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"These donuts are as big as Buicks!"
— Roy as an animated mouse, Stay Tuned

A staple of kids' media which depicts a fantasy of either becoming small or being in a land of giants, and coming across a table full of delicious food, all of which is (or seems) huge. This appeals to the greedy kid in us all.

The archetype would be "Jack and the Beanstalk", in which a boy sneaks into a giant's house.

Not to be confused with the US mid-Atlantic regional supermarket chain or the other US mid-Atlantic regional supermarket chain. note 

Compare Level Ate which is likely constructed out of Giant Food, and also compare Mountain of Food, in which the food is normal-sized but the amount is what's giant. Someone might also imagine giant food via a Delicious Daydream. If a shop selling food looks like this, whether it's really made of food or not, it's Shaped Like What It Sells. For the opposite, see Micro Dieting.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 
  • People had giant fruits (and a chocolate bar) dropped on them in commercials for Bonkers! candy.
  • One commercial for Grrravy dog food had some fire dogs fill a giant bowl of it with water from the hose, then dive in and eat it all within seconds. ...Then the burning building gives out, revealing a giant bag of it.
  • A series of commercials in the early 2000s for the Frisch's restaurant chain featured people daydreaming about giant versions of Frisch's cuisine (ie: a woman lounging inside the curve of a giant onion ring). [https://youtu.be/3a-w001CI6o]
  • An ad for Frigidaire showed a tiny woman swinging through a refrigerator of giant food, landing on the cap of a giant mustard can, then plunging into a huge chocolate cake.
  • 1995 ad campaign for TGI Friday's had 5 inch tall Little Guy on a tabletop, walking past huge meats, vegetables, and drinks.
  • This AT&T ad shows tiny cheerleaders; one is catapulted and splashes into a cup of coffee.

    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).
  • Toriko is essentially Giant Food: the Manga. Specifically there's a chef among the top 100 of the world's greatest whose specialty is to make jumbo meals.
  • The picture above comes from the ending sequence of Gourmet Girl Graffiti, where the cast explores different giant foods.
  • One of the storybook worlds in Tamagotchi: Happiest Story in the Universe! is filled with giant foods.
  • There's giant food everywhere in the Totto Land archipelago from One Piece, with some food items big enough to be seen as geographical features of Totto Land's various islands. The wedding cakes seen in Whole Cake Island Arc also count, when it comes to more plot-relevant examples.
  • Deconstructed in Witch Watch when Nico uses a spell to shrink herself and Morihito. She finds some now-proportionally enormous donuts and think she can live out eating fantasies. Instead, she discovers this ruins their texture, making the donut taste like coarse bread and the frosting by itself disgustingly sweet.

    Asian Animation 

    Comic Books 
  • Alan Ford features, in one episode, a Satiating Sandwich weighting 6 kg (13 pounds) and around the size of a large tire and filled with ham, mustard, pickles, salami and tomato. It was apparently made by a baker for a culinary contest, and said baker is so distraught by its loss (he's convinced he can't make anything like that again) that he tries to commit Seppuku with his bread knife.
  • The Smurfs comic book story "Salad Smurfs" had Farmer grow really big vegetables from his garden when Chef Smurf forced him to use more of Papa Smurf's fungicide and fertilizer than was necessary. Unfortunately, it had the side effect of turning the Smurfs who ate the vegetables into Anthropomorphic Food.
  • Briefly shown in Give Me Liberty in a television commercial for Behemoth supermarkets.
  • Many Little Lotta cover gags have Lotta eating giant food.
  • A Post-Crisis Superman story shows him throwing a party for smallville when he leaves for Metropolis, with a giant cake (which he built a giant oven to bake) big enough to give a slice to the whole town. (Most didn't eat it, however; preserved pieces kept as souvenirs remain until the present day.

    Fan Works 

    Fairy Tales and Folklore 
  • Jack and the Beanstalk, of course. Possibly the Ur-example.
  • Gorgo the Ogre: the final course of the Red Ogres' Christmas Feast is a red pudding so large that all the village can swim into it.
  • Most stories about Paul Bunyan mention the giant flapjack griddle that the chefs in his camp use to make huge pancakes.

