Suicide food refers to a specific visual marketing paradigm characterized by anthropomorphic representations of animals portrayed as willingly contributing to their own consumption or the production of human food items. This technique leverages cheerful, colorful, and often joyful imagery, directly contrasting the actual suffering associated with the industrial farming and consumption of animal-derived products like meat, fish, and dairy. The primary socio-psychological aim of such communication is to mitigate consumer guilt by fostering the perception that animals desire to be eaten, thereby embodying a form of extreme anthropocentrism and the reification of the animal subject into a mere commodity. Emblematic examples include "The Laughing Cow," a smiling pig self-carving into sausage, or a plucked turkey basting itself, all designed to disassociate the product from its living origin.

The term "suicide food" emerged in the early 2010s, coined by American vegan activist Ben Grossblatt, who cataloged numerous instances on his blog from 2006 to 2011. While early instances of critique, such as a 2009 complaint against a Le Gaulois chicken advertisement for false representation of farming conditions, existed, the broader denunciation gained significant traction in 2022. This surge in awareness coincided with escalating public concern over the environmental and ethical impacts of meat and dairy consumption. A notable development was a December 2022 ruling by a French advertising ethics body against KFC for an advertisement featuring a joyful chicken bouncing on a cow, deemed misleading regarding actual animal breeding conditions.

Analytically, suicide food resonates with Carol J. Adams' concept of the "absent referent," functioning to sever the conceptual link between the living animal and the consumed product, thus alleviating consumer guilt. Researchers Dan Dombrowski and Brianne Donaldson interpret it as a vivid example of how contemporary visual culture degrades animals to mere consumer objects, reinforcing an exclusively anthropocentric worldview. This critical perspective has prompted industry reevaluation, with outlets like Quebec's Les Affaires questioning the future of such imagery and the RTBF observing logo modifications, such as the Croustibat fish transforming into a genie, ostensibly to diminish direct animal association and mitigate potential ethical backlashes.