Talking About Food

Welcome to Real Easy English from BBC Learning English. I'm Beth.

And I'm Neil. In this podcast, we have a real conversation in easy English.

If you want to read along, you can visit our website: bbclearningenglish.com. Hi, Neil.

Hi Beth. How are you?

I'm very good, thank you. How are you?

I'm pretty good, yes.

Good, good. What are we talking about today?

Well, today we are talking about food. In particular, we'll talk about our favourite foods and how often we eat them.

What an amazing topic. I have so much to say about food. But you said how often. What do we mean by how often we eat something?

Good question! How often means how many times we eat our favourite food. So we might eat them every week, every day, or if we really like a food, we might eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner - every meal!

So, Neil, what is your favourite food?

Well, that's a really difficult question. But I really like fish.

Ah, me too! I was going to say that! But actually, I really love seafood. So, I think I'd say any kind of dish with seafood in it I absolutely love.

So, how often do you eat seafood, Beth?

Well, not very often, actually. I have it when I go on holiday and I have it in restaurants sometimes, but I don't really cook seafood at home. What about you? How often do you have fish?

Oh, probably a few times a week.

Really!?

Maybe, yeah. Yeah. We eat a lot of fish.

We sometimes have fish at home. I normally have it once or twice a week.

Right.

But I never have seafood at home, actually.

Yeah, OK. So what is your least favourite food?

Ooh… I absolutely hate baked beans!

You hate baked beans!?

I think they're disgusting! I can't even… the smell of them even makes me feel a bit sick.

Oh, OK.

So we've talked about the foods that we really like and the foods we don't like. But in a general week, what do you normally cook?

Often we'll eat Indian curries, but also Italian pasta dishes or Spanish dishes and then sometimes more traditional British roast dinner kind of thing.

Yeah. I think, generally, we have the same at home. Like, we eat a lot of food from different countries. But I have to say I usually cook quite a lot of pasta and quite a lot of rice at home in general. Just because they cook really quickly.

So, Beth. You generally eat rice and pasta dishes. What does that mean? Generally?

Well, we use generally and usually and normally for habits or things that we do a lot. So, for example, if I generally cook pasta or rice, that means maybe five times out of the seven in a week, I would say.

OK, so that’s most of the time. If we use sometimes we mean that we'd do it less than generally.

Yeah, sometimes might be two or three times a week. I guess it depends on what you're talking about. But for example, with me I sometimes cook fish. Like I said I have it maybe twice a week. So I would say that’s sometimes.

Beth, you said you hate baked beans. So do you ever eat baked beans?

Never. No, I can't stand them. So I never, ever have baked beans.

Well, never is something that we don't do. We just don't ever do it. I can’t believe you don't like baked beans. Beans on toast is a classic!

It is. But, no. Not for me. Let's quickly recap the vocabulary we learnt during the conversation. We learnt often which means we do something a lot. And we learnt how often, which we use to ask someone how many times they do something.

Usually, normally, and generally, which are all ways to talk about things we do a lot.

Sometimes, which we can use to talk about things we do, but not always or often.

And never to talk about things we don't do like eat beans, Beth.

Yes, just like I never eat baked beans. Ugh, horrible!

Thanks for listening to Real Easy English. Visit our website for more activities and courses to help you with your English: bbclearningenglish.com.

Next week, we'll talk about our friends.

See you then, goodbye.

Bye.