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File:Matter Eater Lad.jpg

Matter-Eater Lad, the Patron Saint of this trope.

Cquote1
"If it looks good, eat it. And it all looks good to me."
Andrew, Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern
Cquote2
Cquote1
"I watched Marco eat some of the popcorn. I did as he did... The texture was rough and strange. And the flavor! It reminded me of a food called pizza. But there was just a hint of cigarette butts, which I also enjoy. Although Prince Jake had told me never to eat cigarette butts again. They are bad for you."
Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, Animorphs #8
Cquote2


Sometimes a Big Eater, except that the Big Eater tends to have some standards of cuisine. The Extreme Omnivore will pretty much eat anything out of hunger or curiosity, so long as it looks like food. And sometimes when it clearly doesn't. They don't fear the Lethal Chef, and you will never hear them ask "I Ate What?".

In more realistic cases, he spits the bad stuff back out. In less realistic cases, he digests it with few ill consequences.

A milder form of The Extreme Omnivore is a character who is willing to eat things that may be perfectly nutritious, but are considered unhygienic (e.g., it fell on the floor, or another character has been eating it), or taboo (e.g., insects, horseflesh). He may be indifferent to, or ignorant of, the social norms that keep most people from eating these things, or he may be from another culture or species where such things are accepted.

Also may or may not be humanitarian when the opportunity presents itself.

Please note that instances of someone being forced to eat something disgusting or inappropriate isn't Extreme Omnivorosity. Likewise for unintentional ingestion. A true Extreme Omnivore has a long-term pattern of eating everything knowingly, willingly, and usually cheerfully.

Compare Paste Eater. Extreme Omni Goat is a subtrope where this trope applies to goats.

Examples of Extreme Omnivore include:


Anime&Manga[]

  • Orihime Inoue of Bleach is a combination of this trope and Cordon Bleugh Chef. She's well-known for creating horrible combinations of food (usually involving red bean paste), and loves them. Most characters get sick just hearing about it, however a couple of people (who aren't human) appreciate her cooking.
    • This is actually exaggerated: while Orihime's tastes are weird according to others, she can also cook normally and likes more average meals like cheese and butter. In the X-Cution arc she actually works part time in a bakery, and so far the pastries and bread-based meals she's learned to make are fine; also, she's seen pestering Riruka for...something as mundane as donuts.
  • Hororo on Bottle Fairy is usually a Big Eater, but her constant sleepiness and the fact that everything reminds her of food sometimes leads her to unconsciously try to eat the first thing in front of her, whatever it may be.
  • Ga-chan, the weird flying space baby from Doctor Slump, has been known to eat cars and other inanimate objects. The only thing she - or they - won't eat is rubber.
  • In the aptly-named anime and manga Eat Man, the hero Bolt Crank could consume just about any tool (usually a gun of some kind) and later reproduce it out of his arm, intact even if he ate it in pieces.
  • All Dragon Slayers of Fairy Tail have this as an ability. However, they're best at eating their natural element (Natsu eats fire, Gajeel eats metal, etc.) This leads to some What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway? when we meet the Sky Dragon Slayer...who eats air.
    • Though, when you factor in the fact that the Dragon Slayers need to eat their elements to stay at full power (Natsu was once nearly defeated because he couldn't find any fire to eat), and remember just how abundant air is...
  • Fullmetal Alchemist's Gluttony can (and will) eat anything. Anything. Live people and scenery included. Having acid for saliva certainly helps.
    • In the manga when they are trapped inside Gluttony, Ed seems pretty comfortable with eating boots to survive (probably as a result of his foraging on the island Izumi left him and Al on). Ling eats one too, though he's less pleased about it.
  • Guu from Haré+Guu is capable of eating anything, up to elephants, whales, and people with a single bite. In one occasion she even ate such metaphysical things as another person's dream of herself. She is fully capable of spitting out anything she's eaten completely unharmed, making the effect comically disturbing rather than disturbingly sinister.
  • Crunch in Mighty Orbots is an extreme omnivore robot by design, as his main function is the team's power source. He can convert anything he eats into energy to use in the team's united form.
  • One Piece villain Wapol has the powers of the Munch-Munch Fruit, which gives him the power to eat anything and duplicate its effects. For example, he can swallow a cannon and fire it at will, and at one point he eats his flunkies Chess and Kuromarimo, then combines them into a four-armed super-flunky, Chessmarimo (though as Sanji points out, they're just wearing one costume while one stands on the other's shoulders). Wapol even manages to eat himself in order to slim down enough to fit through a narrow door.
    • Luffy swallowed a plate whole during the celebration at the end of the Arlong Arc
    • He later ate the bones of an giant fish at Reverse Mountain, and much later on at Thriller Bark ate the bars of the cage holding him.
  • Gible of Pokémon is able to eat things like rocks, bicycles (though he leaves the rubber intact), and an entire Team Rocket mecha.
    • To a lesser extent is Jessie of Team Rocket, who can stomach the horrible cooking skills of Misty and May where others (humans or Pokémon) cannot, and even enjoy them.
    • Also Snorlax.
  • More of Extreme Omni-drinkers, but hey. From The Prince of Tennis, Shuusuke Fuji and Kei Tanishi are able to drink down Gargle Blaster-type concoctions that usually knock ANYONE else but them out. The only exception would be Inui's Aozu, which knocked the lights outta Fuji once.
    • Technically, the only difference between most food and drink is the water content. Sports tonics, protein shakes, etc tend to straddle the line.
  • One of the Ranma ½ OAV series has the minor character Kurumi, a Big Eater who can wolf down an entire feast prepared by Akane Tendo, the resident Lethal Chef (with minors in Cordon Bleugh Chef), and not only consider it delicious, but actually ask for more.
  • Plue, the mascot of Rave Master. His diet consists almost entirely of suckers, but it used to be based around beetles. He's also eaten a sign and a porcelain doll.
  • Gourry Gabriev from The Slayers is sometimes shown as an Extreme Omnivore. For example, when a crooked cook serves fake, unpalatable Dragon Cuisine to the party, he is the only one who does not feel anything wrong. But subverted in the first season, when he refuses to eat fish guts.
  • Simon from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann won't eat anything in sight, but he's able to eat Nia's HORRID cooking and enjoy it. It's assumed Nia herself eats this too.
  • Similarly, the title character of To Aru Majutsu no Index can eat any food. In the very first season, she ate decomposing salad and complimented Touma for the "revitalizing" sour taste. Touma, who was purposely trying to scare her away with inedible food, was thoroughly squicked out by it.
  • In the manga Toto (not to be confused with its successor Toto! The Wonderful Adventure) by Yuuko Osada, the titular Toto is a dog/dragon that becomes the main hero's left arm. Its power? Devouring anything and reproducing it. Eating a squad's worth of machine gun and becoming a 10-barrel version of all those machine guns combined? Check. Eating a panzer armor to become a big slab of steel shield? Check. Eating an entire theme park to use anything from go-karts to roller coasters as a weapon? Check too. And oh, it once ate a BFS; carnage ensues.
  • Taro (and his family) from the manga Yamada Taro Monogatari, due to being exceedingly poor and half-starving most of the time, is capable of digesting pretty much ANYTHING without trouble. Including a whole bag of narcotics that he mistakes as flour.
  • Makihara aka Gourmet of Yu Yu Hakusho also eats people, but as a side effect, he gains any powers that the person had. Too bad that, when he ate Toguro-ani, Toguro's powers reverses the effects and allowed him to kill Gourmet slowly and painfully from the inside, eventually taking control of his body until Kurama unmasks and defeats him by giving Toguro a Fate Worse Than Death.
  • Eriko Futami from KimiKiss has been called taste blind due to her eating stuff like Berry Ramen and putting honey and mayonnaise on chips.
  • Yue from Negima drinks weird beverages such as: Salt water.
  • While some of the cast of Dragon Ball are prime examples of Big Eaters, some of them would also fall under this heading. In his youth, Goku was very naive about the outside world and thought with his stomach a lot, which more than once lead to him believing a person, thing or concept he'd never heard of before was something to eat.
    • In his first appearance, Yajirobe kills, cooks, and eats one of Piccolo Daimao's monstrous dinosaur-like henchmen.
  • Syn Shenron from Dragon Ball GT consumes the seven Dragon Balls to gain the power of the previously defeated Shadow Dragons, becoming Omega Shenron. Later when Syn attempts to do so again, Goku decides to eat the Four Star Ball (his grandfather's keepsake) to prevent Omega from reaching full power and to keep Nouva Shenron from being corrupted. While Goku's attempt is more painful, he was successful in what he planned.
  • The eponymous Toriko graduates to this in the "Gourmet Casino" arc. With the help of Komatsu's cooking skills and Coco's Batman Gambit, Toriko is able to eat explosive and poisonous ingredients. When Livebearer taunts him for eating the equivalent of dynamite, Toriko retorts that there is no such thing as a "miss" ingredient — to him, all ingredients are blessings.
  • Dead Master in Black Rock Shooter: Innocent Soul doesn't just eat souls, she also while sleeping in the same bed as Rock, ate a teddy bear and half of Rock's pig tail.
  • Mehitak, one of the five Nodos in Heroic Age may avert the LETTER of this trope, but embodies the spirit of it to a degree only surpassed by Matter Eater Lad himself. Specifically, his Tribe, the Poros, don't eat anything living - which includes fruits and vegetables. Instead, they can - and will - eat any dead matter. Including metal. At one point, he eats a plate of bulletproof superalloy from a pile of Humongous Mecha spare parts and comments that it is 'a bit bitter'. He still decided to have another one, though, much to the consternation of the Humongous Mecha's OWNER.


