Talking point: Eating

This week's talking point is eating. Before getting together with the members of your conversation group, go over the questions below so that ideas flow more easily when you get together with your friends and you can work out vocabulary issues beforehand.

• Can you cook?
• What's your best dish?
• Who's the best cook you know?
• Who does the cooking in your house?
• What kind of thing do you usually eat?
• Are you a fussy eater, an unadventurous eater or an adventurous eater?
• Do you prefer to eat out at a restaurant or at home when celebrating something?
• When you eat at home on special occasions, what do you like to cook?
• Do you eat much foreign food?
• What's your favourite?
• Are there many specialist shops selling [foreign] food in your city/town?
• What food from your country would you miss if you went to live abroad?
• What's the strangest food you have ever eaten?
• What food from your country do foreigners usually find strange?
• Do you watch cooking programmes on TV?
• Why have they become so successful?
• Do you look up to any celebrity chef?

To illustrate the point, watch this short video about the importance of a healthy breakfast.

We've got some delicious items to kick-start your morning. And Joe, you're absolutely right. We cannot skip breakfast. We have to eat something to fuel our bodies for the day. First, I wanna illustrate a typical breakfast to show what we might want to avoid. While this is delicious – these eggs, hash browns, bacon and biscuits, it's really high in fat, calories and saturated fat, which can lead to heart disease. A great alternative is a vegetable omelet. You can pick your favorite vegetables. Here, I have mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, and peppers. Be sure to use egg substitute to cook it in. You can have some sliced strawberries to go with it, and a piece of whole-grain toast.

Another really great breakfast, actually, is cereal. You wanna stay away from the sugary cereals and try to choose whole-grain cereals that have a lot of fiber. You wanna add some low-fat or fat-free skim milk, and top it with some fruit. Another great breakfast item is some cottage cheese. Low-fat or fat-free, with some peaches. You could have a whole-grain bagel with some sugar-free jelly as well.

Lastly, we have some Canadian bacon. For those of you who have to have your bacon in the morning, choose Canadian bacon. It's a lean meat, and you can have it with English muffin, some oatmeal, and some raisins on top.

And there you have some excellent, tasteful, and healthy breakfast items.