Food God

aka: Harvest God

"God comes to the hungry in the form of food."

— Mahatma Gandhi

This is the god of whatever food is the basis for a culture's survival — usually grain, but for a steppe people it might be grass for animals and for a coastal people it might be fish, or whatever is appropriate to a given environment. Because of their inherently lifegiving portfolio, these tend to be among the nicest or friendliest of gods.

Often a Love God as well to associate different types of fertility. For Older Than Dirt cultures who considered food a type of currency, these deities could also be a type of wealth god.

Compare Anthropomorphic Vice, which are Anthropomorphic Personifications of various vices, including food and drink; and Supreme Chef, who fulfills the other, more figurative sense of "food god". This is often one specific function of a Fertility God.

Not to be confused with Foodgōd, the new moniker of Kim Kardashian's friend Jonathan Cheban.

---

Examples

Advertising

• Dundee's Honey Brown Lager beer foisted the "beer god" concept in their commercials. It's an ugly little stone figurine that purports to know which beer is the best. The beer god lasted only one summer.

Anime and Manga

• Lucoa from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is a former goddess of agriculture and wisdom (in keeping with her being a Gender Flip of Quetzalcoatl). Despite no longer being divine, she still feels a subconscious desire to aid farmers, and one chapter of Kanna's Daily Life shows that she does volunteer farmwork in her spare time.

Comic Books

• Wonder Woman: While the original comics took little from Classical Mythology beyond a few names the Post-Crisis comics made sure to depict Demeter's tie to grain and Dionysus' tie to grapes. Dionysus even chooses to manifest with a curly purple hair and beard that look like grapes in most of his appearances.

Film—Animated

• The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water: Sandy loses her mind after finding the book page of the bikini bottom story so she begins to theorise where she came from and comes to the conclusion that a food god wants a sacrifice so the krabby patties will come raining from the sky.

Literature

• In The Powder Mage Trilogy, one of the gods has incarnated as a chef, who provides gourmet food in effectively infinite quantities in the army's camp kitchens.
• The Discworld has many:
  • The Hogfather, in addition to being a Santa Claus Expy, has elements of this, specializing in pork products.
  • Epidity, God of Potatoes, lord of a Potato Cult.
  • There is a God of Custard, Nog-Humpty
  • While the details are obscure, the Grace Bissonomy has divine associations with both oysters, or perhaps bivalve aquatic mollusks in general, and is depicted in iconography as brandishing a bunch of root vegetables that might be parsnips. Or perhaps carrots.
  • Small Gods briefly mentions a God of Lettuce.

• Dark Shores: Yara, goddess of the earth and everything that grows from it. Particularly worshipped by the peaceful farmers of Katamarca.
• Fengshen Yanyi: the prince of Shang Yin Hong is deified as the God of Five Crops at the end of the novel. The Four Mo Brothers also become the Lokapala/Heavenly Kings of Buddhism, with the ulterior task of monitoring good weather to grant abundant food to farmers.
• Prior to the events of Spice and Wolf, Holo acted as the harvest goddess for a small town.

Live-Action TV

• In Game of Thrones, the people of the Summer Isles worship a god of "tits and wine". Tyrion is rather impressed.

Mythology and Religion

• Classical Mythology:
  • The Greeks had an interesting twist on this in that multiple gods had this role depending on what particular food you were talking about. The general agricultural goddess was Demeter, but her remit was primarily the annual grain crop that served as the basis for the rest of the Greek diet. However, that covered only one of the "Mediterranean triad" of bread, wine, and olive oil. The grapes were assigned to Dionysos (which makes sense, given his general "god of partying" role) and Athena was generally recognized as the patron of olives (for unclear reasons, though the fact that she was the patroness of Attica—home to Classical Greece's best and most extensive olive groves—probably had something to do with it). Also, what with Greece being made up of a peninsula and a bunch of islands, the Greeks were (and are) big on fish and other seafood; the sea god Poseidon thus also had a food role, being invoked for a good catch (especially for tuna).
  • Mars is the Roman god of agriculture as well as of war. Sensible as whatever politicians might think an ordinary legionary's motive is "get those blankety-blanks off my property/take some of theirs".
• Shintoism:
  • The Japanese idiom "There are seven gods in each grain of rice" is equivalent to the old "starving children in Africa" warning about wasting food. It refers to the belief that there are seven rice gods, and wasting even one grain of rice may draw a curse from one of them.
  • In Shinto mythology, the goddess Uke Mochi was able to vomit up or spit out food. When her brother Tsukuyomi discovered her method of food production, he was so disgusted that he killed her.
  • Inari, arguably the most popular god in Shinto, was originally a god of rice but gained a much broader portfolio over time.
• Norse Mythology:
  • Idunn was the goddess of youth and apples.
  • Njord was the god of the seas, especially over fish and fishery. As a result he also doubled as a fertility god and was often presented as hermaphroditic.
  • Njord's son Frey was the god of the harvest, especially associated with grain in Denmark and Sweden. In Norway and Iceland he is more strongly associated with horses.
  • Kvasir was a minor deity associated with honey, and more importantly mead (mead being said to have been made from his blood).
• In Pi Shashin, a strain of Tengriism found in parts of Mongolia, the deity Pi is often associated with baked goods.
• Mesopotamian Mythology
  • Ashnan a goddess of grain, seen within the Sumerian Creation myth, "Myth of cattle and grain".
  • Enkimdu is another god of farming, and a prototype of the wealthy, healthy, and wise farmer.
  • Lathar cattle god.
  • Dumuzid is believed to have been a god of sheep and shepherding.
• In Taíno Mythology, the creator and fertility god Yucáhu is also the god of cassava.
• Aztec Mythology has Chicomecoatl, a fertility goddess who was also the guardian of maize (better known as corn).

