Meat

Meat is probably still the overall food favourite in Britain, with roasts, stews, casseroles, pies, steaks, chops, ribs and a lot more all being part of it. But our meat-eating habits have shocked quite a few people over the years. After a visit to England in 1748, a foreign visitor, one Per Kalm, a Swedish diplomat, recorded his surprise at the amount of meat eaten in England: ‘... I do not believe that any Englishman who is his own master has ever eaten a dinner without meat.’ The British association with meat-eating is so great that we actually have a corps of yeomen called Beefeaters (although the term was also applied, with little respect, to over- or well-fed servants in the seventeenth century).