reading about vegetables and cooking

Reading and Use of English1

part 7

Multiple matching

1 What types of things can you cook?

Do you enjoy cooking? Why/Why not?

Are you a vegetarian? If so, why? If not, would you ever consider becoming one? Why/Why not?

2 a You are going to read an article about a certain type of cooking. Read the title of the article and the introductory sentence and answer this question:

What types of things do you expect to read about in the article?

b Read the article and check your predictions.

3  Read the article again and for questions 1-10, choose from the paragraphs (A-E). The paragraphs may be chosen more than once.

waste vegetarian cooking

Samuel Muston discovers why we should think twice before we throw away those peelings

A

Watch a few cookery shows on TV and you'll see that nearly all of the chefs waste food. Not consciously, but still they do it. When they slice off that bit of fat or throw away those peelings, they are wasting things we probably would have eaten in the past. And the reason we don't notice it is because that's the way we all cook - they simply cook like us, and, indeed, we cook like them. That's what the 26-year-old chef Shane Jordan is telling me over a plate of vegan curry at Arc Cafe, where he works. 'TV chefs are all chop, chop, chop, put this to the side, throw away this,' says Jordan. 'I used to watch and think "I could make a dish out of what you are throwing away alone."' So that's what he started doing.

B

At Arc he has created a series of dishes that are zero waste, or very nearly. So if he uses one part of a vegetable or fruit, he'll use the rest of it elsewhere, as long as it isn't harmful to health. In fact, his curry is banana-skins curry, the skins filling in for what would normally be meat. 'I make a lot of banana fritters with the flesh, so I'm left with all these skins,' he says. 'And I thought, "what can I do with them?" Then I found an Asian recipe which tells you haw to make them edible and I built the dish around that.'

C

Jordan's cooking is inventive, but it also has a backwards-looking feel to it - and that may not be a bad thing, Tom Tanner, of the Sustainable Restaurant Association, says. 'We have become used to fast, quick, disposable food. A return to the culinary values and good housekeeping of our grandparents may help reduce the vast quantity of food we all chuck away.' Certainly the figures on waste ore a cause for concern. A recent study into home eating concluded that we waste one-fifth of all the food we buy. It is against this that Jordan is fighting. 'I believe in spreading what knowledge I have of my type of low-waste cooking, I don't want to lecture people,' Jordan says. 'But I do want to try and show people there's another way.'

D

To help do this he has created a programme of school visits. In these, he'll teach kids how to cut vegetables and fruit (tight to the flesh) and think about food as something that isn't infinitely available from the fridge - and infinitely disposable. He is also targeting slightly older cooks. 'In the next few months we also plan to set up a webcam to livestream what we do in the kitchen so people can learn exactly what you can and can't eat,' Jordan says. Using peelings from fruit to add flavour to cakes and jams, for example, seems very sensible. The ends of broccoli stalks and leeks, often overlooked, are also great for throwing in stir-frys.

E

This type of creative thinking might just be what we need, according to Tanner. 'We have to face up to the fact we have a waste problem,' he says. 'It costs us money and it's bad for the environment - and to change it we need to change our attitude to the food we eat.' At a time when we are having to tighten our belts, we could all do with cutting down on the throwaway - and Jordan may just be one of the men to help us.

Reacting to the text

' ... we waste one-fifth of all the food we buy.' How true is this in your household?

What else can be done, in addition to Shane Jordan's idea, to reduce the amount of food wasted?