Food For Different Cultures.[1]

   Have  you  ever  stopped  to  really think  about  what  you and your family eat

 everyday and why? Have you ever stopped to think what other people eat? In the movie Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom, there are two scenes in which the two characters are offered meals from a different culture. One meal, meant to break the ice, consisted of insects. The second meal was a lavish banquet that featured such delicacies as roasted beetles, live snakes, eyeball soup, and chilled monkey brains for dessert. Some cultures eat such things as vipers and rattlesnakes, bush rats, dog meat, horsemeat, bats, animal heart, liver, eyes, and insects of all sorts.

   Often the differences among cultures in the foods they eat are related to the differences in geography and local resources. People who live near water ( the sea, lakes, and rivers) tend to eat more fish and crustaceans. People who live in colder climates tend to eat heavier, fatty foods. However, with the development of a global economy, food boundaries and differences are beginning to dissipate: McDonalds is now on every continent expect Antarctica, and tofu and yogurt are served all over the world.

Mexico: Beans and rice[2]

Corn tortillas (2 servings)

Black beans (2 servings)

Rice (2 servings)    

Salsa

Morocco: Couscous4

Couscous (wheat pasta)

Carrots

Zucchini

Peppers

Chickpeas

Lamb

Italy: Spaghetti[3]

Spaghetti (2 servings)

Tomato sauce (2 servings)

Parmesan cheese

Chicken breasts, baked

Japan: Tempura5

Shrimp

Eggplant

Peppers

Mushrooms

Flour

Oil

Egg white

Rice (2 servings)

From Land and Sea.[4]

   Spain occupies most of the Iberian Peninsula, on the western edge of Europe. It is nearly surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.

   Spain’s dry climate and poor soil make farming difficult. Extensive irrigation allows farmers to raise strawberries and rice in dry areas. Vegetables and citrus trees grow on the coastal plains, and olives and grapes grow in the river valleys.

   The grasslands of the large dry central plateau are used for grazing sheep, goats, and cattle. People in this region eat roasted and boiled meats. They also raise pigs for ham and spicy sausage called chorizo. And people all over the country eat lots of seafood from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

   One classic Spanish dish, paella, includes sausage, mussels, lobster, or chicken, plus red pepper, peas, tomatoes, and saffron rice. Peasants were the first to make paella, using whatever food was available. But this dish and others also reflect Spain’s history of traders, conquerors, and explorers who brought a variety of food by land and by sea.

   Phoenicians from the Middle East introduced grapes to Spain in about 1100B.C. Hundreds of years later, Romans brought olives from what is now Italy. In the 8^th century A.D., Moors (Muslim Arabs and Berbers from Africa) introduced shortgrain rice and za faran, or saffron – the spice that colors rice yellow. And in the 1400s, 1500s, and 1600s, Spanish explorers and traders returned home with nutmeg and cloves from the East Indies: and peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, and chocolate from the Americas.   

Meals in Great Britain.[6]

   The two features of life in England that possibly give visitors their worst impressions are the English weather and English cooking.

   A traditional English breakfast is a very big meal – sausages, bacon, eggs, tomatoes, and  mushrooms.  People who  do have a full  breakfast say  that  it  is

 quite good. The writer Somerset Maugham once gave the following advice: “If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts daily.” But nowadays it is often a rather hurried and informal meal. Many people just have cereal with milk and sugar, or toast with marmalade, jam, or honey. Marmalade and jam are not the same! Marmalade is made from oranges and jam is made from other fruits. The traditional breakfast drink is tea, which people have with cold milk. Some people have coffee, often instant coffee, which is made with just hot water. Many visitors to Britain find this coffee disgusting!

   For many people lunch is a quite meal. In cities there are lot of sandwich bars, where office workers can choose the kind of bread they want – brown, white, or a roll – and then all sorts of salad and meat or fish to go in the sandwich. Pubs often serve good, cheap food both hot and cold. School-children can have a hot meal at school, but many just take a snack from home – a sandwich, a drink, some fruit and perhaps some crisps. British kids eat more sweets than any other nationality.

   “Tea” means two things. It is a drink and a meal! Some people have afternoon tea, with sandwiches, cakes, and, of course, a cup of tea. Cream teas are popular. You have scones (a kind of cake) with cream and jam.