Comic Books[]

  • Matter-Eater Lad of the Legion of Super-Heroes has the power to - you guessed it! - eat and digest any form of matter. This not a joke. The supervillains he ate know very well.
    • M.E. Lad has eaten his way out of at least one cage. He is also one of the few characters possessing this ability to demonstrate the logical but downplayed corollary power of Acid Spit. Think of the "Alien" movies and their 'molecular acid for blood', but a controllable projectile.
      • He can eat laser beams, on the grounds that energy is also a form of matter.
      • He's also eaten an explosive device nobody could destroy, remove, or molecularly alter. People were reminded why they kept him around: as a plot device.
    • Ditto for Upchuck the alien "Gourmand" of Ben 10's transformations.
      • ...Only he can't eat anything that's edible to regular humans.
    • Ditto again for Masu in Deadman Wonderland (although this hasn't been shown as a power per say).
  • In Phil Foglio's adaptation of Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures series, dimensional-castaway and powerless-magic-instructor Aahz will occasionally snack on various nearby objects, which have included a goblet and a doormat. The behavior was not specifically mentioned in the source novels. However, the cuisine from Aahz's home dimension of Perv (making him a P-e-r-V-E-C-T, thank you very much) is as disgusting to the reader's sensibilities as Asprin could make it, which may mean that Foglio's visual joke is a Justified Trope. However, as Aahz is only depicted doing this during long segments of exposition, it may simply be Foglio poking fun at Asprin's writing depicting Aahz chewing the scenery.
  • Averell Dalton from Lucky Luke. His reaction after being forced to eat a bar of soap? Going after another, because he found it tasty.
    • Ran Tan Plan the guard dog is even more so.
  • The comic book Chew features a man who has the power to psychically see the lives of anything he eats. He's a homicide detective, and is often forced to use his power to solve cases.
    • Unfortunately, he can't turn the power off. He eats a lot of beets, because it's the only food he can eat without having to watch its entire history.
  • Grossout from Scare Tactics was known to eat small dogs when hungry, and once ate a pillow in his sleep.
  • Galactus. While there are a few who might have a bigger range, nobody comes anywhere near him for scale. Dude eats planets.
    • Also his daughter Gali/Galacta; she lives on Earth, tries to let the locals in peace, and eats alien invaders and bioweapons. It takes all her willpower to NOT eat the yummy Earth. And it has gotten even worse since she became pregnant.
    • If you consider that Galactus eats everything on the planet, he's got a pretty big range, too (although he probably processes those things along the same lines as we would with seasonings). He just does it in fewer bites.


Film[]

  • Vermin from Time Bandits. "He eats anything!"
  • In The Mask, the titular artifact turns Stanley Ipkiss into a human cartoon. Thus, at the climax, he is able to neutralize a bomb by swallowing it and letting it explode inside him. The only side effects to this are comical distension as it explodes, followed by a fiery belch afterward.
    • This exact same gag was done in the pilot episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, where Superman's debut as a superhero involved eating a bomb on a space shuttle.
    • In the animated series, a villain wants to blow up Edge City with a nuclear missile. The Mask covers said missile with bread, sauce and salad, and stands on the place it would hit the ground with his mouth open. Although this time the bomb-eating gets him charred and smoked.
  • Harpo Marx's character(s) were frequently like this.
  • Bill Murray's character in Osmosis Jones contracts a lethal virus by eating a hard-boiled egg he'd dropped on the ground near the monkey cage at a zoo. He arm-wrestles the egg away from a grabby monkey, then heedlessly pops it into his mouth.
  • Link from Encino Man will eat anything he can get his hands on. Some of the things he eats are actually food (salsa, butter, Hot Pockets, candy bars, etc.), and some are obviously not (dog food, bath beads, formaldehyde-preserved frogs, and so on). The one and only thing he ever ate that he reacted negatively to was the salsa, because it was hot and he drank an entire bowl of it. He got over it about ten seconds later.
  • In Return to Oz, the Nome King turns into a giant rock monster and tries to eat the Gump (which is made of a Gump's head attached to a sofa). They save the head, but he does eat the sofa. He later tries to eat Jack (who is made of sticks, though he does have a pumpkin for a head). It is likely he would have tried to eat the Scarecrow as well if Billina had not laid an egg that fell down the Nome King's throat and killed him.
  • The dog in Snatch eats a shoe, a rubber chew toy, and an 86 karat diamond...which has actually lost a couple of karats by the time it comes out of his digestive tract.


Literature[]

