Alice invites Bob to dinner or lunch. Bob is impressed by the excellent cooking, and Alice smugly informs him everything was grown in her very exclusive garden. Interestingly, Alice is usually a villain, either because villains are the ones who tend to have big egos and be obsessed with living "off the grid" somewhere in Waco or because Hitler Was A Vegetarian.
Often (but not always) paired with No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Beastars: After the current Beastar, Yafya (a horse), invites Legoshi (a wolf) to a private meeting, he offers Legoshi carrots from his own personal garden. Shortly afterwards, he reveals that his garden is fertilized by the corpses of people he's murdered, all carnivores just like Legoshi. As the Sublime Beastar, Yafya is beyond accountability.
- Senshi from Delicious in Dungeon grows vegetables in the backs of golems he's found wandering around the titular dungeon. Team Touden helps him harvest them and then Senshi cooks the vegetables in his usual Food Porn.
- In Last Exile, Mistress Delphine offers some wine to guests while going on about how much water was needed to properly grow the fruit, the implication being that many people in the drought-stricken outer world died so that she could produce the extravagant beverage. For her, part of the decadence of the wine comes from the suffering that its production entails.
- Played with in one chapter of Oishinbo, where a famous artist provides a meal of vegetables and chicken he raised himself. While one set of guests enthusiastically praises it, Yamaoka dismisses the cooking as simple and provincial, but truly hospitable and displays great effort and thoughtfulness from the host.
- Mercilessly warped in Umineko: When They Cry during the second tea party. Beato starts bragging about how every dish Rosa is eating was made from her siblings.
Beato: It's a sweet aperitif of noble rot German-made wine. A wine cocktail made of white wine mixed with a crimson golden drop. If I had to give it a name, I'd call it a Bloody Krauss. Soaked with just a golden drop of your brother's blood that was squeezed out of a compressor.
Fan Works
- A New World, A New Way: A non-villainous example in Swarm, X offers the changeling Nell some Sitrus Berries that his Trevenant Asia's grew inside of her thanks to Harvest. Because of Harvest, Asia's is X's personal garden.
Film — Animated
- The Incredibles: Mr. Incredible eats with Mirage, Syndrome's Sexy Secretary, who points out how everything on the table was grown on the island, thanks to the rich volcanic soil.
Film — Live Action
- The Big Short has Ben Rickert, a former trader whose cynicism over the state of the financial system has led him to paranoia and flirting with survivalism. He serves his guests salads grown in his own garden, which they don't have a problem with until he mentions that he's used urine (presumably, his own) to help revitalise the soil without petrochemicals. Depending on your take on the central characters of the film, he's either not a villain, just a guy who helped some old friends make money by betting against the global economy... or he's knowingly profiting from other people's impending misery.
- The Black Hole is the Trope Namer. Reinhart tries to pass off the garden as "tiny" but it was, in fact, huge in order to feed the entire zombified crew.
- Water (1985). The Governor of Cascara has his own private garden of heavy-duty herbs.
Literature
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo informs his prisoners that everything they are eating is taken from the ocean. One of them is less than thrilled to know he's eating octopus embryo gelatin. Not that that's much better than what gelatin is normally made of.note . Justified because Nemo bothers to mention the food because his guest, The Professor Aronnax, is starving, and Nemo wants to convince him that it’s possible to survive without any “Civilized world” product. This might be an Unbuilt Trope, as the first known example, where the garden is the ocean.
- In Halo: First Strike, while negotiating with an Insurrectionist community for repairs to their ship, the bridge crew of the Gettysburg-Ascendant Justice are treated to refreshments that Governor Jiles brags are grown from the hydroponics gardens in the asteroid.
- Hammond, who is much less sympathetic in the book than the film of Jurassic Park, mentions that the ginger in the ice cream he shares with Henry Wu was grown on the island.
- In Street Magic, when Briar is entering the stronghold of the Big Bad, he notices at once the luxuriant and flourishing gardens of the rich widow — very strange in a landscape that is in the middle of a desert (the city is a Fantasy Counterpart Culture to a Middle Eastern one). When he asks the plants how they're so strong, they answer "Rich food!" This is before Briar learns what the widow is using as fertilizer...
