Discuss the following questions in the group.

1. Who cooks in your family?

2. How many meals do you have a day?

3. What is your biggest meal of the day?

4. Do you always eat healthily?

5. Do you want to cut down on something?

Reading

3. Read the text. Do you think that eating habits are getting better or worse in your country?

We are what we eat

One well-known saying runs that we are what we eat, implying that the food we consume influences our physical, physiological and psychological well-being. Every piece of food we take presents a brick in our whole body structure. That means that our new generation differs dramatically from the previous one as it is made of different bricks. Many things dealing with our eating habits have obviously changed.

Firstly, eating out has become as usual as eating at home. The standards of cooking are improving all over the world and restaurants, pubs and cafes are open 24/7 to offer their customers Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, American, Mexican, Georgian cuisine. They offer a great variety of dishes, efficient service and reasonable prices. No matter, in what part of the city you are, you can always find a cosy place to drop in for a cup of coffee and a snack. Large city-centre department stores always have restaurants on their premises targeted particularly at the shoppers. Snack bars and espresso coffee bars are very popular with young people.

Secondly, with more and more women going out to work there is a great demand for convenience foods, i.e. foods which are ready to cook and eat. This demand decreases cooking at home, on the one hand, and increases eating out and shopping for the convenience foods, on the other hand. In our country just like all over the world it is getting popular to buy hot take-away dishes from the restaurants and or heat up a frozen meal in the microwave. It saves a lot of time and lets hundreds of women stay away from the oven and enjoy the evening with the rest of the family.

Thirdly, the period of time needed for your meal has totally changed. Always pressed for time you just can’t rush home to chew a two- or three-course lunch and then sip a cup of tea on the terrace of your house. You have to be mobile, available and fast exactly like your food. Our mad rhythm of life has given a rise to fast food restaurants, which are extremely popular with students, office workers and commuters. Young people are crazy about juicy burgers, tender chicken nuggets, crisp French fries, melting ice cream, mouth-watering milk shakes and fragrant invigorating coffee in the tight-closed paper glasses. Fast food is widely discussed and criticized today, but so far the foundations of its network stay unshakable.

These obvious changes may produce the impression that modern people are not interested in cooking any longer, and that in the nearest gloomy future all recipes including that of scrambled eggs will be known only to the chosen – the owners of the restaurants and the chefs. Surprisingly, but today with so many people eating out, cookery shows on TV become increasingly popular as celebrity chefs work to fuel the population’s love of food. Women share recipes of fancy cakes and salads made of hardly combine ingredients. Almost every household has its unique recipe to pass on from generation to generation.

No doubt, eating habits have undergone considerable changes and have given our life a lot of diversity and a great choice. If we compare the body structure of the previous generation with that of a new one, the main difference should lie in the colour of the bricks in the wall.