  • The Langoliers are definitely the most extreme example, eating matter and time itself.
  • In Percy Jackson, the satyr Grover can eat anything recyclable, notably soda cans.
  • Gregory Benford's titular Eater. The Eater of All Things is Exactly What It Says on the Tin; since it's a sapient black hole, this is natural enough.
  • In Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman, Mr. Vandemar is always hungry, and has been known to eat rats, pigeons and frogs. There are hints that he eats people, too ...
    • He is probably a werewolf of some sort.
  • In Tanya Huff's Confederation novels, the Krai are an entire alien race of Extreme Omnivores. This comes in handy when they want to impress other alien races by downing whatever local food is offered them, no matter how disgusting.
  • The Luggage from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series will eat, quite literally, anything that gets in its way. This includes people (on many occasions), sharks, legendary grimoires, and even (on one occasion) a demon. This is combined with its Hyperspace Arsenal capacity to ensure that regardless of what it eats, the next time you open it all you find is your clean laundry. According to Rincewind (its owner) at one point, the only time it ever disliked that it ate was a book of spells - it sulked for three days and then spat it out. The Discworld's swamp dragons, particularly Errol, are also extreme omnivores, although this might be limited to flammables.
    • The Tsimo wrestlers (Parodies of Sumo wrestlers) of the Counterweight Continent also seem to fit. One man was rejected as a Tsimo wrestler when the trainers gave him a meal and he didn't eat the table, too.
  • One of the "Utopias" in John T. Sladek's satirical short story "Heavens Below: Thirteen Utopias" depicts a family enjoying a picnic at a landfill site, eating the garbage as if it were the most delicious snack food anyone ever tasted.
  • In the Perry Rhodan setting, the inhabitants of the planet Halut — four-armed and only somewhat loosely humanoid giants routinely growing taller than ten feet — are capable of chewing and digesting virtually anything, including rock.
  • As seen in the quote above, the Andalites in Animorphs fit this trope whenever they morph into something with taste buds.
    • The Taxxons are, as a race, plagued by insanity-inducing hunger. If one sees something that looks like it might be edible and isn't likely to kill him eating it-- even if it's his own entrails after being shot in half, or a similarly-wounded buddy-- CHOW TIME!
  • The Rirhait, a vaguely centipede-esque alien species from the Young Wizards series, are this in a big way. One important point while introducing a Rirhait to human cuisine is to stress that the plate, silverware, table, and floorboards are not to be considered part of the meal.
    • When a Rirhait construction crew repairs a wrecked building, they eat the rubble instead of throwing it into a dumpster.
  • In one of Keith Laumer's Retief stories, a race of hostile aliens called the Basurans can survive on a diet of raw metals and silicon if necessary, and, having consumed most of their own planet, are looking for new planets to eat. They were bribed into cancelling an invasion by shipping them another planet's garbage as "gourmet food".
  • In Robert Heinlein's The Star Beast, the title creature (nicknamed "Lummox") could eat just about anything, including concrete, steel, wood, rose bushes, hay and dogs (among other things).
  • Bob, the resident Big Friendly Dog of the Stephanie Plum books. He has been known to eat furniture.
  • Mulch Diggums, a dwarf from the Artemis Fowl books by Eoin Colfer, has a one-way digestive system and travels underground by eating through dirt, rock, etc. and expelling it behind him. That is one thing all dwarves can do slower or faster. Anything found in earth, like beetles, is food for dwarves as well. A large chunk of granite managed to temporarily constipate Mulch, though. Other features of dwarven biology in Colfer's books include, for example, slightly fluorescent saliva that hardens in contact with air, a detachable lower jaw, and the ability to weaponize the built-up air from consuming soil.
  • The title character in Shel Silverstein's "Hungry Mungry" (in Where The Sidewalk Ends) ends up literally eating everything. In all of existence. Ending with himself.
  • Ungoliant in JRR Tolkien's Silmarillion seems to exist solely to devour. Her insatiable hunger even seems to scare the crap out of the other main villain, who is a freaking demigod!
  • Miranda Silver in Helen Oyeyemi's White Is For Witching is a pica sufferer who habitually feeds on chalk and plastic. She's deathly thin because of her general avoidance of actual food.
  • The Hive in Tour of the Merrimack is a Horde of Alien Locusts that will eat anything organic. Anything. An attempt to bomb them fails when they take the bomb apart to eat the fuse.
  • The creature in The Clone. Humans and animals are absorbed and converted, as are certain types of fabrics, but it also likes rubber and concrete - car tires, shoe soles and parts of buildings. When it comes to clothing, the "clone" is a picky eater, though; it'll eagerly convert nylon but cotton is rejected and left behind for some reason. It even resorts to cannibalizing itself when its food supply starts to dwindle, which ends up killing it.
  • In Frog Jumps by Steven Kellogg, while counting backwards, the frog eats everything the animals don't need getting him bigger.


Live Action TV[]

  • Sesame Street's Cookie Monster has been known to compulsively eat some rather odd things if cookies aren't available, including half a Volkswagen in The Movie, Follow That Bird. The Muppet Wiki has a list of things Cookie Monster has eaten.
    • He even ate Stephen Colbert's Peabody Award!
    • Also seen in this video featuring a prototype of Cookie.
    • Highlights among the things Cookie Monster has eaten over the years include mutiple cars, big chunks of Seasame Street itself, and the friggin' moon!
  • Muppet monsters in general are Extreme Omnivores, but special mention goes to The Lunch Counter Monster and Carl the Big Mean Monster, whose sketches seem to revolve around the abnormal things they eat. Then there's Animal, who, amoung other things, once ate a TV set without unplugging it.
  • Joey on Friends, known for his voracious appetite, is effectively a walking garbage disposal. In one episode he catches Chandler and Rachel eating a cheesecake that fell on the hallway - and, without missing a beat, takes a spoon out of his coat pocket and joins in. Another episode has Rachel accidentally putting meat in a traditional English trifle. The others pretend to like it so as not to hurt her feelings, but Joey actually does - so much so that he eats not only his but that which the others had not eaten!
Cquote1

  "What's there not to like? Custard? Good. Jello? Good. Meat? Good!"

Cquote2
    • It's also been suggested in one episode that Joey eats books. Possibly they had foodstains on them.
    • Also, when Rachel spilled spaghetti on the floor in "Casa del Joey", she apologised and he says "What the hey!" and throws some on the floor as well, saying she shouldn't worry. She then throws some more on the floor and his response?
Cquote1

  "See now you're just wasting it. It's still food."

Cquote2
    • And proceeds to ladle all of the dropped spaghetti back on his plate.
  • Fear Factor, natch. (Though it's debatable if it counts as this trope, if you're only eating live maggots on a dare/as a stunt/for money.)
  • Man vs. Wild host Bear Grylls has to be one if he's willing to put this in his mouth.
    • Its' counterpart Survivorman also features a number of bugs, grubs and occasional meat of questionable origin as survival food.
  • Also, ALF, while favoring (and never getting) cats also fits this trope sometimes. Most of the time, he is just a Big Eater and freeloader.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000: After Crow and Tom Servo get their onion blossoming tool, they make appetizers out of a bowling ball, Mike's wallet, and ultimately Tom's head.
Cquote1

 Servo: What? You blossomed and fried my head?!

Mike: Oh, come on; you didn't even miss it!

Cquote2
  • Red Dwarf's Dave Lister will eat just about anything hot and fried, oblivious to standards of cleanliness and sanity. A triple fried egg sandwich with chili sauce and chutney featured prominently in one episode.
    • Another episode saw him happily eating a space weevil. Although to be fair he thought it was a crunchy king prawn...
    • This is a man for whom a typical breakfast consists of cornflakes with tabasco sauce and a sprinkling of grated raw onion, served with a glass of chilled vindaloo sauce.
    • He's also pretty indiscriminate in regards drinks, too. Let's not forget that in the first episode of season 8 he mentions polishing off just about everything in the drinks cabinet, including advocaat, that "smeg-awful pink stuff" (windowlene- a kind of glass cleaner) and "that chartreuse green liquory thing" (swarfega- heavy-duty hand cleaner normally used to remove oil and grease).
    • However, (most of the time), he absolutely refuses to eat Pot Noodle; to the extent that when it once came down to Pot Noodle or a can of dog food, he chose the dog food.
  • James May of Top Gear nonchalantly took a drink of Jeremy Clarkson's "Manly V8 Smoothie", which was composed of raw beef (with bones), bovril, tabasco sauce, chilis, and "for added bite", a brick, blended in a blender powered by a Corvette's V8 engine. His nonchalance abruptly ended when the full effect of the taste hit. Hilarity Ensued. When May could speak and/or see again, he dubbed the concoction the "Bloody Awful".
    • A partial list of other things that James May has eaten or drunk: garlic wine, grape juice he squeezed with his own bare feet, wine he fermented in the boot of a Jag, a deep fried Mars bar, the contents of a spittoon in a wine bar which someone had stubbed out a cigarette in, a sample of a puddle of unknown fluid leaking out of a caravan (which turned out to be his own homebrew beer), a prawn sandwich on an aeroplane which he dropped on the floor, snake whiskey, a bull penis, and fermented shark. Of those, the only things that he found objectionable were the garlic wine and the deep-fried Mars bar (which had been fried in fish-and-chip oil). He did claim that it was the prawn sandwich that made him "catastrophically ill" on the day of that interview, and not the weekend he'd spent in Dublin with his Top Gear mates. For extra hilarity, that fermented shark? Made Gordon Ramsay throw up.
  • Jeremy Clarkson also apparently has a philosophy towards novel food items encapsulated thus: "I had a puffin last week, that's not delicious, but the point of eating it was because I'd never had one before. I had some whale, and [the man serving it] said, 'Would you like me to grate some puffin on that?' How do you say no?! Yes, go for it, grate some puffin on that."
    • Direct quote from an interview: "I would put anything in my mouth. [beat] Exc-" [audience begins laughing]
  • What about Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern? Hosted by the Travel Channel, the titular host goes places to sample the various local cuisines. Some of the more spectacular episodes include: insects galore, chicken testicles, rooster combs, not-quite eggs (an egg that was collected from the inside of the chicken before it grew its shell... as if eggs in general aren't squicky enough...), fermented pork, a hallucinogenic drink made by tribes in Africa where the women chew on the leaves of a plant for a while then spit the masticated glop into a big pitcher, and, the thing that actually beat the host, Stinky Tofu (tofu that is left basically to rot for days, gets fried up to make bread, and mushed together to make the filling). The host couldn't even choke back a single bite. He actually went and hugged the old lady who had cooked for him, and said, "You're the first chef to beat me." He claimed it tasted of raw sewage.
    • He also couldn't eat the durian.
      • He can eat it. He just thinks it's absolutely atrocious and refuses to eat any more of it because of the smell. It's not surprising, considering just how pungent durian fruits are.
  • No Reservations and its predecessor A Cook's Tour. Let's not forget that fellow chef and TV host Anthony "Tony" Bourdain once ate a cobra's beating heart among other things (see show entry for more details). That said, while he's friends with Zimmern, he criticises his style in which Zimmern presents the food for the shock factor above its other qualities; Bourdain tries to portray the food with respect to its culture and origins.
  • All of the Jackass team are like this to some extent, although Steve-O and Dave England are perhaps the biggest examples - in particular, the latter ate horse manure in a $200 bet with the Three Six Mafia in Jackass: Number Two.
  • "The Human Dustbin" from Look Around You series 2.
  • In the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode "Who Pooped The Bed?", a forensic analyst (played by Fran Kranz) dissects one of the poops in their quest to find out the episode's Driving Question. He determines that whoever did it was eating newspaper, as well as pieces of a credit card. It turns out that that still doesn't narrow it down from Frank and Charlie.
  • Vyvyan in The Young Ones in "The Television Inspector", literally eats the television to hide it from the television inspector:
Cquote1

