Fun with Food Idioms

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Hello, welcome to another class. I’m Robin, and today our topic is Food Idioms. So first of all, what is an idiom? In case you don’t know, an idiom is a group of words that, together, they have a definition that is different from the individual words. So it could be three or four words together or whole sentence. And this group of words has one meaning, but if you look at the meaning of each word, it is different. Okay? And it’s important to remember that idioms are not literal. The meaning of the idiom is not literal. You’ll see what I mean when I show you my examples. I’m going to give you 10 examples today of idioms related to food, okay, so there are so many idioms in the English language, and grouping them by category is a good way to remember them. So today, I have 10 food idioms for you to learn and practice. 

Okay, so let’s start with the first one, “to bring home the bacon”. Again, this is not literal, but it just means to earn money for a family, okay, to live on. So normally, if you have a family, the mother, the father, or both are the ones who bring home the bacon. That means they have a job, they earn money, and with that money they can provide for their children, for example, so this bacon, it kind of means money or food, they provide the food for their children, etc. So it’s not literal bacon, it just means that they earn money for their family. 

All right, let’s look at another food idiom, this one is kind of funny. “To butter someone up.” Again, not literal, you do not put butter on someone. It means that you are very kind or friendly to someone, so that that person will do what you want, or will do something for you or help you. So let’s say you are looking to get a promotion at work. So you might butter up your boss, for example, by working extra hard, offering to do extra projects, by complimenting them, just by doing, being extra nice. And then, when the time comes, you when you ask for this raise, you have buttered up your boss so that maybe they like you more, or they’re very happy with you. So it will be a good situation for you, let’s say, so to butter someone up. 

Alright, you may have heard of this one. “To have your cake and eat it too.” Okay, what does this mean? To have your cake and eat it too. So it means to have two good things or to do two good things at the same time that are actually not possible to have or to do at the same time. So think of for example, we pay taxes and, with those taxes, you have some benefits. So if you want to pay low taxes, you’re not going to have more of these benefits of the money that you pay. So you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t pay a little bit and expect to get a lot, for example. Okay, so there’s many ways that you can use this situation. It means you can’t have it all. You can’t have everything. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. All right. 

If we say something is “not my cup of tea”, it means that it’s not your style. It’s not something that you like. So maybe your friends invite you to go on a hiking trip or camping trip, but you don’t really like that. So you can say “Actually, no, no, thank you. It’s not my cup of tea.” So something that you don’t like, you don’t particularly enjoy, is not your cup of tea. 

Okay, here’s another one. “To have a bun in the oven”. All right. This means to be pregnant. If a woman, if we say she has a bun in the oven, it means that she is pregnant. And you can imagine, this one kind of makes sense because when you have a bun, you put it in the oven and the oven bakes it. You bake the bun and it grows, right so if you have a baby growing inside of you, it’s kind of like having a bun in the oven. Okay, so to have a bun in the oven means to be pregnant. And it’s kind of like a nicer way to say it. 

Um, alright, the next one. “To cry over spilled milk” or many people will say, don’t cry over spilled milk. So, to cry over spilled milk means to be upset or to worry about a situation that has already happened and that you cannot change. Okay, so many people say “Don’t cry over spilled milk”, or “There’s no use crying over spilled milk” because we cannot change the past. You can only try to improve in the future or do something differently in the future. So there is no point in being upset about something that has already happened. Don’t cry over spilt milk, because we can’t change anything about it. 

Alright, “to spill the beans”, alright to spill the beans. If I spill the beans, maybe someone has told me a secret. Like a friend, she’s told me that she’s pregnant, but she doesn’t want anyone else to know. So if I tell more of our friends then I spill the beans because it was a secret. Or maybe the person wanted to keep it a secret for a while longer or something. Or maybe you’re planning a surprise birthday party for someone and if they find out then you spill the beans if you accidentally, normally, when we talk about spilling the beans or just spill the beans, it’s an accident, like you don’t mean to share this information. Or maybe you don’t know that it’s a secret. So you tell someone and you’ve spilled the beans because they weren’t supposed to know. So that’s kind of a fun one. 

Okay, “in a nutshell”. If we talk about something in a nutshell, it means that we summarize something in just a few words. So if you can, if you ask someone if you miss a meeting, “Tell me what happened at the meeting. Well, in a nutshell, we’re going to hire more staff. In a nutshell, the company is merging with another one.” Okay, so just saying something in very brief short terms is to put it in a nutshell. 

Okay, “the cream of the crop”, the cream of the crop. This means that in a group of people, the very best ones. Okay, so this could be on a team on a sports team, or in a class. So the cream of the crop in a class are the people with the highest grades, the smartest, the most successful, etc. So these people are the cream of the crop. All right. 

And finally, my last one is “cheesy”. So if something is cheesy, there are kind of two different definitions here. It can mean cheap or low quality. So let’s say you go on vacation and you buy the typical souvenir that everyone buys, you could call that cheesy because it’s cheap. It’s low quality, but you know, everyone buys these kinds of things. Or we can say that something is cheesy when it’s really like exaggerated or sentimental, for example, a romantic film or a romantic comedy. We could often say that they’re cheesy because they’re not very realistic. Oh, they’re always, you know, they’re so in love. They’re always together. It’s not. It’s not exactly like real life. So we say that that is cheesy. 

Okay, so now that I have taught you 10 food idioms, I want you to practice with them. In the comments, you can write some examples. And if you can think of another food idiom because as I said, there are so many in the English language, then write that in the comments too. So I hope that you learned something new in today’s class and you now have these new food idioms that you can use in English conversation. So take care and I will see you next time. Bye!