    Films — Animated 
  • Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, as well as the book it was based on. The difference here is that the food is generated by a machine that Flint builds rather than just being a natural occurence, and the trope comes in when the machine starts to overload—Not to mention the enlarged food comes down on other places in the world.
  • In Antz, Z and Bala think they've found Insectopia when they see a bunch of this (it's actually a human picnic).
  • The Boxtrolls features a giant cheese wheel called the Briehemoth. The White Hats bought it with money meant for building a children's hospital.
  • The Mickey Mouse version of "Jack and the Beanstalk" in Fun and Fancy Free has a section where Mickey, Donald, and Goofy are exploring the giant's castle and being food-deprived, raid his dinner table.
  • The Dragon Slayer Contest in Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Amazing Pleasant Goat involves attempting to lift a giant pear known as "Glee-Gulu", which is old goat language for "very heavy". The fruit is only borne by its tree once every thousand years.
  • In Abominable, Everest the yeti overdoes it when he hums some blueberry bushes into bearing fruit for himself and the children. The berries swell to the size of basketballs, form a huge mound, and collapse in a berry landslide.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The protagonist of Ella Enchanted encounters this when she travels to the land of giants.
  • James and the Giant Peach, where most of the adventure is set inside the titular peach.
  • 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. (It shows up just when the kids are starving. "I think I've died and gone to heaven..." says Amy.)
    • Then at the end, a bigger-than-normal turkey is served.
  • 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."
  • Stay Tuned: Roy makes this page's quote upon finding a dish of giant donuts on a kitchen table while in the cartoon segment, wherein he and Helen are cartoon mice. He's forced to spit out his cheek-fulls of them when the robot cat shows up.
  • In The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, there is the Land of Milk and Cookies in the Planet Drool.
  • In The Incredible Shrinking Man, Scott has a huge coffee cup when he's three feet tall and later tries to get a huge speck of cheese from a mousetrap and get to a huge slice of leftover cake.
  • In Uncle Buck, Buck cooks massive pancakes for his nephew Miles' birthday breakfast.
    Buck: You should see the toast. I couldn't even get it through the door.

    Literature 
  • The food turning gigantic is what ends up leading to the exodus from Chewandswallow, an island where food items rain from the sky, according to the story in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
    • The sequel, Pickles to Pittsburgh, follows efforts to package all the gargantuan food and send it to places that have any kind of it in shortage.
  • James and the Giant Peach.
  • In the Mr. Men book Mr. Greedy, the title 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.
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its adaptations have a whole chocolate river (for, as the owner will tell you, waterfall-mixed chocolate tastes better than any other kind). There's also a giant chocolate bar, though it's that size specifically because it's being sent by television and the process will shrink it down to an ordinary size.
  • In Adventures of Dunno, the Mites are tiny people who don't suffer from hunger due to this trope. All animals are in proportion to the Mites, and humans don't appear to be present anywhere. In the third story, Dunno on the Moon, the titular character ends up inside the Moon, which turns out to be hollow and on a habitable planetoid inside it, which is also populated by Mites. However, all plants are in proportion to the Mites on this world, and many people go hungry due to lack of food. Dunno and his Lunar friends start a company selling shares to finance a rocket to get to the Lunar surface and retrieve the seeds for giant plants.
  • In Feet of Clay, Wee Mad Arthur, a gnome, is small enough (six inches tall) that food fit for humans is Giant Food to him, explaining why he charges such low rates compared to other rat catchers: he needs less money, because, for example, a single loaf of bread is food for him for a week, and then can be hollowed out and used as shelter. This unfortunately also means that he's always drunk, because the glass of beer is taller than he is (few publicans are inclined to sell beer in thimbles).
  • A Captain Underpants villain invented a Shrink Ray to reduce garbage and a growing ray to make Giant Food. (Conservation of matter? What's that?) Unfortunately, his efforts were foiled by the fact that his ridiculous name got him laughed out of every university. And that was the Start of Darkness for Professor Pippy P. Poopypants.

    Live-Action TV 
  • 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.
    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?
  • 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.
  • The Electric Company (2009) had an animated series that was an Affectionate Parody of 24. Special Agent Jack Bowser, a bipedal blue dog inspired by Jack Bauer, was always seen trapped in a factory of some sort. Often it would be a factory that made a certain kind of food, where he would be stuck in a big cake or a giant bottle of soda.
  • The Power Rangers Turbo were baked into a giant pizza once, and they will Never Live It Down.
  • 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.

