History Main / MockMeal

* One commercial for Pepto Bismol has two young kids make and serve pancakes to their parents in bed. It's not until after the father [[IAteWhat takes a big bite]] that the mother whispers, "We don't have the stuff to make pancakes." Apparently, they made the syrup too.

** When Mr.Krabs threw Pearl a birthday party, the cake was just cardboard covered in frosting. As for the punch...

* ''Series/TheSupersizersEat''. On the Wartime episode, they reconstructed what was apparently a common dish during [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII WWII]] Britain: a Mock Duck made out of sausage.

* Done in ''Series/ThreesCompany'' with a phony cake Jack made from sawdust, thinking he was on his way out and trying to ruin the party. Surprisingly, Mr. Roper liked it. (Recall in an earlier episode the man ate dog food....)

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[[folder: Live Action Television ]]

* On ''Series/{{MASH}}'', the main characters sculpt a "SPAM Lamb" after Radar lets the original lamb, provided by a Greek military unit, escape so it can avoid being eaten.

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[[folder: Western Animation ]]

* On ''WesternAnimation/SpongebobSquarepants'', someone orders a pizza from the Krusty Krab by mistake. Sensing an opportunity to make money, Mr. Krabs squashes some Krabby Patties into a pizza and sends Spongebob and Squidward to deliver it.

[[folder: Real Life ]]

* During WWII, meat was severely rationed so housewives often had to fake it with meat that was tough or poor quality, plus organ meats and other less-valued pieces. These were put in a grinder along with oatmeal or some other meat-extender (even soy was used) and shaped into steaks or another more appetizing form. One name for this meal was "Emergency Steak."
** During the Siege of Leningrad, the besieged civilians had almost no food and had to eat whatever they could scrape. The oft-told tales of [[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2032706/BEYOND-HORROR-They-ate-cats-sawdust-wallpaper-paste--babies-Leningrads-agony-Nazis-tried-starve-submission-LENINGRAD-TRAGEDY-OF-A-CITY-UNDER-SIEGE-1941-44-BY-ANNA-REID.html various inedible materials]], such as pine tree needles, sawdust, wallpaper paste, and mineral oil is something of a misrepresentation, though. Trying to eat ''really'' inedible stuff (like the toxic mineral oil) would only make things worse, while harsh conditions of Northern Europe prepared people to eat things that wouldn't be considered edible ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_food in better times]]''. Pine needles, for example made an excellent vitamin supplement tea, while the certain part of a coniferous tree bark was long known to be edible and even nutritious (but barely palatable) throughout the region. Thus the pine bark was stripped of inedible parts and ground into bitter, resiny "flour", or "sawdust", that was added to the siege bread with anything else the people could find, like wheat bran (normally reserved for [[DogFoodDiet cattle fodder]]), ground burdock root (eaten as a vegetable in Japan, but regarded as a famine food in Russia), orache and nettle (common weeds) and so on. Wallpaper paste made from potato starch was also edible and thus eaten, as well as various rawhide items, such as boots and belts. A lot of machine oils were of vegetable origins before WWII, and thus also were made into a food source. [[ShaggyDogStory But there still wasn't enough.]]

* Crab sticks and crab salad, popular in (among other places) East Asia and Russia, don't contain any real crab meat. They are based on surimi, powdered fish flavoured to taste like crab and textured to look like crab. Crab salad is sometimes made with corn, sometime with egg, sometime with pickles, but what they never put in it is crab.
** The reason for it was that the crab fisheries in Russia is a relatively modern practice, only started in earnest after the WWII, and for a time crab was a novel, unknown and somewhat mysterious food, so to stimulate a consumer interest it was sold basically at cost, and thus cheap, so it was the time when it started to be used in salads. But then, roughly in TheEighties, the Soviet government learned of the huge prices Japanese were ready to pay for the Russian king crab, so they've started to export more and more of it to Japan, and come [[UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia the Nineties and beyond]] almost all Russian crab is exported to Japan, making it too expensive to use in salads.
** But wait, there is more! Certain brands of Chinese crab sticks do not even contain any surimi. It is replaced with a mixture soy protein, starch and egg white. So, that's this trope, ''squared''.

Does not cover [[FutureFoodIsArtificial synthetic foodstuffs in futuristic settings]].

* Inversion: When Alfie Gator a self-proclaimed culiinary artist, fails to catch WesternAnimation/YakkyDoodle for a meal and gets incredibly injured doing so, he settles for a hot dog. His justification: while the hotdog ranks far down on a gourmet's priority, it has never been known to retaliate by biting back.

* On an episode of ''Series/{{Friends}}', Monica is employed to create recipes for a chocolate substitute called 'mockolate'. Despite her best efforts, everything turns out inedible, with Phoebe tasting the 'mockolate chip cookies' and declaring "[[TastesLikeFeet This must be what evil tastes like!]]"