 Television Inspector: Aha! The old "eat the telly" trick!

Vyvyan (electric cord hanging from mouth): It's a toaster!

Cquote2
  • Part of the mission of the chefs of Future Food is encouraging people to expand their definitions of what is edible.
  • In the Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch "The First Man to Jump the Channel", the titular character, played by Terry Jones, also intends to be "the first man ever to eat an entire Anglican cathedral". (He fails.)
  • ICarly Sam Puckett from iCarly eats many different forms and amounts of food including chugging of pickle juice.
  • MASH: In one episode, Klinger's attempt of the week to get a Section 8 discharge is to declare that he's going to eat a jeep. He is seen on screen consuming the windshield wipers and swallowing a bolt dipped in motor oil.
  • More than one death in 1000 Ways to Die involves someone eating something they shouldn't and dying as a result. I.e, there's the French nobleman in Bank Ruptured who has pica and eats metal regularly, which cuts the veins and arteries in his stomach and ends up killing him.


Fan Fiction[]


Tabletop Games[]

  • The Tyranids from Warhammer 40000 are the ultimate Omnivores, eating everything up to and including entire planets right down to the bedrock, including the atmosphere.
    • Orks get a special mention for the sheer robustness of their physiology. For example, one "sport" Orks engage in is a face-eating contest, where an Ork and a face-eater Squig try to see who can eat the other's head first. Also, Ork Fighta-Bommas include fuel lines routed through the cockpit, in case the pilot gets thirsty.
    • Space Marines are capable of eating pretty much anything, since their Bio Augmentation gave them a 'pre-stomach' organ called the Preomnor which neutralizes anything indigestible or poisonous to them before it enters the stomach. This can also be tactically beneficial, as other organs allow their taste to be strong enough to notice specific chemicals, allow them to potentially track targets by tasting an area. Their bones are also extremely strong, because yet another organ allows them to digest ceramic-based chemicals put into their diet to toughen them.
  • The Ogres from Warhammer Fantasy are an entire race of Big Eater/Extreme Omnivore. Their whole society revolves around eating, their magic is practiced by Butchers who devour meat, rocks, or other objects to cast spells, and their god is called The Great Maw. A section in their army book involves someone autopsying one and finding fourteen kilograms of raw meat, a whole horse skeleton, rocks, bones, clothes, a sword, and a pistol, which was the cause of death (it went off when the Ogre swallowed the arm holding it, and shot into the base of the Ogre's brain). Gnoblars (small goblin-like creatures) are virtually the only thing they don't think are good for eating — they use them as pets, servants, and cannon fodder (sometimes literally).
  • In Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition, there was a prestige class called the "Flux Adept" which, among other abilities, allowed you to derive sustenance from any substance. Gold, poison, dust, anything.
    • Also, dragons are stated to be able to eat and digest just about anything, including dirt and rocks.
    • D&D dragons can eat any thing but prefer anything that can be affected by their breath weapon (makes it easier to digest)
      • In 4th Edition, and maybe others, dragons can use the magic of some items they sallow.
    • Then there's the infamous metal-eating rust monster, bane of fighters everywhere.
      • Rust monsters don't really count as this trope - they can eat metal and rocks, which isn't something humans can digest, but they're not omnivores even in the usual sense.
    • What about the Tarrasque? Once every few years/centuries, it wakes up and goes on a spree of destruction, eating EVERYTHING in its path- including entire towns, buildings and all.
  • In the Planescape campaign setting, there is a Sensate Alchemist that personally samples all of his potions and never refuses an offer to try something new, however hazardous it may be.
  • In the 3E Ravenloft supplement Van Richten's Guide To The Walking Dead, the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins take on an undead Extreme Omnivore: the Glutton of G'henna. This ravenous ghoul-like creature broke into houses or barns and ate every scrap of food there, whole livestock included; it could be tracked cross-country by the large bite marks it left behind in trees and boulders. It did eat people, or parts thereof, if they got between it and food, but was not a man-eater by preference.
  • In Nomine, a game about war between Heaven and Hell, includes Haagenti, the Demon Prince of Gluttony. Not only does Haagenti eat pretty much anything, his servants can get an attunement to eat anything they can bite through. According to the game's entry about Haagenti:
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  "The world is starving - it must be fed. Just don't stand too close, or you might lose an arm. (Mmmm. Arm.)"

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    • Let's not forget he earned this position by eating the Demon Princes of Sloth and Oblivion.
  • Changeling: The Dreaming featured the Redcaps, a group of faeries who could eat anything they could fit in their mouths.
    • Prometheans are also capable of eating practically anything organic — mounds of dead leaves are specifically cited as perfectly valid sustenance. Developing an extra gallbladder or the Acid Stomach Merit expands this to include anything that the character can swallow, though the book does point out that it only reduces the obvious consequences of consuming such things as shards of broken glass, and does not increase the Promethean's jaw strength for chewing the matter in question. Gulping down small pellets of, say, titanium would work; trying to eat one's way out of a thick-barred iron cage is another question entirely.
      • The Unfleshed, Ridiculously Human Robot Prometheans, can even eat such things as rubber tires and drink motor oil by default... but this actually hurts their Karma Meter. The reason? The Promethean Karma Meter is Humanity, which represents how well they mimic humans, and human beings, as a rule, don't eat rubber tires - doing something like this is a blatant reminder that you aren't a human being, which damages the illusion.
  • The cosmic level of Universal Digestion in GURPS allows the character to get sustenance from anything with the sole exception of antimatter. Surviving what you eat, is a different matter entirely but easily covered by a couple of other Advantages.
  • In Paranoia, Matter Eater mutants can eat anything, while those with Toxic Metabolism can eat poison and exude it through their skin. (This being Paranoia, sometimes these powers don't work right. Ow.)
  • The Epic Stamina knack "Inner Furnace" from Scion grants you the ability to eat any organic object without penalty and drink any quality of water. Its upgraded version, "Devourer", takes away the "organic" and "water" requirements - now you can subsist on anything.
  • Rune Quest trolls definitely fit this trope. They're cannibalistic (and will eat other intelligent species), and they can eat things like leather boots, wax candles, and even rocks for food.
  • Champions adventure "Bad Medicine for Dr. Drugs. The teen superhero "The Masked Avenger" had the ability to bite through and eat just about anything, including non-living material and plants. It didn't say whether he could use it to eat living animal flesh.
  • Shadowrun. The Awakened creature called the Juggernaut could eat plants, animals, rocks, scrap metal, etc.
  • The Yozi Metagaos in Exalted. He's a sapient swamp who'll eat anything: Colour, individuality, time, space, himself...
  • Grim Stalkers from New Horizon are perfectly happy chowing down on humans OR (or rather, AND) Wafans. And can digest and use the materials from both. They also happen to be the planet's top predator.


