Yeah, what are you lookin' at?
    (a pickle falls out of Irwin's mouth)
    Billy: You dropped a pickle.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy (2015) — In the episode "Lyin' Eyes", Drax briefly sees Rocket as a ham after being stuck on a deserted moon for three days.
  • In the Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi episode "Tsunami Yumi", while lost at sea Ami imagines Yumi as an enormous sushi roll, because they're Japanese of course.
  • In the House of Mouse episode "Goofy's Menu Magic", the guests start going hungry when there's no food in the kitchen. Dumbo sees Timothy as a peanut, Br'er Fox sees Br'er Rabbit as a chicken, Lucifer sees Jaq and Gus as two mini-chickens, and Timon and Pumbaa see Clara Cluck, who is a chicken, as a giant insect?
    Timon: Tastes like...chicken?
  • Johnny Bravo:
    • "Over the Hump" has a desperately thirsty Johnny hallucinate Lawrence the Camel as a giant canteen.
    • In "Hip Hop Flop", Round Pound member Heavy C gets so hungry that he eats Main Flavor's turntable after hallucinating that it is a sandwich.
  • In the Kaeloo episode "Let's Play Trap-Trap", Quack Quack, who has been deprived of yogurt for nearly an hour, starts to visualize Kaeloo and Stumpy as giant yogurt containers. He winds up eating half of Kaeloo's brain.
  • In an episode of Kick Buttowski, the title character has to prove that he can refrain from doing stunts for 24 hours, or he'll be shipped off to a military academy. At one point, he imagines Gunther as a skateboard, and even tries to ride him.
  • In the Little Audrey short "Butterscotch and Soda", when her nanny tries to curb Audrey's Sweet Tooth, she looks around her room for any candy she has stored away and hallucinates an umbrella as a candy cane and her canary as chocolate. Things get darker from there.
  • Plenty of Looney Tunes shorts:
  • An episode of Mike, Lu & Og, Mike starts to snap from lack of hot dogs and sees everyone and everything around her as hot dogs.
  • In The Mr. Peabody & Sherman Show, Mr. Peabody and Sherman get trapped underground with explorer Lucy Walker, leaving Peabody starving and seeing Sherman as a hot dog and Lucy as a chicken leg. Not wanting to eat his son, or change history, he settles on a convenient hamburger that turns out to be a compass.
  • Not necessarily because of desperation, but in My Life as a Teenage Robot, when Jenny gets new eyes and flips through the settings, one of them is "Sausage Vision".
  • In an episode of Oggy and the Cockroaches, one of the roaches gets a snootful of mushroom spores and hallucinates that Jack is a giant roast chicken. And then tries to eat his leg.
  • One episode of The Proud Family features a starving Oscar and Felix imagining each other to be burgers and hot dogs. They also attempt to eat a bowling ball that they believe to be a cherry.
  • Invoked in an episode of Recess when, in order to withstand Ms. Finster's interrogation on who started a food fight, Gus heeds Mikey's advice and retreats into this mental state, with Finster appearing to him as a giant bar of chocolate, her reprimand interspersed with references to chocolate.
  • In an episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show in which they are trapped in a log cabin buried beneath the snow, they imagine each other as various food items, and in another one where Ren lives in a cave, he imagines bats as a pair of cow's udders, which he starts sucking on before one of them smacks him away.
    Bat: What are you doing?! I'm a man, not a cow!
  • Rocko's Modern Life:
    • In "Rocko's Happy Sack", when Rocko discovers his kitchen doesn't have any food, Spunky appears in the oven. Rocko licks his lips and sees Spunky as a piece of chicken, but then slaps himself out of it.
    • In "Hut Sut Raw", after ending up lost and hungry in the wilderness, Rocko, Heffer and Filburt imagined each other as food, complete with diner background noises ("Ding! Order Up!").
  • Seven Little Monsters:
    • In "Runaway Mom", the monsters are upset that they got their mother angry and fear that she will stop taking care of them out of spite, which triggers an Imagine Spot of the monsters being abandoned and having no food. The sequence ends with Five looking at Four and hallucinating that his head is a roast chicken.
    • In "You Are What You Eat", Five becomes addicted to pie as a consequence of Four attempting to train him for a pie-eating contest by having him eat nothing but pie. After being told there aren't any pies left to eat, Five then hallucinates that Four is a pie.
  • The silent film seen in the Sheep in the Big City episode "Baah-dern Times" begins with Sheep's grandfather trying to run away from a man resembling a bearded Farmer John when the man sees his body as a lamb chop and tries to eat him.
