Lesmundo2003

As I haven't added anything for a long time, I'm feeling I've left some of my fans :-)  high & dry.

So with the incentive I've just finished, I'll give you a firm idea that used to exist in the minds of many a foreigner.

"English people tend to eat the wrong things when compared to the European diet".

In the time of my parents, the usual 'eat at home' meal was known as "meat & 2 veg".

This was usually meat from the pig or cow, accompanied by 2 different vegetables. One vegetable was nearly always potatoes in the form of chips. The other would be something green, maybe peas etc ...

In my early years, I grew up on meat & 2 veg, but also on take-a-aways. They would replace the lunch I would get in college. School lunches were compulsory in my schools then, but college offered the teenager a bit of freedom & the main teenager's take-a-away was chips.

Chips with a heavy dose of salt & maybe vinegar or ketchup.

Chips was the number 1 take-a-away, but as a nation, fish & chips was known as our number 1 meal. This was a meal that you would take away, but eat at home, whereas chips were a "eat while walking along the street" type of meal.

With the chips, for eating in the street, a sausage or saveloy could also be added as an easy pick up with the hand & eat food. The meat pie or cornish pasty fell into the "eat at home" category.

To finish off this basic meal was the every popular fizzy drink - a carbonated tinned beverage. If you've read my profile, you will have guessed I choose a Lilt.

Times, as they do, change.

Take-a-aways include all manner of ingredients now, mainly due to delicious foods & methods of cooking given to us by other cultures that have grown up in England.

There was 1 exception to this, as I remember. A local chippy (fish & chip shop) introduced the 'traditional' method of serving chips. To have them wrapped, not in clean hygienic grease proofed paper, but that day's used newspaper. Apparently this was the accepted thing in the past.

His customers, myself included, put it in strong words that if this continued we would find ourselves a new place to eat. He quickly bowed to our wishes.

So the next time you hear that the English have an unhealthy diet, it probably because of take-a-away food or the addition of too much salt. Some choices of meat also give the heart a hard time.

Me - my incentive that I've just finished.

Yes - meat & 2 veg. Although my meat was chicken & a Spanish version of the chips. Plus I rarely cook in a frying pan now, since the advent of the microwave oven, so less grease, saturated fats & more cholesterol friendly foods.

Now I need a cup of tea to calm me down & a short relax as I correct any errors in this newest addition for you lot  :-)

Happy Eating  :-))