+ Time off Eating out

+ Food and drink Food in Britain has had a bad reputation abroad for a very long time. Visitors from foreign countries complain the meals they order in restaurants and cafés. However, in a city like London there is great variety. There are so many restaurants serving continental and non-European dishes that it can be difficult to find one serving only own cooking to Britain – Asian, Caribbean, Greek Cypriot. There are restaurants specializing various foreign cooking in addition to the many Italian and French ones.

+ Meals In spite of complaints about uninteresting food, there seems to be a great interest in cooking among people in Britain. Cookery books are published, and newspapers and magazines regularly print unusual recipes from foreign countries and revive old recipes from the past and from various regions of Britain. A good combination of tradition and innovation is represented by gastropubs. There are generally three main meals breakfast – lunch – dinner. The latter has tripartition: starter – main course – dessert. “Cream tea” is the traditional way to enjoy tea drinking which can substitute dinner.

+ Shopping for food The sort of food a family eats depends, to some extent, on how well off the family is. The richest families spend more on fruit and vegetables that have a short season, and on meat, fresh fish, and cheese. The poorest families buy more sugar, potatoes, lard, and white bread. Bread has always been a basic food but the amount eaten nowadays is declining. The sliced white loaf produced in a factory is the cheapest. More and more people buy food from a “take away”. This is a quicker than cooking a meal. The traditional take away foods in Britain are fish and chips, jacket potatoes, but also hamburgers and Chinese food. Today, however, supermarkets provide high quality fresh foods ready-to-eat from all parts of the world.

+ Natural foods There has been a change of diet during the last few years, some people prefer not to eat factory-made, processed foods. They want to eat foods which are grown without the aid of chemical fertilizers. There is an increase of vegetarians and vegans.

+ Teas and beers The average number of cups of tea drunk each day is 3.5, though some people drink as many as 10 cups a day. The consumption of coffee, on the other hand, trebled during the 1960s. The introduction of instant coffee made it an easy drink to prepare. Beer has been one of the favourite drinks of the British since the early 1600s. Most beer drinking is done in pubs. Traditionally, beer is drawn from the cellar up to the bar of the pub to be served to the customer as draught beer.

+ Beer styles British beer is noted for being warm that is, it is not iced or deliberately kept cool. During the last 40 years many of the breweries have manufactured keg beer. Keg beer is artificially fizzy and kept in special barrels called kegs. Other types of beers are: lager (Germany), stout. Some people drink a mixture of beer and lemonade called: shandy. A regional speciality from the West of England is cider, which is made from apples.

+ Wine and spirits As Britons have taken holidays abroad, have grown used to drinking wine consequently the consumption of wine has increased. Vineyards have existed in southern England since Roman times and new vineyards have been established in recent years. But the quantity produced is never likely to satisfy the growing British thirst for wine. Most of the wine drunk in Britain will continue to be imported from Italy, France, Spain, Germany, South America and U.S.A. Among spirits, whisky is the favourite one and, of course is the national drink of Scotland. “Scotch” is exported to the rest of the world. Nowadays whisky with a peaty flavour is getting more and more popular.