   The evening meal is the main meal of the day for many people. They usually have it quite early, between 6.00 and 8.00, and often the whole family eats together.

   On Sundays many families have a traditional lunch. They have roast meat, either beef, lamb, chicken, or pork, with potatoes, vegetables, and gravy. Gravy is a sauce made from the meat juice.

   The British like food from other countries, too, especially Italian, French, Chinese, and Indian. 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. 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 that we are able to produce some  of the finest varieties of meat, fruit and vegetables, which don’t need fancy sauces or complicated recipes to disguise their taste. People often get take-away meals – you buy the food at the restaurant and than bring it home to eat. Eating in Britain is quite international!

English breakfast.[8]

   All people in the world have breakfast, and most people eat and drink the same things for breakfast. They may eat different things for all the other meals in the day, but at breakfast time, most people have the same things to eat and drink – Tea or Coffee, Bread and butter, Fruit.

   Some people eat meat for breakfast. English people usually eat meat at breakfast time, but England is a cold country. It is bad to eat meat for breakfast in hot country. It is bad to eat too much meat; if you eat meat for breakfast, you eat meat three times a day; and that is bad in a hot country. It is also bad to eat meat and drink tea at the same time, for tea makes meat hard so that the stomach cannot deal with it

   The best breakfast is Tea or Coffee, bread and Butter, fruit. That is the usual breakfast of most people in the world.

How tea was first drunk in Britain.11

   By the time tea was first introduced into this country (1660), coffee had already been drunk for several years.

   By 1750 tea had become the most popular beverage for all types and classes of people – even though a pound of tea cost a skilled worker perhaps a third of his weekly wage!

Tea ware.

   Early tea cups had no handles, because they were originally imported from China. Chinese cups didn’t (and still don’t) have handles.

   As tea drinking grew in popularity, it led to a demand for more and more tea ware. This resulted in the rapid growth of the English pottery and porcelain industry, which not long after became world famous for its products.

The tea break.

   Nowadays, tea drinking is no longer a proper, formal, «social» occasion. We don't dress up to “go out to tea” anymore. But one tea ceremony is still very important in Britain – the Tea Break! Millions of people in factories and offices look forward to their tea breaks in the morning and afternoon Things to do.

1)      Make a display of as many pictures, cut from magazines. As you can showing different kinds of tea pots and tea cups.

2)      Design your own kind of tea pots and tea cups.

American food and drink.[9]

 The popular view outside the U.S.A. that Americans survive on cheeseburgers, Cokes and French fries is as accurate as the American popular view that the British live on tea and fish’n’chips, the Germans only on beer, bratwurst, and sauerkraut, and the French on red wine and garlic.

   This view comes from the fact that much of what is advertised abroad as “American food” is a very pretty flat, tasteless imitation. American beef, for example, comes from specially grain-fed cattle, not from cows that are raised mainly for milk production. As a result, American beef is more tender and tasted better than what is usually offered as an “American steak” in Europe. When sold abroad, the simple baked potato that comes hot and whole in foil often lacks the most important element, the famous Idaho potato. This has different texture and skin that comes from the climate and soil in Idaho.

      America has two strong advantages when it comes to food. The first is that as the leading agriculture nation, she has always been well supplied with fresh meats, fruits, and vegetables in great variety at relatively low prices. This is one reason why steak or beef roast is probably the most “typical” American food; it has always been more available. But good Southern-fried chicken also has champions, as do hickory-smoked or sugar-cured hams, turkey, fresh lobster, and other seafood such as crabs or clams.

   In a country with widely different climates and many fruit and vegetable growing regions, such items as fresh grapefruit, oranges, lemons, melons, cherries, peaches, or broccoli, iceberg lettuce, avocados, and cranberries do not have  to  be  imported.  This is  one  reason  why fruit  dishes  and  salads  are so

 common. Family vegetable gardens have been very popular, both as a hobby and as a way to save money, from the days when most Americans were farmers. They also help to keep fresh food on the table.

   The second advantage America has enjoyed is that immigrants have brought with them, and continue to bring, the traditional foods of their countries and cultures. The variety of foods and styles is simply amazing. Whether Armenian, Basque, Catalonian, Creole, Danish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, traditional Jewish, Latvian, Mexican, Vietnamese or what have you, these traditions are now also at home in the U.S.A.

