Fill in the blank with a suitable word.

Isn’t it amazing how much time we spend (1) about food? “Have you ever eaten...?” “What did you have for lunch?” and so on. And when you travel from one country to another, you find that people have quite different (2) about food. People often feel that what they eat is normal, and that what other people eat is strange or silly.

In most parts of Asia, for example, no (3) is complete without rice. In England, people (4) potatoes every day. In the Middle East, bread is the main part of every meal. Eating, like so many things we do, becomes a (5) which is difficult to change. Americans like to drink a lot of orange juice and coffee. The English (6) tea four or five times every day. Australians drink large amount of beer and the French drink (7) every day.

The sort of meat people like to eat also differs from one country to another. Horse (8) is thought to be delicious in France. In Hong Kong, some people enjoy eating snakes. New Zealanders eat sheep, but they never eat goat meat. The Japanese don’t like to eat sheep meat because of its smell, but they enjoy raw fish.

So it (9) that although eating is a topic that we can talk about forhours, there is very little (10) sense in what we say about it. People everywhere enjoy eating what they have always been earing, and there is very little we can do to change our eating habits.