Let's eat toghether - QUESTIONS
Read the text Let’s eat together: how immigration made British food great and answer the questions.
Let’s eat together: how immigration
made British food great
I can think of no place that welcomes the food of other countries with more enthusiasm than Britain. Good though our indigenous cooking is, made with ingredients from our own landscape, we have long had an insatiable appetite for the food of other countries. A walk along our high streets will offer everything from sashimi…
…to tacos and pizza to Korean noodles. Some of this food comes from chain restaurants with global domination, but for the most part it is the product of small restaurants and food shops run by first- or second-generation immigrant families that have come to Britain and set up shop. It is something I wholeheartedly want to celebrate.
Walk past the big international retailers and you will pass a string of small restaurants, cafés and food shops. As the smell changes from cappuccino to cardamom, we enter the home of the kebab and the korma, the dim sum and the laksa, places where you can get your hands on a box of Alphonso mangoes or a warm, freshly baked roti. The further we go, the food becomes ever more intriguing, more tempting.
Now do the same in Nice, Naples or Stockholm. There will be little food on offer that isn’t local. Certainly there will be sections of each city with a particular culinary flavor, but there won’t be anything like the variety of nationalities (that) we have here in Britain. No one, it seems to me, has embraced the products of the rest of the world’s kitchens like the Brits.
It would be rude to assume that this enthusiasm is a product of our own food not being good enough. Those who peddle that old idea need to catch up. British food has never been more interesting. It is more that we are, mostly, a nation of adventurous eaters. Our appetites are open-minded, our plates always happy to receive something new.
Our eagerness for the cooking of other countries is not confined to restaurants either. At home in the past week I have eaten the products of about six different countries: Italian gnocchi with gorgonzola on Monday, Thai pork ribs on Tuesday, and Japanese sushi on Friday.
(On Thursday my planned dinner of Taiwanese buns was nipped in the bud only by the length of the queue I was expected to join. We ate decent jamón at a Spanish bar instead.) It was on Sunday that I ate what you could call a British meal: asparagus from the Wye Valley, roast chicken from Suffolk and roast potatoes grown in Herefordshire.
I am not interested in cooking in a kitchen that doesn’t include ingredients from other countries. Imagine a lifetime of always eating the same food over and over again. Diversity, this is what’s good in the world. In my opinion, food is what unites us in more ways than one.
Answer the questions:
- Does he/she enjoy eating food from different places in the world? How can you tell? Please, give examples to corroborate your opinion!
- What does the author of the article think of British food?
- In your opinion, what is the main message of the article? What did the author want to tell us? Please, provide examples to support your opinion!