Music[]

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 He constructed a factory

Just because he was hungry

Just to see how it tasted

Bicycle wheel in a brat's brain



Yeah he's mad; he's Matter-Eater Lad

Yeah he's mad; he's Matter-Eater Lad



First he started on furniture

Then he moved on to parking lots

Now he's eating Ansonia

Now he's eating Andromeda

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Newspaper Comics[]

  • Garfield fits this. He'll eat anything that's edible, including things like chocolate that would kill a real cat. Although even he has his limits-he hates raisins. And Jon's cooking at times.


Toys[]

  • The Spikit from Bionicle. It has been known to tear parts off people's cars and eat them.


Video Games[]

  • No Delivery: The Waitress. She can eat Trash to regain some hit points. Seriously.
  • Nintendo character Yoshi, who first appeared in Super Mario World, can eat almost anything that moves. Never before has borderline cannibalism been raised to an art form of self defense. Adding to the fun, in later games, things he eat get turned into eggs (apparently empty ones).
    • Strangely, Yoshi's stomach has gradually grown more sensitive in each game he has starred in. In Super Mario World, he could eat pretty much anything, but in Yoshis Island, his tongue would bounce off of spiny, large, or tough enemies. In Yoshis Story, the Yoshis (except for the hidden black and white ones) would prefer specific foods over others, even take damage from eating things they didn't like, like black Shy Guys or hot peppers.
      • This makes sense, actually. In Super Mario World, Yoshi was a helper character, so he was more powerful than in Yoshi's Island, where he was always a playable character. And in Yoshi's Story, eating the right foods was a major aspect of the gameplay, as opposed to the earlier games where Yoshi's tongue was mainly used as a weapon.
      • Also, the Yoshis in Yoshi's Story are supposed to be babies.
      • So are the ones in the Star Road in Super Mario World.
      • In the cartoon, HE EATS MARIO.
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 Mario: Now I know how a meatball feels!

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  • Kirby has been eating his enemies almost as long as Yoshi has.
    • King Dedede has been doing it just as long, even being able to consume Kirby before Kirby could respond in kind.
  • Princess Peach acquired a parasol with this trait for the game Super Princess Peach.
  • In Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door, the three dragons, while intending to eat anyone they see, also eat some things that aren't considered food, even for dragons. Before Mario fights each of them, Hooktail ate the Diamond Star (which Koopley found inside her), Gloomtail ate a treasure chest containing the Star Key (coughed it up after he was defeated), and Bonetail ate a chest containing a badge (also coughed it up once defeated).
  • Wario can also eat pretty much anything in Super Smash Bros Brawl with his Chomp move, making him similiar to the other Ommnivores that appear in the game.
  • In a reference to Metal Gear Solid 3, Snake, in his Codec Taunt in Super Smash Bros Brawl turns the tables on Yoshi and wonders what it'd taste like.
  • Online game example: Skeiths and Grarrls, two types of virtual pets in Neopets, can eat any inventory item, not just those designated as food.
  • Izen from Gadget Trial, being a bio-engineered Robot Girl, eats just about anything she can get her hands on. She does have a fondness for dynamite, which, according to her, tastes like bean jelly.
  • Final Fantasy VIII's Guardian Force, Eden, allows the Junctioned character to equip the "Devour" ability. If used successfully, the character will rush the enemy... and the scene will change to a peaceful, pastoral landscape while horrible chomping noises are heard in the background.
  • Quina Quen, the Qu that joins the party in Final Fantasy IX, has the "Cook" Trance Skill which allows it to eat any sufficiently-weakened enemy in order to learn its special skills.
    • And "Cook" is just an upgraded version of "Eat" her(?) normal skill that does the same thing.
  • In Jeanne D Arc, the Team Pet Cuisses can eat almost any combination of two Skill Stones and spit out a new Stone. Most high-level Skill Stones can only be acquired through this method.
    • Toady from Rogue Galaxy, who Cuisses is an Expy of, can do the same thing with equipment.
  • Of course we can't forget Naked Snake/Big Boss from Metal Gear Solid 3, whose conversations with his medical contact mostly revolved around how tasty the latest animal he'd captured or killed was. Among the items on his menu were various poisonous snakes, ("Cannibal.") mushrooms, crocodiles, frogs, tropical birds, rodents, and ramen noodles.
  • Pac-Man. He eats all sorts of fruit yes, but he eats floating dots (and the occasional big floating dot). And blue ghosts. How would you like to eat a ghost? That can't be healthy. Then there's the keys and spaceships.
  • Drong, from Puzzle Quest. He even eats a Physical God.
  • Maw, from The Maw, eats a huge variety of creatures, the rocks one of those types of creatures hide under (once he's large enough), an entire planet, and the game's camera. Pretty much the only thing he won't eat are these little one-eyed blobby things.
  • Darkstalkers gives us Soul Bees. They instinctively attack and devour anything moving object that is not another Soul Bee and rarely suffer from indigestion or food poisoning.
  • SWIM SWIM HUNGRY
  • Mass Effect: The krogan come from a Death World where until the invention of gunpowder the #1 cause of death was still "eaten by predators." (Afterward it was "shot to death by another krogan".) Their versions of dogs, varren, are just as nasty. Opportunistic omnivores, they are both scavengers and pack hunters, but they prefer live meat. They are so nasty that feral varren have caused mass extinctions on almost every world they've been introduced to. It doesn't help that they apparently breed like rabbits, can survive in almost any environment, or that they're so aggressive that the Alliance recommends using a squad of heavily armed Space Marines to hunt them.
  • Yuyuko Saigyouji of the Touhou series, according to fanon and Memetic Mutation, will eat anything. And anyone. Poor Mystia...
    • Yoshika Miyako's ability is explicitly to "eat anything and everything". She makes use of it in combat by eating spirits to regenerate health.
  • The Green Tentacle from Maniac Mansion will eat good food, food gone bad, or anything that just looks like food - in fact, his favorite dish is plastic shaped like food.
  • Dimitri in The Legend of Zelda Oracle Games will eat any enemies Link comes across while being ridden. Funnily enough, in both games he is nearly eaten before Link intereferes, in Seasons by some Moblins and in Ages by some Tokay. The Tokay themselves gladly ask for some Ember Seeds to eat in place of Dimitri, though they don't actually end up liking them so much.
  • Your BOY in Noby Noby Boy can eat anything and anyone. However, he doesn't really digest them, as they come back out in one piece when they're, um, "evacuated".
  • In Persona 4, the main character Souji Seta can check the refrigerator on certain days and eat things that he finds within to increase his courage. These include such delicacies as expired milk, white miso (which used to be red), and his cousin's science experiment, which is a pot of grass. This has become a bit of a joke in the Persona 4 fandom.
  • Similar to Orihime above, Flynn Scifo in Tales of Vesperia will eat nearly anything, resulting in him becoming a Cordon Bleugh Chef. Making things worse, his reaction to people disliking his cooking is to come up with even worse combinations to "improve" the flavor.
  • The Elder Scrolls series has a rather complex alchemy system that uses all kinds of items ranging from normal food, to flowers and fungi, to ectoplasm, zombie flesh, and raw demon hearts. Your character can eat any ingredient raw or brew multiple ingredients into a potion.
    • This includes inorganic, inedible, or just plain weird materials; such as: ground-up bone, claws, raw silk, teeth, wax, magical salts, horns, scales, demon and human skin, human flesh, troll fat, vampire ash/dust, normal ash, rat poison, various hides, cuttle, soap, pearls, several types of jewels (including diamonds!), metals, glass, rocks, and presumably even more.
    • In Oblivion, this gets even worse. Occasionally whenever you slay a monster and check its corpse, you have a small chance of finding a gold piece or some other inedible item like a lockpick in their body.
  • Monster Hunter Tri has Deviljho, a dangerous endgame-level monster only encountered in the online mode. It's an Extreme Omnivore not in the "eats cars and lightbulbs" sense so much as apparently having no standards for what kind of meat it'll eat. On top of being a voracious predator that hunts nonstop due to its extremely high metabolism (to the point of driving other species to extinction, according to the game's description), it's also been observed in actual gameplay to munch on slain or captured members of its own species as well as its own severed tail.
  • League of Legends Has Cho'gath, whose level 6 ability allows him to basically eat(or attempt to eat) anything with a health bar, [1], growing in size and gaining bonus HP if he is successful. His passive, "Carnivore", has him restore health and mana whenever he scores a killing blow on something, implying he eats at least a part of everything he kills.
    • Also Kog'maw, the "Mouth of the Abyss" whose entire skillset, including his auto-attacks, involves spitting digestive fluids at his enemies. The only reason he's even in the League is because he was told it had the finest food Runeterra had to offer. Ironically, he's never actually seen eating anything.
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 Kog'maw's Background: The enchanting colors and aromas of Runeterra intoxicated Kog'Maw, and he explored the fruits of the strange world the only way he knew how: by devouring them. At first he sampled only the wild flora and fauna he happened across. As he traversed the parched Tempest Flats, however, he came upon a tribe of nomads. Seemingly unhampered by conventional rules of physics, Kog'Maw consumed every nomad and any obstacles they put in his way, amounting to many times his own mass and volume.

