Isn't it amazing how much time we spend speaking about food? Have you ever eaten …? "What did you have for lunch?" and so on. And yet when you travel from one country to another, find that people have quite different feelings about food. People often feel that what they eat is normal and that what other people eat is strange or silly. In most parts of Asia, for example no meal is complete without rice. In England, people eat potatoes everyday. In the Middle East, bread is the main part of every meal. Eating, like so many things we do, becomes a habit which is difficult to change. Americans like to drink tea and coffee four or five times everyday, Australians drink a large amount of beer and the French drink wine everyday.
The sort of meat people like to eat also differs from one country to another. Horse meat is thought to be delicious in France. In Hong Kong, some people enjoy eating snakes. New Zealand eat sheep, but they never eat goat meat. The Japanese don't like to eat sheep meat because of its smell, but they enjoy eating raw fish.
So it seems that although eating is a topic that we can talk about for hours, there is very little common sense in what we say about it. People everywhere enjoy eating what they have always eaten, and there is very little we can change our eating habits.