In Praise or Fast Food IELTS Reading Answer with IELTS Passage

In Praise or Fast Food IELTS Reading Answer: The In Praise or Fast Food passage is a popular IELTS Reading text that challenges common beliefs about traditional versus modern food. It explores how industrial and processed foods have often been unfairly criticised by those who idealise natural, handmade meals. Understanding this passage is important for IELTS candidates because it tests skills like identifying main ideas, completing diagrams, and answering detailed questions based on complex arguments. This guide provides clear explanations and model answers to help IELTS test takers improve their reading comprehension and score higher in this section.

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In Praise or Fast Food IELTS Reading Answer Passage

In Praise or Fast Food

The media and a multitude of cookbook writers would have us believe that modern, fast, processed food is a disaster and that it is a mark of sophistication to bemoan the steel roller mill and sliced white bread while yearning for stone-ground flour and a brick oven. Perhaps, we should call those who scorn industrialized food, culinary Luddites, after the 19th-century English workers who rebelled against the machines that destroyed their way of life. Instead of technology, what these Luddites abhor is commercial sauces and any synthetic aid to flavoring our food.

Culinary Luddism has come to signify more than just taste, however. It presents itself as a moral and political crusade, and it is here that I begin to back off. As a historian, I cannot accept the notion that the sunny, rural days of yesterday are in such contrast to the grey industrial present. I refute the philosophy that so crudely pits fresh and natural against processed and preserved, local against global, slow against fast, and additive-free against contaminated. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.

It will come as a shock to many to discover that the notion of food being fresh and natural is a rather modern one. For our ancestors, what was natural frequently tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruit inedibly sour, and fresh vegetables bitter. Natural was unreliable. Fresh milk soured, eggs went rotten, and everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger. What's more, natural was usually indigestible. Grains, which supplied 50 to 90 percent of the calories in most societies, had to be threshed, ground, and cooked to be fit for consumption.

So to make food tasty, safe, digestible, and healthy, our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were nothing at all like their original form. They created sweet oranges and juicy apples and non-bitter legumes, happily abandoning their more natural but less tasty ancestors. They dried their meat and fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used additives and preservatives like sugar, salt, oil, and vinegar to make the food edible.

Eating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror; only the uncivilized, the poor, and the starving resorted to it. The ancient Greeks regarded the consumption of greens and root vegetables as a sign of bad times, and many succeeding civilizations believed the same. Happiness was not a verdant garden abounding in fresh fruits, but a securely locked storehouse jammed with preserved, processed foods.

What about the idea that the best food is handmade in the country? That food comes from the country goes without saying. However, the idea that country people eat better than city dwellers is preposterous. Very few of our ancestors working the land were independent peasants baking their bread and salting down their pigs. Most were burdened with heavy taxes and rent, often paid directly by the food they produced. Many were ultimately serfs or slaves, who subsisted on what was leftover watery soup and gritty flatbread.

The dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane, aristocrats who collected the surplus. This is true of the lasagna of northern Italy as it is of the chicken korma of Mughal Delhi, the moo shu pork of imperial China, and the pilafs 

and baklava of the great Ottoman palace in Istanbul. Cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation.

Preparing home-cooked breakfast, dinner, and tea for eight to ten people 365 days a year was servitude. Churning butter or skinning and cleaning rabbits, without the option of picking up the phone for a pizza if something went wrong, was unremitting, unforgiving toil. Not long ago, in Mexico, most women could expect to spend five hours a day kneeling at the grindstone preparing the dough for the family's tortillas.

In the first half of the 20th century, Italians embraced factory-made pasta and canned tomatoes. In the second half, Japanese women welcomed factory-made bread because they could sleep a little longer instead of getting up to make rice. As supermarkets appeared in Eastern Europe, people rejoiced at the convenience of ready-made goods. Culinary modernism had proved what was wanted: food that was processed, preservable, industrial, novel, and fast, the food of the elite at a price everyone could afford. When modern food became available, people grew taller and stronger and lived longer.

So the sunlit past of the culinary Luddites never existed and their ethos is based not on history but a fairy tale. So what? Certainly, no one would deny that an industrialized food supply has its problems. Perhaps we should eat more fresh, natural, locally-sourced, slow food. Does it matter if the history is not quite right? It matters quite a bit, I believe. If we do not understand that most people had no choice but to devote their lives to growing and cooking food, we are incapable of comprehending that modern food allows us unparalleled choices. If we urge the farmer to stay at his olive press and the housewife to remain at her stove, all so that we may eat traditionally pressed olive oil and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old. If we fail to understand how scant and monotonous most traditional diets were, we fail to appreciate the 'ethnic foods' we encounter.

If we assume that good food means only old or slow or homemade food, we miss the fact that many industrial foods are better. Certainly, no one with a grindstone will ever produce chocolate as sophisticated as that produced by 72 hours in a conching machine. And let us not forget that the current popularity of Italian food owes much to two convenience foods that even purists love, factory pasta and canned tomatoes. Far from fleeing them, we should be clamoring for more high-quality industrial foods.

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples - salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea -produced by food corporations.

Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things: We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they've done us all a service by teaching us how to use the bounty delivered to us by the global economy. Their ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen, and many of us would be starving.

Also Read: 

• IELTS Reading Tips And Strategies

• IELTS Listening Tips

• IELTS Writing Tips

• IELTS Speaking Tips And Tricks

In Praise or Fast Food IELTS Reading Answer Sample Questions 

Questions 1–3: Diagram Completion

Complete the diagram below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Diagram: Traditional Food Preparation Process

1. Fresh ingredients often had to be
   - _________ to improve flavour.

2. Natural foods like meat and milk
   - _________ or rotted quickly.

3. Ancient grains were processed before eating
   - threshed, ground, and _________

Questions 7–11: Sentence Completion

Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

7. The author believes that the idea of fresh food is a relatively __________.

8. People in the past associated natural food with __________ conditions.

9. The author argues that most peasants ate __________ and bread.

10. Urban societies have historically been centres of __________.

11. In Italy and Japan, factory-made food was welcomed because it saved __________.

Questions 12–17: Multiple Choice Questions

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.

12. What does the writer suggest about the media’s view of processed food?
    A. It has improved health outcomes.
    B. It is treated as inferior to traditional food.
    C. It is essential in rural areas.
    D. It has no moral value.

13. Why does the writer mention the term "culinary Luddites"?
    A. To praise people who cook traditional food
    B. To compare food critics to 19th-century machine destroyers
    C. To describe professional chefs
    D. To criticise modern cookbook authors

14. What point does the author make about early natural food?
    A. It was usually delicious and nutritious.
    B. It needed no preparation to be edible.
    C. It often tasted bad and was hard to digest.
    D. It was mostly eaten by royalty.

15. What does the author say about food in the countryside?
    A. It was always of higher quality than city food.
    B. It was typically sold to neighbouring villages.
    C. It was rarely sufficient or varied.
    D. It was cooked mainly for festivals.

16. What does the author think about traditional home cooking?
    A. It was a joyful and communal event.
    B. It was a demanding, everyday responsibility.
    C. It only occurred in wealthier households.
    D. It was usually done by professional cooks.

17. What is the author’s main argument in the final paragraph?
    A. People today should adopt traditional cooking techniques.
    B. Culinary Luddites are right about everything.
    C. Industrial food gives modern people essential freedom.
    D. Traditional food is more ethical than processed food.

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