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  • Dog in the Fallout: New Vegas add-on, Dead Money. He accidently ate the explosive collar his master, Elijah, gave him in order to keep him loyal. He will also eat the remains of Ghost People you kill, a useful way to make sure they stay dead.
    • The player can eat, with the right perks, giant insects, mammals,people, boiled toxic cloud, most plant life,super mutants, 200 year old Indestructible Edibles,Ghouls (radioactive zombies), glowing mushrooms and mutant animal guts.
  • Pep in the Putt-Putt series, especially in Putt-Putt and Pep's Dog on a Stick, where he had more bones than any dog could dream of.
  • Kingseeker Frampt in Dark Souls serves as your Vendor Trash disposal by eating the equipment and giving you souls in return. He can also break down Titanite material.
  • Raving Rabbids: a couple of minigames in the first one feature Rayman serving up food to a rabbid by drawing it. Foodstuffs produced in this manner range from the relatively normal (bananas, fish, sausages), to the odd (cans of spam...the can is eaten too) to the absurd (baseballs and cinderblocks.) These are all devoured with every indication of satisfaction.
  • In Street Fighter, Ryu and Elena are pretty much the only ones able to stomach El Fuerte's cooking. Additionally, in Street Fighter X Tekken Ryu's win quote against the fighting bear Kuma has the guy seriously consider making him into bear stew.

Web Animation[]

  • Serena in Sailor Moon Abridged. In her own words, "Crepes. Craps. My digestive system doesn't discriminate."
  • Fred of Fred the Monkey has eaten a raw turkey, cake mix, among other things.
  • In Homestar Runner, the King of Town has eaten some very odd things. In addition to a variety of technically-edible dishes such as butter-flavored soda, raw eggs, and a pile of salt, the King of Town has eaten a cardboard box covered in maple syrup, toilet paper, candy-corn-shaped Halloween lights, sticks of roll-on deodorant and an entire flock of fruit bats. It's confirmed that he'll eat anything if there's butter on it, or in it, or even near it, and the only thing he won't touch is peas (which makes one wonder what he'd do if presented with a bowl of buttered peas).
    • He would go to great lengths to lick the butter off.
    • Don't forget him eating a pile of...whatsit (the stuff the Poopsmith handles, in case you didn't get the hint).
    • He's even consumed some of the other characters at one point (although they eventually returned--after three days.) The incident involved a swimming pool full of Red Flavored Fluffy Puff Translucent Dessert Related Substance, submerged characters in said pool, and a straw.
    • In one toon, it's hinted that he can eat Arbor Day. Don't ask.
    • Strong Mad is an even more extreme omnivore, eating things like rocks, glass, entire computers, and somehow literally sucking up bandwidth through a hose.
    • In the old-timey Homestar Runner program, Sickly Sam eats The Strongbad whole, despite his calm but surprised objection during the entire slow process. He soon after objects that the board games present in his stomach are inadequate.
    • The Homestar Runner Wiki keeps a running list of these incidences.


Web Comics[]

  • In Sluggy Freelance, one of the incarnations that the ever-evolving alien Aylee has gone through is a flying, fire-breathing, dragon-like Extreme Omnivore. The only thing she wouldn't eat was tofu.
  • Order of the Stick's Monster in the Darkness eats pretty much everything, except babies.
  • Sergeant Schlock from Schlock Mercenary. About the only thing he can't eat is military-level Nanomachines.
  • Not from the comic itself, but Brian Clevinger (author of Eight Bit Theater) regularly makes his newsposts the latest episode of What Did Charlie Eat, starring his Extreme Omnivore cat. At the time of writing, the latest update was "iPhone earplugs".
  • The Jaegers seem to fall under this trope, as illustrated here.
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  No bogz in pie? Aw.

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    • Moloch von Zinzer probably also qualifies, at least when it comes to beverages. His taste in drinks and associated iron stomach is actually something of a running joke among the fanbase, leading to, among other things, him being pegged as 'most likely to accidently Jaegerize himself'.
  • The Wayward Vagabond will eat anything, as long as it's green (or has been green at some point in time). This includes a pumpkin, a potted plant, several pieces of chalk, and a chunk of uranium.
    • He also learns proper human etiquette by eating a book on it (though to be fair, he reads each page before eating it).
  • Weesh, of the eponymous comic Weesh, who isn't human.
Cquote1

 Weesh: Mm. This blue mayonnaise you've got is delicious.

Boy: Blue mayo? ...That's dishwasher soap.

Weesh: Ah. I wondered why it was under the sink.

Cquote2
  • Warp-Aci in DMFA will "eat" anything smaller than them... which becomes a real problem if they grow. It helps that they have no actual digestive system - anything they 'eat' is simply teleported somewhere random.
    • Also, Abel once ate a pillow. In his defense, he was having a dream about giant marshmallows.
  • Tanked from Bear Nuts. Constantly in such an altered state, he'll (at least try) to eat anything he can fit in his mouth.
  • Sam Starfall is apparently pretty tough in this department. Probably makes up for his general weakness in nearly every other one. Winston doesn't do too bad for a human.
  • Casey and Andy's Planet Devourer can eat just about anything...given enough time.
  • According to Bug, the typical office worker would eat almost everything.
  • In Rusty and Co:
    • As long as it's metal, Rusty will want to eat it. At least he (usually) asks first...
    • Gelatinous Cube will eat anything organic. The bones just take a little longer.


Web Original[]

  • In The Gamers Alliance, Ronove eats pretty much anything his companions give him although he is particularly fond of cake and sand gnome legs. No matter how much he devours, he'll soon be begging for more.
  • Loading Ready Run's Iron Stomach Challenge videos sees the crew eating suggestions submitted on their forums. Past challenges have included banana and onion blended together, milk mixed with things that curdle milk and milkshakes made with mayonnaise.
    • Bill Watt, in particular, fits this trope enough to be The Ace in those videos.
  • The Guild. Vork. Found Object Stew. 'Nuff said.
  • In the Whateley Universe Tennyo is a Big Eater, but she's not always picky. In a recent story, some horrific part-Were part-animal part-Mythos monsters invaded the Whateley Academy campus and she ate them.
    • She also eats ectoplasmic monsters called spider-rats that a demon lord summons. When the big showdown between her and the demon comes and he summons a bunch of insect-like demon warriors, she somehow eats their souls. The demon is naturally terrified of her and begs her friend to get her to spare him.
  • SCP-524, a rabbit which eats anything. No, really, anything. Including himself.
  • In episode 8 of The Gmod Idiot Box, RED Scout eats BLU Scout's Force-A-Nature. After daring BLU Scout to Rage Quit, he gets kicked, which apparently is enough to set off the gun inside him, sending him flying into the blades of RED Heavy's flying machine.
  • In Kelly Distasio is "Matter Powered" Thus, she can eat practically anything to gain energy.
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 "Wuah~ Can I eat it?"

