Урок-дискуссия Тема “Food”
Тема “Food”
Pre-reading task.
Teacher: Do you know any typical meals from different countries?
Pupils: Pate de foie gras is a traditional meal from France, which is the liver from duck and geese;
If you are in India, you should try Indian dried walnuts, dried apricots;
There are a lot of milk products in Switzerland like famous Swiss cheese and cream;
Italy is famous for pasta;
Fried rice is an indispensable part of Chinese cuisine;
Traditional meals of England are fish and chips, roast meat, pudding;
As for Russia, pancakes, various kinds of soup, stewed fruits are typical food
Teacher: What factors dо influence the country’s food?
Pupil: Weather and climate, religion, historical peculiarities can influence it.
Teacher: Can you give an example?
Pupil: For example, Japan is surrounded by the sea. Japan cuisine almostly consists of sea products. Japan sushi is known all over the world.
Reading
Read the following text quickly.
How come it is so difficult to find English food in England? In Greece you eat Greek food, in France French food, in Italy Italian food, but in England, in any High Street in the Land, it is easier to find Indian and Chinese restaurants than English ones. In London you can eat thai, Portuguese, Turkish, Japanese, Russian. Swiss, Spanish – but where are the English restaurants?
It is not only in restaurants that foreign dishes are replacing traditional foreign food. In every supermarket, sales of pasta, pizza and poppadoms are booming. Why has this happened? What is wrong with the cooks of Britain that they prefer cooking pasta to potatoes? Why do the British choose to eat lasagna instead of shepherd’s pie? Why do they now like cooking in wine and olive oil? But perhaps it is a good thing. After all, this is the end of the 20th century and we can get ingredients from all over the world in just a few hours. Anyway, wasn’t English food always disgusting and tasteless? Wasn’t it always boiled to death and swimming in fat? The answer to these qutstions is a resounding ‘No’, but to understand this, we have to go back to before the Second World War.
The British have in fact always imported food from abroad. From the time of the Roman invasion foreign trade was a major influence on British cooking. English kitchens, like the English language, absorbed ingredients from all over the world – chickens, rabbits, apples, and tea. All of these and more were successfully incorporated into British dishes. Another important influence on British cooking was of course the weather. The good old British rain gives us rich soil and green grass, and means hat we are able to produce some of the finest varieties of meat, fruit, vegetables, which don’t need fancy sauces of complicated recipes to disguise their tastes.
However, the Second World War changed everything. Wartime women had to forget 600 years of British cooking, learn to do without foreign imports, and ration their use of home-grown food. The Ministry of food published cheap, boring recipes. The joke of the War was a dish called Woolton Pie (named after the Minister for Food). This consisted of a mixture of boiled vegetables covered in white sauce with mashed potato on the top. Britain never managed to recover from the wartime attitude to the food. We were left with a loss of a confidence in our cooking skills and after years of Ministry recipes we began to believe that British food was boring, and we searched the world for sophisticated, new dishes which gave hope of a better future. The British people became tourists at their own dining tables and in the restaurants of their land. This is a tragedy! Surely food is a much a part of our culture as our landscape, our language, and our literature. Nowadays, cooking British food is like speaking a dead language. It is almost as bizarre as having a conversation in Anglo-Saxon English.
Nevertheless, there is still one small ray of hope. British pubs are often the best places to eat well and cheaply in Britain, and they also increasingly try to serve tasty British food. Can we recommend to you our two favourite places to eat in Britain? The Sheperd’s Inn in Melberly, Cumbria, an the Dolphin Inn in Kingston, Devon. Their stake and mushroom pie, Lancashire hotpot, and bread, and butter pudding are three of the gastronomic wonders of the world. [link] Adopted from: Verona Paul and Jason Winner “English food: bad taste?” // Liz and John Soars “New Headway English Course”, Oxford University Press, 2003, p.60