   There seem to be four trends in America at present which are connected with foods and dining. First, there has been a notable increase in the number of  reasonably priced restaurants which offer specialty foods. These include those that specialize in many varieties and types of pancakes, those that offer only fresh, baked breakfast foods, and the many that are buffets or salad bars. Secondly, growing numbers of Americans are more regularly going out to eat in restaurants. One reason is that they are not many American women do not feel that their lives are best spent in the kitchen. They would rather pay a professional chef and also enjoy a good meal. At the same time, there is an increase in fine cooking as a hobby for both men and women. For some two decades now, these have been popular television series on all types and styles of cooking, and the increasing popularity can easily be seen in the number of best-selling specialty cookbooks and the number of stores that specialize in often exotic cooking devices and spices.

   A third is that as a result of nationwide health campaigns, Americans in general are eating a much light diet. Cereals and grain foods, fruit and vegetables, fish and salads are emphasized instead of heavy and sweet foods. Finally, there is the international trend to “fast food” chains which sell pizza, hamburgers,   Mexican  foods,  chicken,  salads  and  sandwiches,  seafoods  and

 various ice creams. While many Americans and many other people resent this trend and while, as many be expected, restaurants also dislike it, many young, middle-aged, and old people, both rich and poor, continue to buy and eat fast foods.

Hot Dogs.[10]

   Tad Dorgan, a sports cartoonist, gave the frankfurter its nickname in 1906. Munching on a frank at a baseball game, he concluded that it resembled a dachshund’s body and put that whimsy into a drawing, which he captioned “Hot dog”.

   Sausages go all the way back to ancient Babylon, but the hot dog was brought to the U.S.A. shortly before the Civil War by a real Frankfurter – Charles Feltman, a native of Frankfurt, Germany, who opened a stand in New York and sold grilled sausages on warmed rolls – first for a dime apiece, later, a nickel.

   The frank appealed to busy Americans, who – as an early 19^th century comment put it – tend to live by the maxim of “gobble, gulp and go”. Nowadays Americans consume more than 12 billion frankfurters a year.

Hamburgers.12

   Modern hamburgers on a bun were first served at the St. Louis Fair in 1904, but Americans really began eating them in quantity in the 1920s, when the White Castle snack bar chain featured a small, square patty at a very low price. Chopped beef, tasty and easily prepared, quickly caught on as family fare, and today hamburger stands, drive-ins, and burger chains offer Americans their favorite hot sandwich at every turn.

   The history of the hamburger dates back to medieval Europe. A Tartar dish of shredded raw beef seasoned with salt and onion juice was brought from Russia to Germany by early German sailors. The lightly broiled German chopped-beef cake, with pickles and pumpernickel on the side, was introduced to America in the early 1800s by German immigrants in the Midwest.

Doughnuts.12

   It was early Dutch settlers and the Pennsylvania Germans who introduced the yeasty, deep-fried doughnut to America. To the Dutch it was a festive food, eaten for breakfast on Shrove Sunday.

   Legend has it that doughnut got its hole in 1847 when Hanson Gregory, a lad later to become a sea captain, complained to his mother that her fried cakes were raw in the center and poked hole4s in the next batch before they were cooked.

   During World War I, when the Salvation Army served them to the troops, doughnuts really took off as popular fare. Since then, coffee and doughnuts become a national institution. Stores sell them plain, sugared, frosted, honey-dipped, or jam-filled.

Apple pie[11]

   At its best, with a savory filling and crisp, light-brown crust, apple pie has long been favorite on American tables.

   Apples and apple seems were among the precious supplies the early colonists brought to the New World. The first large apple orchards were planted near Boston by William Blaxton in the 1600s. When he moved to Rhode Island in 1635, he developed the tart Rhode Island Greening, still considered one of  America’s finest apple pies.

   As the fruit became abundant, many settlers ate apple pie at every meal. Garnished with a chunk of cheese, it was a favorite colonial breakfast dish. By the 18^th century apple pie became so popular that Yale College in New Haven served it every night at supper for more than 100 years.

   America’s love affair with apple pie has remained constant. Today’s housewives, pressed for time, can shortcut the tradition by buying the pastry ready-made at bakeries and supermarkets. Many variation on the good old original are available, but the classical apple pie, irresistible when topped with a slice of rat-trap cheese or slathered with vanilla ice cream, is still America’s favorite.