    Newspaper Comics 

    Video Games 
  • In the Older Than the NES game BurgerTime, the objective is to walk over giant buns, burgers, lettuce, and tomatoes, causing them to fall down platforms and make giant burgers.
  • 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.
  • Kirby
    • In Kirby's Epic Yarn, as you beat the levels in Treat Land, the giant cake in the center gains more layers, going from a giant strawberry cake to an even larger cake with fudge, ice cream, and dark chocolate. The cutscene that plays after beating this world involves Kirby and Prince Fluff encountering a mountain-sized cake that they both devour in a cake-eating duel, causing the cake to collapse on top of them. Kirby, being the ravenous, pink puffball he is, easily wins the duel and actually gets a bellyache from it according to the narrator.
    • There's lots of them in Kirby's Dream Buffet, due to food and sweets being decorated in the race track or battle royale stage.
  • One world in Mystic Ark consists of towns carved into giant squash, gourds, pumpkins, etc., and most of the enemies here are basically giant hungry bugs.
  • In Stardew Valley, growing cauliflower (in the spring), melons (in the summer), or pumpkins (in the fall) in a 3x3 or bigger plot with a high Farming skill has a chance to grow a giant version of that crop.
  • In Tomodachi Life, one of the news stories the player can get is of a Mii taking part in eating a giant food item, which is randomly generated. They give up when they only have one bite left.

    Webcomics 
  • The Perry Bible Fellowship comic "Nuñez" has two men lost in what looks like a desert and one of them dying, before it's revealed that they're actually on a giant cake.
  • In this Scandinavia and the World comic, Canada grows a pumpkin as big as him, but notes it tastes terrible when it's grown that big. So Quebec turns it into a boat instead.

    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.
  • In the short story "Not As Planned" a man is shrunk to less than the size of a sesame seed and is surrounded by gigantic food at a bakery and in the trash.
  • Buzzfeed's Tasty has the show Making It Big, where Alvin Zhou makes giant versions of regular food

    Western Animation 
  • A Treasure In My Garden: In the episode "The Man from Leeds", the titular character has an apple that's about half his size.
  • On The Simpsons, Homer tried to grow giant (and possibly super-intelligent) vegetables with plutonium rods from the power plant. Another time, he once tried to make a doughnut grow huge by dropping it into the plant's reactor. Needless to say, neither attempt was successful.
  • 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. (It was an exaggeration; the hot dog they bought was "only" about 100 feet long.)
  • 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 & 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.
    • The episode The Good Old Ed has one of the forgotten scams involving the Eds creating a giant pancake...which ends up failing because the neighborhood kids ended up using the grease as a skating rink right as the batter fell onto them, which lead to them beating Eddy up for it.
  • 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 The 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 only he can pick, else they too will die in his Dads hands.
  • 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. It turns out to have been recurring villain Mr. Wongburger all along.
    • In a different episode, Meatwad used Frylock's size changing ray to make a giant hot dog. It went bad long before he managed to eat even a twelfth of it, though.
  • In George Shrinks' episode "Ants in the Pantry", tiny George is on a picnic spread and goes by huge food such as salad, and runs up a stack of cupcakes.
  • The Popeye and Olive Comedy Show had a Prehistoric Popeye short titled "Vegetable Stew", in which Popeye and Bluto harvest giant vegetables for Olive's diner.
  • Ready Jet Go!: Using his Bortronian grow lamp, Jet grows a huge pumpkin in "That's One Gigantic Pumpkin, Jet Propulsion!"
  • Molly of Denali: "Cabbagezilla" shows that vegetables in Alaska grow to absolutely enormous sizes, much to Trini's delight.

    Real Life 
  • There were photoshopped postcards produced in the United States in the 1910s showing farmers collecting super-sized crops... apples as big as barrels and so on.
  • The world's largest submarine sandwich according to the Guinness World Records was as wide as an ordinary sub sandwich, but nearly half a mile long. To qualify for the record, it must be eaten after being made, which took a fair number of people. Also in the Guinness Records:
  • The Pizza Barn in Yonkers sells giant slices. (Okay, technically, they sells pizzas that are shaped like pizza slices, but this has quickly become a Memetic Mutation.)
  • Ideal growing conditions and abundant sunlight can allow fruits or vegetables to attain staggering sizes. This is particularly true near the equator, where sunlight is more intense, or (ironically) at the arctic circle where the growing season, though brief, has 24-hour daylight.


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