- Victoria has a "heroic" example, with protagonist John Rumford inviting the Landwehr emissary Halsing to share his breakfast. The food, of course, comes from his own farm.
Live-Action TV
- Sent up in Bottom, when Richie attempts this ("All the ingredients in tonight's main meal have either been grown, found or foraged") despite living in a grotty garden-less upper floor flat in the middle of London:
Eddie: What's wrong with these beans?
Richie: What d'you mean wrong? They're fresh. I grew those in the window box.
Eddie: They've got black bits all over them.
Richie: Well it's just a couple of greenfly, for heaven's sake! Well they're dead now, they've been under the grill for ages. Really, I watched them pop. - Haven: In season one's "Consumed," food is mysteriously rotting spontaneously all over town. The source seems to be a local restaurant, which the surrounding farms supply. The owner's wife is briefly considered as a suspect, since she dislikes her husband's brother—the head chef. When Audrey visits her, it's revealed she grows most of the herbs and some of the produce for the restaurant. One of her herbs, used in the restaurant's signature dish, is also withered and rotten. This effectively removes her from the suspect pool.
- I, Claudius: Played for Horror. Livia gets around her husband only eating directly from his fig orchard to avoid poisoning by putting poison on them while they're still on the trees.
Livia: Don't touch the figs.
- Several non-villainous examples from the original Iron Chef. Several challengers owned and ran restaurants that specialised in using ingredients grown in a dedicated garden (either on site or nearby), sometimes supplemented with wild grown ingredients harvested from the local area for those in more remote locations.
- In the Leverage episode "The Top Hat Job," which features a Corrupt Corporate Executive who's allowing his company to sell frozen dinners contaminated with salmonella, Eliot comments that situations like that are why he grows all of his own food. Given that he follows this by claiming that he makes time to do so by only sleeping ninety minutes a day, he's probably joking... we think.
- On an episode of Sanford and Son, Grady serves a dinner with food served from the garden he's been growing. He doesn't realize that marijuna has been growing in the garden and he mixes it in with the salad and invites two cops to have dinner. Hilarity Ensues.
- Stargate Atlantis plays it for laughs and creeps during a diplomatic meeting between Atlantis and their occasional out-of-necessity Wraith ally "Todd". As vampiric entities feeding on lifeforce, Wraith have no need for "normal" food on their ships; although they can enjoy eating it, they derive no nourishment from it. Also, the entire human population of the Pegasus galaxy is Wraith cattle, hence the trope.
Sheppard: Fruit bowl - nice touch.Todd: (dismissively) Oh, we picked them up during our travels. I thought they would make our discussion a little more comfortable. I hope they prove as delicious as the farmers who grew them...!
- Discussed by Eddington regarding Sisko's homecooked meals for the officers in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Eddington is sure that Sisko managed the ingredients by himself, as they were of higher quality than replicated food. In an inversion, Eddington is the villain (well, Anti-Villain) in this scenario, although he saw himself as the hero.
- Star Trek: Voyager: The two-parter "Year of Hell" has a No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine scene where Tom Paris gets the opportunity to taste the typical food of alien civilizations that never existed! The Big Bad Annorax has wiped them out of time itself, and keeps the last artifacts of their culture on his ship. Granted, this stuff was not grown by Annorax himself, but at least the access is quite exclusive.
Tabletop Games
- Played in a horribly straightway with the products of the Garden of Nurgle, Chaos God of Despair and Decay from Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 mythos. Roughly everything Nurgle makes is a horrifying, grotesque disease, and likely to make you Deader than Dead (unless you join in with him). Nurgle considers these to be gifts, and will jovially bestow them onto a populace, no matter how ungrateful they will be in the end.
Western Animation
- Justice League: In the episode Hereafter, Superman ends up in a desolate Bad Future and runs into the immortal Vandal Savage, who’s undergone a Heel–Face Turn out of regret in the millennia since accidentally wiping out humanity. After a brief fight, Savage invites Superman to lunch at his place. The food is great because he’s had 30,000 years to rediscover the principles of agriculture.
- A version of this shows up in Transformers: Animated. Megatron convinces the Constructobots to join the Decepticons with some wineglass-shaped barrels of high quality oil. When the construtobots comment that the "Autobot's oil tastes like water next to this stuff" Megatron mentions that it's his "private blend".
