In a society deeply marked culturally by appearances and by hunger, the vegetable garden and the orchard appear as the privileged place for food security. Next to the house,the garden endowed the homestead with diverse varieties and abundance, and emphasised agrarian individualism. It was perceived by the peasantry as a compensatory place emanating from the rationale of the land of plenty, to exorcize lean periods, taxation, and collective constraints. For the elite food security was not only physiological but also cultural, and it took into account the representation of food. Thus the cultivated fruit combined all the virtues associated with orchards in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France. Vegetable gardens, orchards and also fruit storerooms gave the owner of a country house the assurance of being able to show his class distinction through the consumption of the products of his estate all year round. Self-sufficient farming, which was at the core of the notion of food security in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was not necessarily an answer to an archaic economic organization.