Food and Body Comparison

That's quite a pair.

"Is 'dumplings' too subtle a metaphor? BREASTS!"

— The Narrator, Ōkami-san

The human body; often a topic of conversation. And why not? We all have one.

Sometimes, either for reasons of comedy or discretion, a writer chooses to use metaphors for the body. And since eating is universal, it is easy to have food represent parts of the body. In more comical depictions, this will often be accompanied by visual comparison.

With breasts, for example, it could be used to drive home a case of A-Cup Angst, discuss the size of someone's particularly large boobs, or both at once if more than one character is involved.

Depictions of male anatomy could reflect size (or a lack thereof) and often overlaps with Gag Penis.

The comparison can be subtle, but over-the-top is far more likely.

Depending on who, in-universe, is making the comparison, it can lead to swift and severe punishment of a Handsome Lech or Casanova Wannabe, either by Indignant Slap, Megaton Punch, or No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.

If the story itself is drawing the comparison, violence is not likely to ensue, but hilarity is.

Similar to Erotic Eating, except in this form of comparison it's rare for food representing the body to actually be shown being consumed on screen.

Depending on the intended demographic, it could be a case of Getting Crap Past the Radar.

A Sub-Trope of Does This Remind You of Anything? with frequent overlap of Visual Innuendo. Can overlap with The Body Parts That Must Not Be Named. Compare Meat-O-Vision. If food is used to describe the color of someone's body, rather than its parts, see Starbucks Skin Scale.

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Examples

Advertising

• A Carl's Jr commercial featured Charlotte McKinney walking through a farmer's market, seemingly nude. As she talks about how she likes to go "all natural," several fruits and vegetables are used as Scenery Censor. This includes melons in front of her chest and a ripe juicy tomato with a cleft in the middle standing in for her butt.

Anime & Manga

• Amagami SS+Plus, in the final episode, while visiting a new hot spring that had opened up, Miya expresses jealousy in the changing area for Sae's "extra large meat buns". Sae is not amused. Particularly when Miya starts to grope her.
• Azumanga Daioh: In a scene exclusive to the anime adaptation, episode 22 features two nearly identical scenes that bookend the girls' summer vacation in August 2001. In both of these scenes, Kagura shows her chest to Osaka after the latter inquires about her tan, with Osaka commenting on the sight before Yomi tells Kagura not to take her seriously. In the second version of the scene, Osaka asks Kagura if her tan makes her look like broiled saury (a type of edible fish common in the ocean waters near Japan), and after getting a look at her breasts, she compares the sight to "big bowls of pea rice."
• Ben-To: In the Pool Episode the characters are put into battle for a special custom bento of omelet over rice dubbed "Omelettitties", as they were modeled after a buxom woman who served as the "God of Discounts" for the area.
• Chihayafuru: In the original Japanese Chihaya gives Nishida the Embarrassing Nickname "Nikuman", aka "Pork bun", for his girth and Big Eater tendencies. ^note Translated as "Porky" in the English dub
• The Devil is a Part-Timer!: In the Pool Episode of the anime, Maou has been sent to a MgRonalds outside of an amusement park, and is serving up meals, while the female members of the cast go to the park itself. While changing into their swimsuits, Emi spies Chihyo in her swimsuit, just as Maou is serving up "Two Big Migs, extra sauce!"^note  "Special one pound burgers in the subtitled version and are treated to a visual of two huge double-decker burgers side by side. Then Emi looks at her own chest, and we're shown Maou serving up, "Two small burgers, hot and fresh!" for a visual of two much smaller single patty burgers side-by-side on the tray.
• The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan: The OVA episode has Haruhi and company racing for a variety of "exotic fruits". Kyon is very interested in the musk melons, which he frequently compares to Mikuru's chest. He is very disappointed when the musk melons are gone (and Mikuru is now wearing a cover-up) as he asks "Where did my musk melons go?"
• I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying: Hajime's little brother Mayotama is a Wholesome Crossdresser who looks feminine enough to pass for a girl. Miki was fooled badly the first time they met, which leads to a funny scene in a later episode where he complains indignantly about discovering that Hajime's "sister" has a palm tree and coconuts.
• Interviews with Monster Girls:
  • Episode 9, Hikari and Yuki wonder why Machi wears a vest during hot summer weather. Machi explains that the sweat will make her undergarments show through her shirt. Machi lifts up her vest, cue a cut of two watermelons.
  • In another episode, Hikari discusses her habit of chewing on her sister's arm to satisfy her vampiric biting needs, then examines the arms of her fellow Demi's, and her teacher. She says her sister is like bubble gum, Yuki's was like soft-serve ice cream, Machi is like a chicken tender, and teach is "inedible".
• K-On!: At the end of the Light Music Club's first concert, Mio walks away, content that she managed to sing the song without succumbing to her shy nature, only to trip on a cable and flash everyone. While the manga shows her panties outright, the anime briefly moves down before it cuts to an image of a bowl of rice with a matching stripe pattern.
• Ōkami-san:
  • Momo Kibitsu is frequently praised by her adoring fan club for her "dumplings". Lampshaded by the Lemony Narrator:
    Narrator: Is "dumplings" too subtle a metaphor? BREASTS!!
  • In one scene from the anime, after Momo suffers a blow to her dignity, with a butler explaining to his young master the sad truth about the effects of the passage of time on large chests, Momo lashes out at Ryoko and Ringo, saying she's sorry the two of them are only fit for smuggling raisins.
• Sailor Moon: Usagi gets nicknamed "Dumpling Head" in the manga and "Meatball Head" in the English dub of the 90s anime due to her odango haircut.
• School Rumble: During an outing to the woods, in an effort to impress the girls, the boys all agree to cook for them. Imadori serves up two mounds of curry and rice that he dubs, "Miko D-Cup Curry". Mikoto, less than amused, punches him into orbit and Akira declares him to be disqualified.