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  • The youtube sensation of EPICMEALTIME features a group of drunken Canadians who like to eat heinously fatty and sugary meals of 3,000+ calories!!!
  • The Cinema Snob's series "Brad Tries", where he eats weird food and drinks sodas which stopped being manufactured years, if not decades, ago.
  • Giratina The Second deserves a mention in The Pokédex Extended Fanon Edition, where it is stated that Cynthia has discovered the critters will drink anything and everything ranging from water to art paintings and scientific research equipment. At least he's diligent enough to eat at scheduled times, on his desk. Which he then also eats.


Western Animation[]

  • The Tasmanian Devil in Looney Tunes is the animated archetype for this character. Many of the jokes in the WB shorts featuring him involve other characters easily tricking him into eating something that no sane creature would, like burning sticks of dynamite, inflatable life rafts, and in one case, an entire refridgerator.
    • Likewise with the spin off series Tiny Toon Adventures with the character of Dizzy Devil, a younger Tasmanian Devil. One episode even featured the characters having a contest, "Will Dizzy Eat it?" where Dizzy was fed various things including a jet plane.
    • Taz's entire family has shown signs of being Extreme Omnivores, although none of them to the extent that Taz is.
  • Gil from Gravedale High is often seen eating bugs, or more often, his Trademark Favorite Food, pizza.
  • Jim from Mission Hill was constantly eating everything in sight, including leftover food in restaurants and a chunk of the apartment sofa.
    • Stoagie falls under this as well. Then again, he's a dog. So it's probably within the realm of normal.
  • Broadway on Gargoyles once ate the glowing fungus growing on a cave wall when nothing else was available.
    • The Archmage ate the Grimotum Achenorum in order to subvert a rule that Avalon has about bringing human magic onto the island.
  • Cyborg, in the Teen Titans episode Crash is infected with a computer virus, making him perceive objects and various people as some of his favorite foods. Normally, Cyborg is a Big Eater. Mayhem and Hilarity Ensues.
    • Starfire of the Teen Titans exhibits Extreme Omnivore behavior occasionally, though usually out of ignorance of what Earthlings consider food (or out of the habits borne of some of the really gross things that Tamaraneans do consider food). For instance, she considers mustard to be a most delicious beverage.
    • Also, in the episode he was introduced, Silkie ate his way through half the contents of Titans Tower.
    • Terra, too, shows herself to be one. For one thing, she's the only person to stomach Starfire's food and like it!
  • Gonard from Kappa Mikey alternates between a Big Eater and an Extreme Omnivore on a whim, and is generally the epitome of either (when not the epitome of both). During one scene, he took video cameras from people, put them on a sandwich, and, at the end of the chase scene, ate it on one bite.
    • He basically will eat anything if it's put into a sandwich.
  • South Park has Kenny, who is not against consuming anything if dared, offered money for, or to get high. Amongst his exploits is drinking gasoline and getting high on cat urine.
  • Ed from Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy apparently never listened to the old adage "never eat anything bigger than your head": when sitting down to a bowl of soup, he eats the bowl as well, and Eddy once tricked Ed into eating his bed.
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 Ed: [wipes his mouth after eating the bed] That hit the spot!

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  • Anti-Wanda from The Fairly Odd Parents will eat anything. Often with her feet.
  • A Running Gag in Drawn Together involving Toot is her habit of eating literally anything that she can grasp (she is a one-dimensional fat joke, after all). She has eaten remote controls, refrigerators, large automobiles and even people (she has eaten at least two housemates on separate occasions).
  • Big Dog in Two Stupid Dogs is pretty much capable of eating anything he would want to eat, in one occasion even functioning as a canine vacuum cleaner. His eating habits are comparable to Guu (mentioned above), in a way that anything he eats is capable of coming out again in one piece (if mostly covered in saliva). Unless he actually chewed, of course.
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 Little Dog: I just saw an airplane!

Big Dog: I can eat an airplane.

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  • The cartoon Fat Dog Mendoza stars the titular dog (who's actually more spherical than fat) and literally stores things inside himself.
  • One episode of The Life and Times of Juniper Lee featured a creature known as a "Batoot", which ate anything in its path, and had the added misery of bringing bad luck with it wherever it went, the severity of which was measured by its unhappiness. The more miserable it became, the worse the circumstances around it became. When Juniper was supposed to take care of it until its herd returned, the large green (but somehow endearing-looking) creature devoured the entire contents of both the attic and the basement of Juniper's home.
  • Wakko Warner of Animaniacs fame is known to eat anything, at one occasion even eating the lightbulb that appeared when Yakko got an idea.
  • If you see a goat in a cartoon, you can bet your bottom dollar it's an Extreme Omnivore. It will often go for clothes drying on the line (or even when someone is wearing them!), but its preferences run more toward tin cans and other metal objects. This is taken to the extreme in the Tex Avery cartoon Billy Boy in which a baby goat devours (among other things) a wheelbarrow, furniture, a car engine, hundreds of miles of railroad track, the Moon and even a frame right out of the film.
    • The same thing applies to ostriches. They tend to swallow things whole in a snakelike manner, with similar visual results as the bulge travels down the bird's long, thin neck.
    • This behavior has some Truth in Television (though it tends to get exaggerated in fictional portrayals), since both goats and ostriches are known to have tendencies toward dietary indiscretion.
    • You CAN also see the outline of whole fish going down when birds with long, thin necks swallow them whole.
    • Sheep aren't that omnivorous, but still stuff themselves with plants poisonous to other grazers... or nitro compounds. Yes, a sheep can eat TNT and break it down.
  • Baby Animal on Muppet Babies.
  • Homer Simpson from The Simpsons has been known to eat some very weird stuff. He's eaten stuff like bacon mixed with fudge, butter in his coffee, a horse head, and a bag of flour, He's also eaten some inedible stuff like a pair of mens' slacks (which apparently tasted better than Indian cuisine), a bowl of change, a jar of petroleum jelly, and a rubber biter covered in petroleum jelly. However, he doesn't like eating anything that's low in fat.
    • In one episode, he ate the baking soda that had been in the back of the fridge before they even first moved in (before subsequently going on an 'antacid trip'). Lisa is then revealed to be on a first name basis with the Poison Control Hotline operator.
  • Dr. Zoidberg of Futurama has been known to eat anything he can get his claws on, including a boot from the ocean floor, a weeks-old moldy sandwich, a tiny edible crown (made of wood), cholesterol scraped from one of Fry's arteries, the Earth Flag, a deviled egg surgically extracted from his stomach and a live raccoon he found in his shell after fishing it out of a dumpster. He has also expressed curiosity as to what the Shroud of Turin tastes like.
    • His race was single-handedly responsible for the extinction of the anchovy.
    • Nibbler. Oh, God, Nibbler.
      • All of the Niblonians for that matter. Feast of a Thousand Beasts anyone?
  • The titular character of Chowder can be classified as this. He's known to eat other things than food such as maps and even once eating a marching band (but he let them go soon afterwards)
  • Oddly, Anakin in the Star Wars Clone Wars miniseries brings a bag of bugs and worms to the little makeshift shelter he and Obi-Wan hang out in while waiting out a protracted siege and starts happily chomping on them. When Obi-Wan expresses his disgust, Anakin quips about how Obi-Wan always taught him to "feed off the living Force".
  • Remy the rat's relatives in Ratatouille, but they are rats.
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 Remy: What...are you eating?!

Emile: I don't really know. I think it was some sort of wrapper once.

