Giant Food

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
This must be what heaven is like.

A staple of kids' media. A fantasy of either becoming small or being in a land of giants, and coming across a table full of food. Appeals to the greedy kid in us all.

The archetype would be Jack and the Beanstalk.

Not to be confused with the US mid-Atlantic regional supermarket chain or the other US mid-Atlantic regional supermarket chain [1]

Compare Level Ate which is likely constructed out of Giant Food.

Examples of Giant Food include:

Anime and Manga

  • A few chapters in Kochikame has giant themed game shows and sporting activities. One example is when one game show hosts a team race having to race through giant bowls of instant ramen, and a sushi maze. The food is real and can be eaten. The main character, Ryotsu takes this advantage when he eats his way through the giant sushi maze to reach the finish.
  • In Nagasarete Airantou, both the manga and the anime, the inhabitants of the island grow large produce...at least, larger than Ikuto and the viewer are accustomed to. Most notable are the eggplants, one of which is used as a dummy to keep the girls away from Ikuto, the only male on the island. There is even recurring humor in Ikuto's failed attempts at helping with the harvest.
  • A Running Gag in Code Geass is Milly's efforts to create a giant pizza as part of Ashford Academy's various student festivals (Which inevitably fail, to C.C.'s dismay).

Fairy Tales

Film

  • Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
  • The protagonist of Ella Enchanted encounters this when she travels to the land of giants.
  • James and the Giant Peach
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has a lake of chocolate, and a giant chocolate bar.
  • Sleeper. Woody Allen's fugitive character comes across a futuristic farm where giant vegetables are grown. He ends up stealing a giant banana and stalk of celery for dinner.
  • The Oatmeal Cream Pie scene from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids comes to mind, although technically, it's normal-sized, and the kids are insect-sized.
  • Seen in Half Baked when the protagonists (as kids, in a Flash Back) try weed for the first time and wander around their local grocer.
  • In a throwaway gag in Real Genius, another student offers Mitch a cherry the size of a baseball. "I grow them myself."
  • In Antz, Z and Bala think they've found Insectopia when they see a bunch of this (it's actually a human picnic).

Literature

Live-Action TV

Jeff: What’s wrong with you?
Troy: I’m sick. I don’t know why. [takes another bite of cookie]
Jeff: Have you considered the sixty-inch-diameter cookie you’re eating?
Troy: How can something that’s delicious make me sick?

  • One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse once dropped a giant sandwich on The Young Ones' house, where it was pressed into service as a sofa.
  • Used extensively on Double Dare. Some of the obstacles on the Obstacle Course included a giant slice of pizza, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, sushi roll, hamburger, stack of waffles, and birthday cake, just to name a few. Later in the show's run, a common physical challenge would be to create a giant replica of some food, such as a burrito or bowl of cereal, with one of the contestants naturally replacing one of the ingredients.

Newspaper Comics

Video Games

  • Battle Bugs involves insects mostly fighting for human food, so yes, make your ant soldier climb that cheese wedge.
  • Giant food is present in Panic Restaurant.
  • One world in the RPG Mystic Arc consists of towns carved into giant squash, gourds, pumpkins, etc., and most of the enemies here are basically giant hungry bugs.
  • When you plant cauliflower, melons, or pumpkins in Stardew Valley, there's a random chance that any 3x3 set of these particular fruits/vegetables can fuse and become one gigantic fruit/veggie overnight. They don't offer any true benefit to the player, but they look really cool and can add some visual flair to your farm.
  • Alcremie from Pokémon Sword and Shield is a cute blob of sentient cream that can become Kaiju-sized when Dynamaxed. However, there are certain Alcremie that have a special Gigantamaxed form that can turn them into a Kaiju-sized cream cake, that can shoot edible, highly fattening cream missiles at its opponents.

Western Animation

  • The Mickey Mouse version of Jack and the Beanstalk
  • On The Simpsons, Homer tried to grow giant (and possibly super-intelligent) vegetables with plutonium rods from the power plant.
  • In at least three Looney Tunes shorts ("Jack-Wabbit and the Beanstalk", "Beanstalk Bunny" and "Lumber Jack Rabbit"), Bugs Bunny finds himself in a giant's carrot patch.
  • Appears occasionally on Chowder. One example is a loaf of bread big enough to be used as a circus tent.
  • It's also done on Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines, in the Magnificent Muttley short "What's New, Old Bean?", in which Muttley imagines himself as Jack and Dick Dastardly as the giant.
  • The Trademark Favorite Food for Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy are jawbreakers the size of bowling balls.
  • On Total Drama World Tour, when they visited Japan, they landed on a giant bowl of ramen.
  • In the Pinky and The Brain episode "Brain Acres", Brain grows giant vegetables as part of his plot to take over the world.
  • When Mr Turner decides to become a farmer on Fairly Oddparents, his inability to keep crops alive (he will kill them by just a single touch, so powerful it even generates a gravestone for the victim afterwards - and it's not only living objects, it goes for inanimate objects too) Timmy wishes for super seeds. Of course the super seeds grows giant crops, which are also indestructible.
  • An episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force involved a contest to win a cheeseburger roughly the size of a small house—by remaining in physical contact with it longer than any of the other contestants.
  • Food like this appeared on The Flintstones a lot, with bronto burgers pterodactyl wings and the like rather big, seeing as they were made from big dinosaurs. Most notably, the rib place in the closing credits where the huge ribs - carried by a petite waitress - cause the car to tip over.
  • Shaggy and Scooby found a place in one episode of The Scooby-Doo Show that sold Mile Long Hot Dogs. An exaggeration; the hot dog they bought was "only" about 100 feet long.

Web Comics

Web Original

  • Pimp That Snack specializes in this. One of their crowning achievements is a Cadbury Creme Egg that weighed a nearly 5 pounds and was an estimated 10,000 calories.

Real Life

  • There were postcards produced in the United States in the 1910s using primitive trick photography that showed farmers collecting super-sized crops... apples as big as barrels and so on.
  • Australia's Big Things often include Giant Foods.... The Big Banana, for example.
  • Alaskan farmers can legitimately boast of their giant fruits and vegetables, as their high-latitude fields can receive twenty or more hours of sunlight on summer days, giving crops' photosynthesis a boost.
  • There are world records for baking the largest pizza, cookie, etc. Guinness World Records requires such entries to be eaten to qualify, meaning such records usually occur at large social events.