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons
  • Forgotten Realms setting
    • Chauntea is the main Faerunian goddess of farmers and agriculture.
    • Isis/Ishtar is the Mulhorandi pantheon's goddess of agriculture.
    • In the Zakharan pantheon Jisan is a goddess of fertility.
    • Angharradh is the elven goddess of fertility and planting.
    • Hiatea is the giants' goddess of agriculture.
    • In the halfling pantheon, the agriculture goddess is Sheela Peryroyl.
  • Greyhawk setting.
    • Merikka is the Oeridian demigoddess of farming and agriculture.
  • Deities and Demigods Cyclopedia
    • Shang-Ti was the Chinese deity of (among other things) agriculture.
    • In the Native American pantheon the wind god Hotoru could help crop growth.
    • Central American mythos. In addition to being the deity of medicine, Itzamna was also involved in the planting of crops. The god Tlaloc had four pitchers, one of which caused crops to grow properly.
• Pathfinder has Erastil, one of the oldest gods. He's generally associated with nature, but especially with agriculture and hunting and the close-knit communities that tend to rely on them.
• Warhammer Fantasy:
  • Two of humanity's oldest deities are the nature gods Taal and Rhya, who govern the hunt and the harvest respectively. Some regions put different emphasis on their roles, like attributing fishing to Taal or animal husbandry to Rhya, but they're always the ones people look to to put food on the table.
  • The Halflings' primary goddess Esmerelda shares their love of food: her main festival is Pie Day and her commandments emphasize preparing and sharing good meals.
  • Valaya is the dwarf Ancestor Goddess of hearth and home, healing, and brewing. The "brewing" part is Serious Business: beer is both a respected craft and a staple food to dwarfs, and she's one of the pantheon's three Top Gods.

Video Games

• City-Building Series:
  • In Pharaoh, both Bast and Osiris fill this role.
    • Bast can provide additional food and goods to houses and decrease the rate those goods are consumed. If angered, she will do the opposite, as well as angering the people in general.
    • Osiris can increase the potency of the Nile's flooding and increase the size of the harvest. If angered, he will withhold the flood and reduce the harvest sizes, or send a flood so strong it washes away the floodplain farms.
  • In Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom: While he's summoned to the city, the "Kitchen God" Zao Jun blesses food shops with extra resources and creates top-quality food in the houses he passes.
  • Zeus: Master of Olympus: Having a sanctuary to Demeter, Artemis, Hera or Poseidon lets you pray to them to fill granaries with food (crops, game meat, oranges or seafood respectively). Of course, if they're antagonistic towards you in that mission the opposite happens.
• From RuneScape we have Brassica Prime, the god of cabbages.
• Minoriko Aki from Touhou Project is a harvest goddess in Gensokyo, albeit not a very powerful one due to having to share faith with numerous far more powerful deities in the same sphere. She is however considered one of the friendliest deities to humans, and she's invited to the Human Village every year in order to guarantee a good harvest.
• The religion of Story of Seasons revolves around the Harvest Goddess and her Harvest Sprites. Several games also feature the Harvest King and Harvest God, albeit as lesser gods compared to the Harvest Goddess. The Harvest Goddess and Harvest King can be interacted with by the player and even married in many games.
• The Riders of Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind have several gods whose blessings provide food. The player is likely to need every one of them before the game ends:
  • Busenari, goddess of cattle.
  • Uryarda, goddess of goats.
  • Pela, goddess of barley and the land.
  • Inilla, goddess of foraging (finding food in the wild).
  • Dostal, god of the hunt.
  • And finally, Nyalda the Earth Mother does not directly help with food, but she's very much associated with it, and is the mother of all the above gods except Dostal (who's Inilla's husband).
• Six Ages' predecessor King of Dragon Pass also has a host of food gods, most but not all associated with farming. These include:
  • Uralda, goddess of cattle.
  • The other animal mothers, including Mralota the pig goddess and Nevala the sheep goddess.
  • Esra the barley goddess and her fellow grain mothers.
  • Barntar, god of farmers, also helps with the harvest.
  • Ernalda, another Earth Mother (or possibly the same one by a different name), who takes a much more active interest in farming than Nyalda, having several food-related blessings to offer.
  • Odayla, god of hunting.
  • And the war gods Elmal and Orlanth each chip in to help the crops as well.
• Genshin Impact has Marchosius, the God of the Stove who is worshipped by the cooks of Liyue and played a major role in helping humans establish Liyue Harbor.
• Given a twist with the Unum in Warframe. The Unum is an Orokin tower that shelters the colony of Cetus at her base, guiding and protecting the Ostrons every way she can. One of the ways she provides for the colony is giving them food... harvested from the flesh that grows within her walls, instructing the colonists on how to collect it sustainably.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: SCP-1846 claims to be an angel of the one true god — a corn god who decides how good an afterlife people get based entirely on how much corn they eat and use. Whether or not it's true, the "angel" has a coating of corn leaves and a corn-specific Green Thumb.

Web Video

• Similar to the SCP Foundation example above, in the "Fantasy High" storyline of Dimension 20, Kristen starts off as a cleric of Helio, the god of corn (and more generally, of the harvest). Later on we meet a devil called "Gorthalax the Insatiable", who had previously been an angel named "Gorthiel the Seraph of Eating the Right Amount of Food", so clearly food and satiety are important concepts in this religion.

---

FOOD FOR THE FOOD GOD! SCONES FOR THE SCONE THRONE! LET... THE GALAXY... DIIIIIINE!