Senseless Phagia

Senseless Phagia is when someone eats something because they can't tell what it is by using their five senses.

Senseless is when the senses aren't in use. Phagia means "consume."

If a person has no sense of smell or taste, so they eat dirt and thinks that it's chocolate, that qualifies, and they've committed geophagia.

This also applies when characters don't use their sense of sight while they're eating and pick up something gross and stick it in their mouths without even looking at it.

Related to Squick and Nausea Fuel and Cringe Comedy (as well as I Ate WHAT?!). Often caused by Tampering with Food and Drink, though it may also happen if a character has a Sick Episode.

A subtrope of Rule of Perception. Compare Sniff Sniff Nom and Fingertip Drug Analysis.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Chainsaw Man: Explicitly justified. Denji's years of scrounging poverty have turned him into an Extreme Omnivore who reflexively eats whatever is put in his mouth, no matter how disgusting it tastes. This is useful when fighting devils, as it lets him eat their (apparently awful-tasting) blood to fuel his powers. It backfires when Himeno gives him an open-mouth kiss and vomits in his mouth, which he swallows and has to puke back up.

Comic Strips

Garfield snatches a vaguely cake-shaped brown object with no distinguishing features from Jon's hands, swallows it in one gulp, then exclaims "I hope that was food!" in the 1994/04/09 strip.
Get Fuzzy:
- Satchel displays a variant: He usually knows what something is, but he has no idea whether it's edible until he's tried it.
- In one comic, Satchel eats an apple-shaped candle because he doesn't realize that it's a candle when he started. He's aware that he shouldn't have eaten the other candles, but by that point he just had a taste for them.

Film — Animated

Ratatouille: The difference between Remy's gourmet tastes and the other rats' indiscriminate omnivory is shown when his brother Emil eats something that he cheerfully admits he has no idea what it was.
Remy: What's that you're eating?
Emil: *smacks lips* I'm not exactly sure, to be honest.
Remy: You don't know what it is... and you're eating it?
Emil: You know, once you get past the gag reflex, a whole world of possibilities opens up!

Film — Live Action

5:45 A.M. features a waiter doing something to the food that involves having his pants around his knees, as seen here.

Blindsided: the Game: The events of the film are kicked off by the blind Walter not realizing that the milk in his fridge had spoiled. This is compounded by him also accidentally grabbing a bottle of hot sauce instead of a bottle of water to wash his mouth out with.
Cabin Fever 2: A custodian who shows signs of infection with a flesh-eating virus takes a leak into the punch that a girl was mixing up for the prom (yes, just to be a douchebag). Halfway through the stream, the urine turns into a stream of blood. The promgoers later remark that the punch tastes like piss, but don't seem to think it noteworthy enough to not drink the punch, apparently dismissing it as bad punch.
Epic Movie: One gag has Kal Penn lustily devouring what he thinks is chocolate for a good twenty or so seconds; more than enough time for the viewer to correctly guess that it's really poop from an inexplicably open sewer line.
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: The duo stop by a fast food drive-thru, where one of the disgruntled workers informs them that the secret ingredient to the food is animal semen.
The Hitcher features a severed finger in a man's fries. He doesn't notice until he directly looks at it.
The Lost Boys: The vampires use their hypnotic powers to either make food look like something disgusting, like maggots instead of rice, or to make actual disgusting things look ordinary, tricking the protagonist into drinking blood by pretending it's wine.

Minority Report has one, just after Anderton's eye replacement. The surgeon tells him that a sandwich and milk are in the fridge. Well, that much is true, but so are several older portions and John's blind fumbling leads him to the rotten ones first.
Problem Child 2 has two examples: One is Junior's urinating into a pitcher and passing it off to an unsuspecting man as lemonade. The other is Junior's releasing his cockroach army into his family's dinner.
Soylent Green: Thorn steals a spoon that a woman is using to eat something out of a jar. He takes it home and gives it to Sol to eat so he can tell him what it is (strawberry jam).

Literature

Hogfather: Lord Downey keeps his liquor in bottles with labels spelled backwards. A footnote explains that some Real Life aristocrats have done this, apparently assuming their servants will be too stupid to tell what's in the bottles and, hence, won't steal drinks on the sly. The same footnote points out that this seldom works ... and that the servants trust that the aristocrats would, themselves, fail to notice that the bottles had been topped off with "eniru".

Live Action TV

Black Books: Bernard denies that he's lost all sense of taste through his booze and cigarette habits, and believes that he's eating "some sort of delicious biscuit". It's a coaster. Made of cork.
The Dick Van Dyke Show: In "The Meershatz Pipe", the flu causes Rob to lose his sense of taste temporarily. Trying to pretend he feels all right, Rob swallows the liquid Laura gave him. He comments that chicken soup was just what he needed...only for Laura to tell him that was salt water for gargling. Later, he tries it again, the opposite way...and ends up gargling soup.
Millennium (1996): Inverted in "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me". Four demons, in their human forms, assemble in the predawn at a doughnut shop and reflect on the havoc they've wreaked on humanity. They, of course, mistreat the doughnut store clerk, who then urinates in their coffee, which they love.
Upright Citizens Brigade: One episode features a sketch where one man claims that color-blindness is the reason his niece can't tell the difference between a juicy, delicious apple and a raw, slimy pig anus. An audience member is incredulous of the claim, insisting there is something far more serious wrong with the girl if she really can't tell the difference. The first man offers him a chance to experience simulated color-blindness with a special pair of glasses and then offers him a choice of two clear ziploc bags (one with apples, the other with pig anuses):
Skeptical Man: (reaching into the pig anus bag) Oh yeah... that's an apple! OH GOD I WAS WRONG!

Video Games

In Episode 2 of The Walking Dead: Season One, the St. John family feed the group Mark's legs as part of their policy of leaving nothing to waste. Anyone that started eating (including Clementine if Lee does not stop her in time) falls under this trope.

Western Animation

The Simpsons are drinking some fruit punch.
Homer: Ooh, punch!
Lisa: Ew! Dad, this is blood!
Homer: Correction: Free blood.
In episode 11 of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, Fred returns from visiting a Blood Bank with a huge red stain on his mouth and shirt. Shaggy and Scooby nervously ask him if it's blood, and he replies no, it's juice. He goes on to mention they have bags of the stuff hanging all over the place.

Urban Legends

Real Life

Daniel Rakowitz of New York killed his girlfriend in 1989 and made soup with her remains that he fed to homeless people.
Coffee pee

Examples:

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