Fan Works

• In Princess Peach Gets Sick of Pink, Mario fails to admit his feelings for Peach and blurts out that her hair looks like mustard.
• In Twinkling in the Dark, Majorina mockingly says that Ichika's fair-skinned, fuzzy head looks like a peach, to which Akaoni asks why she wasn't the one named Cure Peach (Ichika is Cure Whip, while the actual Cure Peach is Love Momozono).

Film — Animated

• Shrek 2: After listening to the Fairy Godmother dress him down and claim he doesn't deserve a happy ending, Shrek points his finger at her as he's about to speak his mind, only for her to push his hand aside saying, "Don't you dare point those filthy, green sausages at me!"

Film — Live-Action

• Airplane!: As the plane flies through a patch of rough turbulence, there's a shot of a gelatin dessert jiggling wildly from the plane's movements. Then the camera pans over to a busty woman, whose chest is bouncing and jiggling just as much.
• Coming to America: Semmi hears about Akeem's hope to find a wife who is more than just an Extreme Doormat. He offers up his own, less charitable, opinion.
  Semmi: You're the heir to the throne of Zamunda. Your wife need only have a pretty face, a firm backside, and big breasts like casaba melons.
• Muffin Man 2003: According to the documentary, the Muffin Man were incapable of making sense of concepts that weren't able to be translated to food somehow. This includes themselves. They viewed their legs as hamstrings, the neck as a turkey neck, their head as an egg head, etc.
• Rush Hour 2: Carter and Lee have been captured by a group of Triad goons. Lee tries to explain how much trouble they're in, saying they'll be tortured for three days. Carter doesn't seem to be worried, until...
  Lee: Then they will cut off our eggrolls.
  Carter: Cut off our eggrolls?! Hell no! Let's get the hell outta here! C'mon man, don't give up!
• To Catch a Thief combines this with Lampshaded Double Entendre — when Frances is offering John part of her picnic lunch (after revealing she knows who he really is) and flirting with him at the same time, she asks him, "Would you like a leg or a breast?"

Jokes

• A newly-married young man is trying to buy a bra for his wife, but doesn't know what size to ask for. The helpful shop assistant suggests various food items as comparisons — would her cup size be comparable to a melon? A grapefruit? An orange? An egg? "That's it," the man says. "An egg — fried."

Literature

• Adrian Mole: When referring to the size of somebody's breasts, they were, as Adrian recalls, slightly larger than Jaffa oranges, but not quite as large as Marks and Spencer's grapefruits.
• A children's book about how the human body works All About Us by Joe Kaufman explains that what we eat becomes us, and illustrates this with an elaborate drawing of a person made entirely of pieces of food, for example with corn stalks for hair.
• Discworld: Magrat’s figure is described as “two peas on an ironing board.”
• The Familiar of Zero: When Saito Hiraga met Tiffania Westwood and noticed the Bust-Contrast Duo between her and Louise de la Valiere, he conveniently called them both as "Melon-chan" and "Lemon-chan" respectively for a while before both of them feel uncomfortable with the nicknames.
• Played with in the Ramona Quimby books. Ramona hurls out an insult she'd heard on the playground without knowing what it meant at her sister Beezus: Pizza Face. Unfortunately, Beezus does know what it means and feels horribly betrayed by her little sister for believing she was poking at her insecurities regarding her acne. The two reconcile later, as Ramona recognized that Beezus was highly upset, and explained that she didn't know what it meant when she said it, which Beezus accepts.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: House Merryweather's sigil is a cornucopia filled with fruit and vegetables. Littlefinger japes that it perfectly represents Orton Merryweather, since he has "carrot-colored hair, a nose as bulbous as a beetroot, and pease porridge for wits."
• 'Twas the Night Before Christmas provides a less prurient simile than most: Saint Nick’s belly “shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly.”

