"I had no clue why I was always got [sic] SO hungry. No matter how much I filled my belly, my body still felt weak and empty until my parents hugged me, nuzzled me. I finally understood one night when I woke up to find a swarm of insects surrounding me. I screamed at the sight of the disgusting things. My parents swooped in and chased away the scurrying intruders. They asked me if I was okay and made sure I was alright and allowed me to sleep in their bed that night. I fed well that night. And I understood."
— Queen Chrysalis, Pony POV Series
So you've discovered a brand-new creature that you know nothing about, which you plan to take care of for the time being. But wait! You just realized you have no idea what this thing likes to eat, on its home planet or wherever it came from (and it doesn't speak English, so it can't tell you). One way of approaching this problem is to offer it many different kinds of food and see what it likes. Sometimes accompanied by the stock phrase (and variations) "What does this thing even eat, anyway?" Commonly, this character is a scientist who has created a new lifeform and is trying to discover what his new creation eats.
This can go many ways. The creature may refuse some foods but enjoy others, happily devour everything offered to it, have a Bizarre Taste in Food by human standards, take a liking to eating something normally inedible due to Bizarre Alien Biology, or even turn out to be feeding on something insubstantial, like thoughts or emotions. It can even be Played for Horror if the creature turns out to have more macabre tastes like human blood or flesh, forcing the protagonist to resort to unethical methods to keep their new friend sated.
Related to Aliens Love Human Food and Tastes Like Friendship. The "creature eats human flesh / blood / souls / whatever" variation is related to Horror Hunger, Human Resources, To Serve Man, Vampiric Draining, and/or I'm a Humanitarian.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Digimon Ghost Game: After finding Gammamon, Hiro feeds Gammamon numerous different foods to see what he likes. Being a Digimon, Gammamon doesn't know the words for the different types of tastes and uses his own words to describe them. Salmon skin is "shiny", spicy cod roe is "scary", and his favorite, chocolate is "champion".
- How to Keep a Mummy: Sora offers many kinds of food to Mii-kun, a little mummy, and records in his journal what Mii-kun likes and does not like to eat. It likes apple slices, shirataki noodles, and dog food, but not cucumber slices.
- Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon: When Professor Kukui's class tries to find out what Nebby eats, it refuses Pokémon kibble, some Poké Beans, a sandwich, a piece of cake, a bowl of salad, and a bottle of Moomoo Milk. Finally, Sophocles discovers that it likes konpeito, a star-shaped sugar candy.
Fan Works
- Pony POV Series: When Chrysalis was shapeshifter mode-locked as a zebra filly, no matter how much she ate or what she ate, she never stopped feeling hungry, except when her parents expressed their affection to her. Much later in life, she would discover that she was actually a changeling, a creature that could only be nourished by love.
Film — Live-Action
- Grace: Madeline is trying to feed her newborn baby Grace, but finds out she can't digest formula. When the baby's nursing becomes painful, Madeline realizes Grace isn't feeding on her milk but on her blood. She tries feeding Grace with beef blood in a bottle, but Grace can't digest that either — it has to be human blood.
- Little Shop of Horrors: The song "Grow for Me" has Seymour singing about how he offered Audrey II everything a plant could possibly want (sunlight, rainwater, fertilizer) but it doesn't seem to react to anything. Until Seymour sarcastically asks if he wants blood just before accidentally cutting his finger.
Literature
- The Andromeda Strain: Researchers at the Wildfire Project are fervently trying to determine what can stop the rapid growth of an alien contagion that piggybacked on a spacecraft. Samples of the contagion have been placed in petri dishes containing various materials to track what substances accelerate its growth, and which inhibit it. This is where the researchers discover the contagion has a very narrow pH tolerance; acidic and alkaline media cause the contagion to shut down and disintegrate. Seawater is as deadly to it as Hollywood Acid.
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Hagrid creates a hybrid species by mating manticores and fire-crabs, which he names Blast-Ended Skrewts. During his Care of Magical Creatures class, he has the students try feeding them ant eggs, frog livers, and grass snakes to see what they like. Harry privately wonders if the exercise is pointless since the Skrewts don't seem to have mouths. Somehow, the Skrewts grow to massive sizes, despite not eating anything they're fed.
