Just before Christmas we looked at the words that we use to describe different types of meals. In this blog, we will consider the many adjectives that we use to describe the food that we eat – some positive, some negative and some neutral.
We use the adjective good to describe food that is nice: My soup was really good. If food is very good we often use the stronger adjective delicious: The fish was absolutely delicious. Yummy also means ‘tasting very good’ but is informal: Rebecca makes a really yummy chocolate cake. If food is good in a way that makes you want to eat more of it, in UK English, we might say that it is moreish: These peanuts are very moreish, aren’t they? Appetizing describes food or food smells that make you want to eat: There was an appetizing display of cakes in the window./Appetizing smells were coming from the kitchen.
Tasty is another positive food adjective, meaning ‘having a good taste’, but is usually for food which has a strong flavour: This makes a tasty sauce that’s great with pasta. The opposite of ‘tasty’ is bland. Bland food has too little flavour. Another word for this is tasteless. I found the food rather bland./The meat was dry and tasteless.
A meal that is light is small and easy to digest: I usually just have a light snack for lunch. On the other hand, food that is filling or heavy makes you feel full quickly.
Stodgy also means ‘heavy’ and is often used to describe unhealthy food: I’ve been eating too many stodgy puddings. Rich describes the type of food that you can only eat a little of because it contains a lot of oil, butter, eggs or cream: The dessert was a bit too rich for me.
Meat that is tender is easy to cut or chew, and the opposite, meat that is difficult to cut or chew, is described as tough.
Sweet describes food that contains sugar or tastes like sugar: a lovely, sweet melon. Food that is not sweet is savoury: There’s cheese if you’d prefer something savoury. Food that contains a lot of salt is salty: salty snacks, such as crisps and peanuts. Spicy, meanwhile, is used for food that contains the flavours of spices, (substances from plants that give special flavours to food): fish in a spicy sauce. Food that is hot contains a lot of spice and makes the mouth feel as if it is burning: A word of warning – that curry is hot!
Two common food adjectives that are often confused are sour and bitter. ‘Sour’ describes the sharp taste of a lemon: I found the fruit a little sour and added some sugar. ‘Bitter’ is used for tastes such as strong coffee or very dark chocolate.
Whatever you eat today, whether it’s savoury or sweet, light or filling, I hope it’s delicious!
Talking of food, here’s an expression to describe the behaviour of teenagers in search of a tasty snack: cupboard-surfing. It describes the way they move around the kitchen opening and closing cupboard doors and the fridge. They often repeat this on a daily basis.
Its not only teenagers! I cupboard surf when I’m bored in the hope that some previously undiscovered morsel will suddenly appear in one of them…a search I’ve found frustratingly fruitless so far!
Thanks!! It helped me a lot!
thanks a lot for information!
when I talk about foods I don’t have any idea to describe my opinion, this is an interesting topic, it helps me can learn more new words and extremely easy to remember,
Thanks
Food is the tool to make someone happy. Let’s make a delicious meal for the people we love…:)
Nice one! When my tongue lacks taste for every food either savoury or unsavoury or what have you, what is it called? i’ll happy to receiving your response.
I’m thinking you mean that regardless of whether it’s sweet or savoury it tastes ‘bland’, flavourless?
Sometimes people feel unwell and have no “appetite”. So the food will taste “bland”. 🙂
The followings are some other example for “appetite”
-I haven’t got much of an appetite (= I am not hungry).
– Both viruses cause fever and loss of appetite.
Is it any coincidence that ‘yum’ sounds like the mnum mnum mnum sound we make when we’re eating something delicious!?!
I like the term cupboard-surfing. But what term do we give to peering in one’s bag for a snack one has already eaten but forgotten?
I don’t know if there is such a term. Does this often happen to you? Perhaps you should coin a phrase!
အရင္ကသိခဲ့တာေတြဟာသာမန္ေလာက္ဘဲလို႔သံုးသပ္မိပါတယ္။အခုမွနက္နက္႐ိႈင္း႐ိႈင္းသိျမင္လာပါတယ္။
Very Good
I love this post, it’s very helpful. Thanks
What about ‘toothsome”?