Live-Action TV

• Blackadder: In "Beer," Edmund's Puritan aunt calls the fake breasts he'd been wearing at a drinking competition "devil's dumplings."
• True Blood: Jason Stackhouse drinks an entire vial of vampire blood to dispose of the illegal substance. Since it's a potent aphrodisiac (you're supposed to only take a drop before sex), Jason has far too much blood rush to his groin and has to go to the doctor. When the doctor sees his penis, he compares it to an eggplant due to its engorged shape and discoloration.
• The Two Ronnies:
  • In one sketch, the Ronnies are at a restaurant, and playing a game to associate things their fellow diners are saying with food items. At one point, they see a man played by Ian Richardson talking about a girl with... he makes hand gestures to indicate. They both immediately associate his gestures with "Dumplings!"
  • One of the "Allotment" sketches is a retelling of the "young man buying a bra for his wife" joke above.

Music

• Limp Bizkit: The title of Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water uses the titular foodstuffs as less-than-subtle metaphors for anal sex, tying in with the band's trademark crude humor. The reference is accentuated by the fact that one of the characters on the album cover holds a starfish with a human anus up to the viewer.

Pinball

• This is the entire basis of Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons, set in a melon farm within a World of Buxom. The machine is full of double entendres and vague, indirect suggestive behavior from Melony and her sisters.

Stand Up Comedy

• Bill Engvall talks about wearing a wetsuit for surfing lessons, and how it made it look like he was smuggling "A Slim Jim and two cherries"

Web Original

• As a kind of Double Entendre, some fruits and vegetables were used as euphemisms for private parts on the internet, even in the old times of ICQ and MSN Messenger, usually with the peach emoji as the butt (normally a female one) and the eggplant as the penis as the most used. This became so viral over the years that even they become a Memetic Mutation by themselves.
• In Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Krillin talks to Master Roshi, Yamcha, and Oolong about the Androids, with him fawning over Android 18's personality. Master Roshi however straight up asks about how buxom she is, with the actual comparison to fruit coming up after Turtle informs them that Goku might have consumed some grapes.
  Master Roshi: That [Goku] can't handle his grapes... Speaking of fruit, what are we talking here: apples, oranges, melons!?
  Krillin: Is that really important?
  Master Roshi: Yes!

Western Animation

• In the Arthur episode "DW's Name Game" Arthur insults D.W. by saying she looks like a watermelon with a bad haircut. Then D.W insults him back saying his head looks like a meatloaf with raisins.
• Dexter's Laboratory: Dexter encounters two strangers who are dead ringers for his parents, save that they are actually scientifically inclined. When we meet them, the wife has her back to the audience and says "I'm telling you, the left one is proportionately larger than the one on the right." before we're shown that she's holding a pair of cantaloupe.
• Family Guy: In "Mind Over Murder", Peter is getting annoyed that Lois is getting so much attention from other men when she starts performing in his basement bar. When a man at the grocery store compliments Lois' "melons", Peter takes offense until she reveals that she's holding actual melons.
• King of the Hill: Hank's been stripped naked and refuses to go into a tornado shelter until his niece Luanne covers her eyes. There's also an elderly woman in the shelter, who says blandly, "Don't mind me. I've seen a barrel of pickles in my day." That's apparently good enough for Hank, and he joins them.
• This comes up in The Owl House episode "Knock, Knock, Knockin' on Hooty's Door", where Luz describes her crush Amity as a "cotton candy-haired goddess" when trying to work up the nerve to ask her out.
• Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race: Emma lovingly compares Noah's buttcheeks to "two apples suspended in midair."
• The Weekenders: A trio of older kids mock Carver in the grocery store by pointing out how much his head looks like a pineapple. Later in that scene, Tino falls into a pile of pumpkins and Tish notes how much his head resembles a pumpkin.

Real Life

• There are some real-life slang terms for body parts based on food:
  • Averted — Adam's apple for... Adam's apple.
  • "Banana"= penis, see also Erotic Eating.
  • "Buns" or "cake" = buttocks.
  • "Cherry" = intact hymen of a virginal woman (hence the phrase "popping one's cherry").
  • "Chocolate starfish" = anus.
  • Food emojis = peach for buttocks; aubergine/eggplant for penis.
  • Various fruits ("melons", "apples", "oranges", etc.) = breasts.
  • In Spanish, huevos, which literally means "eggs", is slang for "testicles".
  • "Melon" or "Nut" (singular) = head.
  • "Nuts" (plural) = testicles.
  • "Peach fuzz" = Facial hair for pubescent children.
  • "Sausage", "salami", or "wiener" = penis.
  • "Twig and berries" or "frank and beans" = penis and testicles.
  • "Wieners" = legs; especially for point-of-view photos that make the legs look like stubs that end at the knee.

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