The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
There's a reason ancient cultures treated cacao and incense as offerings rather than ingredients. They were rare, resinous, hard to handle, and impossible to rush. Food of the Gods, composed by Megan Terpening and released in 2022 through her Vancouver-based House of Forbidden Fruit, takes that reverence seriously. The name evokes something older than any modern chocolate bar. Terpening built her house working with natural materials that retain their rawness instead of being polished into something generic. Food of the Gods is less a fragrance and more a recreation of a specific indoor moment. A room warmed by body heat, filled with the scent of things burning slowly.
The structural choice that defines Food of the Gods is how thoroughly the materials refuse to behave like conventional top, heart, and base notes. Champa flower and chocolate open the composition, but neither disappears cleanly. The champa carries through nearly every phase, lending its indolic, almost overripe sweetness underneath the darker materials. Dark chocolate runs the full length of the fragrance, behaving less like a top note and more like a throughline. Tobacco lands early in the heart and refuses to leave.
The evolution
The first ten minutes are the most generous. Champa and dark chocolate arrive together, one almost narcotic in its sweetness, the other bitter and earthy. The combination reads somewhere between fresh flowers laid on a chocolate bar and something considerably older. Tobacco steps in within 20 minutes, adding a cured-leaf dryness that strips away any sense of the opening being too sweet. By the 45-minute mark, the incense has fully surfaced. Now the composition has become smoky, resinous, warm. The chocolate has shifted from bitter cocoa to something more like the smell of warm chocolate left on a radiator. The linden blossom stays faintly green underneath through the second hour, keeping things from going entirely dark. The incense eventually settles into a low hum that persists through the rest of the wear.
Cultural impact
Food of the Gods found its audience among wearers drawn to ceremonial, resinous compositions. It sits in a small category of indie fragrances built around cacao and incense as primary structural materials rather than sweet accents. The wearers who gravitate toward it tend to be people already comfortable with houses that treat natural materials as the main event. According to community voting, the fragrance performs best in colder months and during evening wear. It reads more as a candlelight fragrance than a daytime one, the kind of scent that belongs in a room with the lights lowered and the windows closed.
