Giant Food



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 Just to confuse things more, both of 'em are owned by the same company, a Dutch grocery specialist called Ahold.

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

Anime & 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

 * Briefly shown in Give Me Liberty in a television commercial for Behemoth supermarkets.
 * Jack and the Beanstalk, of course. Possibly the Ur-example.

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.
 * 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

 * James and the Giant Peach
 * In the Mr. Men book "Mr. Greedy", the eponymous character finds a giant's breakfast, where all the food is as big as he is.
 * In The Indian in the Cupboard the title character, transported through time and shrunk to the size of a plastic toy, is initially skeptical that the normal-sized food is even real.
 * Deconstructed in Gulliver's Travels, where Gulliver finds that Brobdingnagian insects leave slimy trails, feces and spawn on his giant food that make eating difficult.

Live Action TV
"Jeff: What’s wrong with you?
 * In Community episode Pascal's Triangle Revisited Troy finds a giant cookie that turns out to be a metaphor for his and Abed's relationship.

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

 * Little Nemo in Slumberland had a garden where the plants grew larger and larger with each panel. Nemo and Flip are squashed by falling red raspberries.
 * Also showed up in a few Garfield strips. First one was when Garfield found a giant chicken drumstick while on a diet, another when Garfield was thinking about his birthday cake, another had Garfield having a giant cup of coffee and a giant donut, and another had Garfield dreaming about eating a giant cookie, a giant can of sardines, a giant loaf of bread, and a giant bowl of chili.

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.

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.

Webcomics

 * "Nuñez. We really need to find a way out of this dessert."

Web Original

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

Real Life

 * There were protoshopped postcards produced in the United States in the 1910s showing 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.