Text 5 An Invitation to Dinner

The two features of life in England that possibly give visitors their worst impressions are the English weather and English cooking. English food has often been described as tasteless. Although this criticism has been more than justified in the past, and in many instances still is, the situation is changing somewhat. One of the reasons that English cooking is improving is that so many people have been spending their holidays abroad and have learned to appreciate unfamiliar dishes. However, there are still many British people who are so unadventurous when they will condemn everywhere that does not provide them with tea or overdone steak and chips.

One of the traditional grouses about English food is the way that vegetables are cooked. Firstly the only way that many British housewives know to cook green vegetables is to boil them for far too long in too much salt water and then to throw the water away so that all vitamins are lost. To make matters worse, they do not strain the vegetables sufficiently so that they appear as a soggy wet mass on a plate.

It would be unfair to say that all English food is bad! Many traditional British dishes are as good as anything you can get anywhere. Nearly everybody knows about roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but this is by no means the only dish that is cooked well. A visitor if invited to an English home might well enjoy steak and kidney pudding or pie, saddle of mutton with red-currant jelly, all sorts of smoked fish, especially kippers, boiled salt beef and carrots, to mention but few.

A strange thing about England that the visitor may notice is that most of the good restaurants in England are run and staffed by foreigners – for example there is a large number of Chinese, Italian and Indian restaurants and to a less extent French and Spanish one.

(From Access to English Turning Point by M. Coles and B. Lord)

Text 6

What will people eat in future? Eating habits change from generation to generation. Before scientists learned about vitamins and other ingredients of food, people believed in eating large quantities of food and didn’t pay attention to a balanced diet. A good eighteenth century meal consisted of as many as twenty courses. The Romans were famous for their great feasts and big appetites.

In the year 2100 people’s eating habits may be just as surprising but in a very different sort of way. Probably there will be an end to food as we know it today. Meals as we know them may become the thing of the past. Food and vitamins will be taken in the form of capsules, tablets and pills. Maybe this idea is not very pleasant but it may be the answer to food shortage and world famine.

Text 7

In the Canteen

People usually have four meals a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. But they do not always take all the meals at home. Working people have their lunch or dinner at their factories, offices, institutes.

We have a nice canteen at our university, and many students have dinner there. When I stay at the university till late, I also go to the canteen with my friends.

We usually begin our dinner with some vegetable salad. For the first course we take some soup: cabbage soup, chicken soup or vegetable soup. For the second course we can take chops, meat with vegetables or fried fish with potatoes for a change. For dessert we often take stewed fruit, or ice-cream, or fruit.

There is also a buffet at the university where you can buy cheese or sausage sandwiches, milk, coffee, cake, sweets, fruit and other nice things.