The "Bread of the Gods" campaign cast Somali bananas as Italian commodities, the fruits of Fascist empire.  Through bananas, the Bread of the Gods campaign promoted three Fascist political projects critical to securing Italian women’s support for the Ethiopian occupation and the establishment of Italian East Africa.  Because bananas evoked Italy’s previous colonization of Somalia, and suggested that such ventures paid off with new foods, they could be used to advertise the benefits of imperialism to Italian consumers.  Supporting the imperial theme, ads emphasized bananas as food for the Fascist body project. They were high in sugar and vitamins.  Plus, they were easy to digest. Eating a banana meant using food as medicine to strengthen weak bodies: the elderly and the invalid, but also the young. “Bananas are the most complete and nutritious food after breast milk,” bolded text emphasized.  But why were Italian bodies so weak, and in need of fortification?  Perhaps inadvertently, the campaign slogan implied the answer: Fascist Italy lacked sufficient grain to feed the populous.  Benito Mussolini had launched the 10-year Battle for Grain in 1926, exhorting Italians to conserve bread and grow rice as a substitute. The Bread of the Gods campaign could have touted bananas as a luxurious fruit to please the palate.  But instead, they framed bananas as a substitute bread to fill the belly.  At home, alimentary autarky – producing and eating only Italian foods – started with exhausting labor in fields and paddies and ended with at the table with gray bowls of gluey rice.  But what if “Italian” foods – but brighter, tastier, and more nutritious - could come from colonies? A panacea and a godsend, the interwar adverting fantasy of the curative banana was a Fascist Italian legend, not a Somali one.