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  • Heffer from Rocko's Modern Life.
    • Spunky even more so.
  • In one episode of Beast Wars, Dinobot finds a clone of himself infiltrating the Maximal base, and... well, take a guess how he deals with it.
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 Dinobot: He was such a handsome fellow... and, quite tasty. *picks last bit of the clone out of his teeth, hitting Optimus in the face with it, and belches*

Optimus Primal: ...You're disgusting.

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  • The lizard-thing in Fern Gully is apparently very pleased to be eating Zac and cheerfully gulps down a snail and plants as he chases after the poor guy.
  • Buster from Arthur once ate ice cream with fish in it
    • Actually, there is salmon-flavored ice cream served at a parlor in Hawaii. It comes with a complementary bucket in case you find yourself needing to vomit.
  • Beezy and his girlfriend Saffi on Jimmy Two Shoes are known to eat just about anything, sometimes snatching it up frog-like with their tounges.
  • Stitch's appetite expanded from just eating alien food in the movie, to gobbling anything that strikes his fancy in Lilo and Stitch The Animated Series. Throughout the series he's eaten garbage, tools, nuts and bolts, a can of macadamia nuts, a left shoe, several cans of soda, Mertle's awful rock-hard muffins, a container of fresh eggs and even Mertle's dog (thought he spit it out later).
    • There was also moments of extreme eating from Stitch's cousins. In one episode there was an experiment named Tank that was solely designed to eat metal and grow bigger and an experiment named Wishy-Washy who was briefly seen eating a pack of comic books
  • One Goofy episode from Disney's House of Mouse had Goofy learning etiquette. At the dining table he eats the meal set in front of him, and then eats his metal utensils, plate, and table (he justifies that he needed the iron).
  • Owen from Total Drama Island, whose steel-clad stomach (downing everything from Chef Hatchet's food, cockroaches, bull testicles, and even dog food) landed him in the finals. And he won!
    • Yet he got pretty ill in Total Drama Action after eating an entire buffet of foam-core food.
      • He still nethertheless found it delicious
  • In Justice League, one of John Stewart's fellow Green Lanterns, Kilowog, is shown to apparently be this in a scene where he and Flash were poking around John's apartment. Flash first finds a carton of "Bob and Terry's" ice cream in the freezer and shows it to Kilowog, who tosses the entire carton into his mouth, eats it, and declares it "delicious!" Flash then continues searching and finds a VHS tape of Old Yeller. He gives it to Kilowog just to show him, but once again, Kilowog tosses it in his mouth and eats it, declaring it "delicious!"
  • Shaggy in Scooby Doo is a human whose Trademark Favorite Food is a brand of dog biscuit.
  • Just about every pizza Michelangelo prepares and eats in the '87 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, such as peanut butter and clams, chocolate fudge with garlic, and strawberry with anchovy sauce.
  • One episode of Bonkers dealt with Bonkers and Lucky re-institutionalizing a hairy beast known as The Louse who devoured everything in sight, when Lucky tries to better his table manners he eats the entire table along with the plate and eating utensils.
  • Pinkie Pie of My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic has shown a willingness to eat virtually anything, eating cupcakes with hot sauce and ashen lumps that are supposedly cupcakes without complaint. Her first reaction to seeing a vat of rainbow was to taste it, and it's the only thing she's complained about the flavor of on-screen — although she had some bizarre muffins that made her sick, she didn't actually comment on their flavor.
    • Spike from the same definitely qualifies — he prefers eating gemstones, but can and often will eat literally anything. Including eating and enjoying said muffins. After seeing a live earthworm stick its head out of one.
    • Don't forget the Parasprites. Twilight tried to stop them from eating all the food by casting a spell to make them stop eating food. They started eating everything else.
    • Rarity and Sweetie Belle's parents enjoyed the latter's horrible food, which included ashes (burnt juice) and a bowl of bubbling ooze (toast).
  • The alien race in Ben 10 referred to as 'Gourmands' (or, as Ben himself calls said form, 'Upchuck') are essentially an entire species that are this trope, with the added benefit of weaponising what they eat by spitting it back at their enemies with great force. Amusingly, they seem to be incapable processing anything which would be edible to a human.
  • Chris from Dan Vs. It takes him a while to register that he's eaten something human beings really shouldn't eat.


Real Life[]

  • A Frenchman known as Monsieur Mangetout (French for "Mr. Eat-Everything") has eaten, among other things, 18 bicycles, several TV sets, a coffin and even an airplane. There was a subversion, however: hardboiled eggs and bananas, considered normal food, made him sick.
  • Steve, proprietor of "The Sneeze" ("Half zine. Half blog. Half not good with fractions.") has an entire category of posts devoted to his extreme gastronomy: "Steve, Don't Eat It!" You've got to admire a guy who'll eat such things as pickled pork rinds, Beggin' Strips? (a dog snack marketed in the US), natto, and canned silkworm pupae, and drink such things as his wife's breast milk and homemade "prison wine" in the interests of humor.
    • Most of those seem pretty tame compared to some of the things they eat in the TV shows above. Heck, the whole purpose of human breast milk is to be consumed by humans; cow milk is actually squickier, if you think about it a bit.
  • Benchilada, creator of "So You Don't Have To" will also consume all manner of bizarre food and drinks, so you don't have to.
  • Sharks tend to bite first and ask questions later, whether it's their normal prey or not. Played with in Jaws, where a dead shark's stomach has various junk in it, including a license plate.
    • Tiger sharks will eat anything. License plates have been found in the stomachs of actual sharks, along with tires, pieces of medieval armor, etc, etc.
      • Used tragically in Open Water, when a couple of fishermen find a discarded camera left by the unfortunate water-stranded couple in a tiger shark's stomach.
  • Vitamin deficiencies associated with pregnancy can give rise to a temporary craving for materials rich in calcium and other minerals, such as chalk, clay, or even newsprint.
  • Some kids will pull and eat their hair. Ditto with younger infants, who are major Extreme Omnivores (or at least like to put everything in their mouths to determine what it is) — is why they should never be left with things that could potentially fit into their mouths.
  • Coprophagia: Desire to eat feces. Seriously some wackos, like child serial killer Albert Fish, have this as a sexual fetish.
  • And then there's pica, a serious eating disorder in which sufferers habitually eat non-nutritive things like clay, paper, chalk, glass, wood, metal, et al. Eating metal can lead to perforation of the GI tract and usually death, as was demonstrated with this poor fellow
  • One man lost at sea developed cravings for normally-discarded parts of fish, such as eyeballs (for their water content) and internal organs (for vitamins).
  • Criminally-neglected dogs will swallow rocks, sticks, and dirt in an attempt to ease hunger pains.
    • Many dogs have been known to eat their own vomit. Or poop. Or basically anything they can put in their mouths. From an evolutionary standpoint, eating their own waste was a way to keep predators from following them.
  • Human defense cells called "macrophages" (a name which literally means Big Eater) have the job of consuming any and all microscopic things that don't belong in a healthy body. They'll perform phagocytosis on anything, from pathogens, to dead or dying cells, to minute fragments of splinters, to toxic molecules of snake venom or atoms of arsenic.
  • Human beings as a species have a remarkable dedication to eating things nature either never intended them to eat or tried its darnedest to make inedible. In addition to being the only mammal that consumes the milk of other mammal species, we eat things like chili peppers (evolved to be repulsive to mammals with their spicy flavors), potatoes (originally poisonous, yet mankind still domesticated them), blowfish (incredibly toxic in all but a few select slivers of flesh), and several other varieties of poisonous or formerly-poisonous (before domestication) plant.
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  Typical joke: The [insert nationality here] will eat everything in the ocean that's not a submarine, everything in the air that's not a helicopter, and everything with four legs that's not a table.

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  • Many species of catfish will eat anything that they can fit in their (rather large, for body size) mouth. Aquarium keepers have to keep this in mind if they intend to keep catfish, as any smaller fish get eaten whole.
  • Hyenas in general, and it's not just bones and fur they take, there have apparently been reports of them dining on aluminium cookware (though they later regurgitate the pellets).
  • Tasmanian devils. Objects found in this creature's stool include bones, eggshells, feathers, and even items scavenged from households, including part of a boot. Hopefully there weren't any toes in it....
  • This Cracked article.
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