From My Own Personal Garden

• Main
• All Subpages
• Create New

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 of From My Own Personal Garden include:

Anime and Manga

• Mercilessly warped in Umineko no Naku Koro ni 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.

Film -- Animated

• The Incredibles: Mr. Incredible eats with Mirage, who points out how everything was grown on the island, thanks to the volcanic soil. This is before Mr. Incredible encounters Syndrome.

Film -- Live Action

• 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.

Literature

• A variation in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo informs his prisoners that everything they are eating was 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.
• In Halo: First Strike, while negotiating with an insurrectionist community for repairs for 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.
• 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 has been suffering from a long drought. 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...

Live Action TV

• Parodied hilariously in Seinfeld:

Guest (to Kramer): "You made this salad?" Kramer: Yes, I prepared it as I bathed!

• Horrifying variation in I, Claudius. 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.

• 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.

• The Voyager 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.
• Stargate Atlantis plays it for laughs and Nightmare Fuel.

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...!

• • Note: as vampiric entities feeding on lifeforce, Wraith have no need for "normal" food on their ships. Also, the entire human population of the Pegasus galaxy is Wraith cattle, hence the trope.

Tabletop Games

• Played in a horribly straight way with the products of the Garden of Nurgle, Chaos God of Despair and Decay from Warhammer Fantasy Battle 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, now matter how ungrateful they will be in the end.

Western Animation

• Justice League: In the episode Hereafter, after Superman realizes the futility of fighting Vandal Savage, the latter invites the former to lunch. The food is great because Vandal Savage has had 30,000 years to rediscover the principles of agriculture.
  • As it turns out, not only is it futile to fight Vandal Savage, but he has effectively done a slow Heel Face Turn in the many years since the end of civilization, and is one of the uncommon non-villainous examples of this trope to the point that he helps send Superman back in time and tells Superman to do whatever it takes to stop past him.
• 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".