- Perdido Street Station: Isaac gets hold of an unknown species of caterpillar during his studies into flying creatures, and becomes briefly obsessed with figuring out what it eats. After refusing all available samples of meat and plant matter, the caterpillar is left ailing... right up until one of Isaac's bohemian friends happens to bring in a sample of the Fantastic Drug Dreamshit. As it turns out, Dreamshit is the only thing the caterpillar will eat, allowing it to begin growing at long last and form a cocoon. The caterpillar eventually grows up to become a monstrous Slake Moth; these things eat only the minds of their prey and feed their young pre-digested thoughts... meaning that Dreamshit is literal Slake Moth shit. On the upside, the fact that the drug is usually diluted with a cutting agent means that this particular Moth grows up to be a lot weaker than naturally-fed specimens, but that doesn't help much when the Moth breaks into a drug lab and frees an entire team of Slake Moths from captivity.
- Winnie the Pooh: In "In Which Tigger Comes to the Forest and Has Breakfast", Tigger arrives in the forest and Pooh invites him to breakfast. Tigger can talk but doesn't know what his favourite food is, so Pooh offers him honey, Piglet offers him acorns (or "haycorns" as he calls them), Eeyore offers him thistles, and Kanga offers him many different things. He doesn't like any of them until he tries some extract of malt.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who: In "The Eleventh Hour", a girl named Amelia meets a strange alien creature (the Doctor) in her back garden. He's hungry, so she offers him an apple, then yoghurt, then bacon, then baked beans, then bread and butter — all of which he tastes, then violently rejects — before discovering that he likes fish fingers in custard.
- In a non-creature example, one episode of Leverage sees Parker laid up and bored with a torn ACL. With nothing else to do, she decides to observe the patrons at the bar that the crew is using as their cover, and notices that one patron keeps ordering the same dish every day but always returning it after a single bite. Eventually, she learns that he's a widower and that the dish was something his wife used to cook for him, and he can't bear to eat it anymore because it reminds him of her. In the episode finale, she arranges for him to receive a whole bunch of new dishes so that he can find a new favorite.
Puppet Shows
- Fraggle Rock: In one episode, after Junior accidentally drops an egg into the Fraggle Pond, Wembley takes it on himself to sit on it, then take care of the "tree creature" (bird) that hatches from it. He offers the creature a radish, some mashed peas, and an artichoke soufflé, but it doesn't like any of them. Finally, he manages to get it fed when Mokey tells him that tree creatures eat seeds.
Webcomics
- Twilight's First Day: The staff of Canterlot Castle are raising Spike, but they don't really know what they're doing because ponies don't usually raise dragons. They try feeding him ground-up gems since adult dragons eat gems whole, but he won't eat more than a few spoonfuls of them. Twilight solves the problem by crushing his eggshell into powder and feeding it to him, which is something she read in a storybook.
Western Animation
- Bobinogs: In one episode, the trio tries to adopt a baby dragon named Dylan, and Ogi keeps trying different foods on him. He eventually finds out that Dylan eats coal.
- Fluffy Gardens: In We-Reg's Day in the Limelight episode, the puppy invites Green Ball to dinner, but the ball doesn't like any kind of food. After several tests, We-Reg discovers that Green Ball only likes food that is green.
- Futurama: In "Roswell That Ends Well", the temporally-displaced crustacioid Dr. Zoidberg is in Area 51 and the scientists try to determine his diet by putting him in a room with a massive buffet, which he absolutely demolishes upon being told it's all free.
- The Simpsons: In "A Tale of Two Springfields", a badger takes up residence in the Simpsons' doghouse, and Lisa looks up what it eats on WhatBadgersEat.com. She tells Bart they subsist on a diet of stoats, voles, and marmots, and have been also known to eat woodpeckers, prompting him to try and feed it Rod and Todd's pet woodpecker.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Rock-A-Bye Bivalve", SpongeBob and Patrick try to figure out what to feed a baby scallop. They try Krabby Patties, doughnuts, and other types of food, but the scallop rejects them all. Then SpongeBob offers an apple, out of which appears a worm. ("I bring greetings from Apple World!") The scallop gets excited at the sight of the worm, so SpongeBob feeds him the worm. ("We will bury you!")
- Teen Titans: In "Can I Keep Him?", Beast Boy gives his pet silkworm temporarily to Starfire, who tries to figure out what to feed it. After several attempts, she discovers that Silkie likes zorkaberries, a Tamaranean delicacy.
