BBC随身英语:Love leftovers 喜欢残羹盛饭

Our ancestors didn”t have enough money to waste it discarding perfectly good food. They were thrifty and knew how to cook up something from odds and ends of food the next day. And the UK”s Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, wants us to learn some of those old skills again.

He criticises celebrity chefs, saying, “Cookbooks in the 1970s and 1980s always had chapters on using up scraps and leftovers. But this stopped in the 1990s.” And if the media is part of the problem, maybe the media can be part of the answer. Mr Paterson wants celebrity chefs, like Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, to give us more recipes using leftover food.

Celebrity chefs are very influential in the UK. Shops frequently sell out of ingredients they use in their recipes. When Nigella Lawson praised goose fat for making roast potatoes, sales soared. And veteran cook Delia Smith has boosted sales of so many different ingredients over the years, the “Delia effect” is now in the dictionary.

There are some traditional British recipes using leftovers. “Bubble and squeak” is fried up leftover vegetables from the Sunday roast dinner. Bread and butter pudding is traditionally a good use for stale bread.

But modern British lifestyles and left-overs don”t go well together. We hear about food safety, and are scared to use food past its best. Once, people could buy food as they needed it. But in the last 50 years, small local shops have closed, and people do a whole week”s shopping at the supermarket. It's hard to plan your menu a week in advance, which leads to waste. So it seems it will take more than TV chefs to persuade Britons to love leftovers.

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Quiz 测验 1. According to the article, how much food do Britons throw away at home each year?

7 million tonnes.

2. Can you name two British celebrity chefs from the article?

Any two from: Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver and Delia Smith.

3. What is bubble and squeak?

It's fried up leftover vegetables from a Sunday roast.

4. Which kinds of shops have closed in the past 50 years?

Small shops.

5. Is the following statement true, false or not given? The Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, wants people to throw away more leftovers.

False. He wants people to eat their leftovers.

Glossary 词汇表 edible 可食用的 portions 份量 scrape their plates 把盘子刮净 bin 垃圾桶 discarding 扔掉 thrifty 节约的 cook up something （盛饭）再做 odds and ends 零零碎碎的剩饭 scraps 残羹剩饭 leftovers 残羹剩饭 celebrity chefs 名厨 recipes 菜谱 sell out of 一售而空 ingredients 佐料，成份 goose fat 鹅油 sales soared 销售直线上升 veteran cook 老厨师 boosted sales 促进销售 stale bread 陈旧面包 lifestyles生活方式 don”t go well together 不匹配 past its best过期 menu 菜单