JURASSIC PORK : Yumma-Yumma-Do! How’d They Cook Up This Stuff?

Even if you think you’ve heard all the hype surrounding “The “Flintstones,” chances are you haven’t heard much about the chop-bustingly huge food that’s a large part of it.

Finding Gargantuan grub was no mean feat: cocktail olives the size of tennis balls, deviled eggs the size of footballs and a mouthwatering Brontoburger the size of a basketball--all in the line of duty for food stylist Wendy Loring Blasdel.

Blasdel, a former pastry chef with a Los Angeles-based company, Edible Style, spent about four months researching, locating and creating the larger-than-life concoctions for “The Flintstones,” which opens Friday.

Try finding several five-foot-long banana squash, four-foot-long “Bronto ribs” and foot-wide mushrooms in your average supermarket. But appropriately enough, the Hollywood produce market--in which vendors display their wares each week--did provide a few of the larger-than-life foods.

Blasdel, who also whipped up a film feast for ‘raptors and children in “Jurassic Park,” and buffalo livers for Kevin Costner in “Dances With Wolves,” initially haunted produce markets around Southern California, but eventually had to contact special growers in Ventura County and Colorado to fill the film’s special orders.

She rode through vegetable fields in Santa Barbara and in the process felt a bit like a Lilliputian when she stumbled upon shrub-sized heads of lettuce.

“They were four feet tall and they had all gone to seed,” Blasdel said. “The growers couldn’t use the lettuce because it had turned bitter. They had kept it around just as an oddity.”

She also managed to find the five-foot-long banana squash and foot-wide Portobello mushrooms that were used atop giant steaks for a restaurant scene.

Some of the edible treats, however, had to be created, including two-foot-tall strawberries made of plaster and a seven-foot drumstick, which filled a refrigerator the size of a walk-in closet.

“You just can’t find an animal that has a leg that big,” Blasdel said.