  • The Simpsons
    • In "Itchy and Scratchy: The Movie", Bart has been sent to his room without any pizza for dinner as punishment for fooling around with Grampa's dentures, and eventually feels so hungry he begins to visualize Santa's Little Helper's head as a pizza box, with his tongue as a slice.
    • "Marge vs. the Monorail" has a variation; Homer is trapped on the out-of-control monorail train and needs to find an anchor. He looks to Bart, and visualizes him as a large ship's anchor. A deadpan Bart, for understandable reasons, urges him to think harder.
    • In the "Treehouse of Horror XVII" segment "Married to the Blob", the blob Homer sees Dr. Phil McGraw as a box of fudge.
      Dr. Phil: You're thinking about eating me right now, aren't you? (is now fudge) Aren't you?
      Homer: That's ridiculous, talking fudge.
    • On another occasion, Homer fantasizes that Mr. Burns is a giant ice cream cone and starts licking him.
    • When Homer was once unable to drink, he envisioned his family as alcohol bottles.
    • He also envisioned his family as food on another occasion.
    • Inverted in the "Treehouse of Horror XXVIII" segment "Mmm...Homer" when, after Homer begins cannibalizing himself, he imagines a roast chicken as himself with an apple in his mouth.
  • The smurf-colored glasses that Handy created in the eponymous Smurfs episode, which enabled Smurfs to see anyone as handsome and harmless, allows Bigmouth to see Gargamel and Azrael as a pair of walking delectables, which caused Bigmouth to chase Gargamel and Azrael into the forest while the Smurfs make their escape.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants:
    • "Fear of a Krabby Patty" had a variation, where an overworked SpongeBob develops a fear of Krabby Patties, and sees Mr. Krabs and the customers as them.
    • In "Frozen Face-Off", Sandy sees SpongeBob as a sponge kebab.
    • In "It's a SpongeBob Christmas!", Patchy the Pirate and his parrot Potty are stranded and hungry, and Patchy sees Potty as a plate of buffalo wings. Potty, in turn, sees Patchy as a cake of birdseed and starts pecking at his head.
    • At the end of "Feral Friends" when Patchy and Potty are turned into a caveman and a pterodactyl, Potty sees Patchy as a Krabby Patty and carries him away.
    • In "Kooky Cooks", SpongeBob is accidentally cooked and served to Mrs. Puff, complete with an apple in his mouth. One stomach surgery later, she sees SpongeBob again and, having developed a craving for fried sponge, imagines him as the meal from last night before giving chase.
  • Teen Titans (2003) had one episode where Cyborg was infected with a computer virus and hallucinated that everything he looked at was food. This led to him eating everything from a stop sign to the cash right out of an ATM (and nearly the ATM itself). He even imagined his own teammates as food!
    Starfire: You remember who we are, yes?
    (From Cyborg's perspective, his teammates turn into giant fried eggs)
    Cyborg: You're the nasty egg people who stole all my waffles!
    • It stops being funny when he mistook the tip of a transmission tower for a giant cherry, threatening to spread the virus to the entire city.
      Cyborg: (after being rid of the virus, groaning) I felt like I ate a tire.
      Raven: That's a distinct possibility.
  • The Tex Avery MGM cartoon What's Buzzin', Buzzard?, about two starving vultures who try to eat each other.
  • Tiny Toon Adventures: In "Devil Doggie" (part of "The Wheel O' Comedy"), a hungry Dizzy Devil visualizes Elmyra as a ham wearing a hairbow.
  • The Tom and Jerry short His Mouse Friday.
  • Owen starts hallucinating that his teammates (and Chris) are food after his jaw is wired shut in an episode of Total Drama Action.
  • Total DramaRama: When Owen is deprived of ice cream in "Cone in 60 Seconds", he hallucinates that an overflowing trash can is a giant ice cream cone. Noah has to run away with the bin to prevent Owen from licking it.
  • In The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat episode "The Milky Way", Felix goes crazy during a milk shortage and at one point hallucinates everyone around him as giant bottles and cartons of milk.
  • The Woody Woodpecker shorts Pantry Panic and its remake Who's Cookin' Who?
  • Done frequently on Zig & Sharko. Zig, the hungry hyena, sees Marina The Mermaid as a fish nugget, a tailfin with just a bone, or accompanied with half of a lemon.

Alternative Title(s): Hunger Hallucination

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A Delicious Cake in the Subway

Cybertronian radiation causes Sky-Byte to nibble on a subway car, thinking that it's a delicious cake.

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