This is full of beans!

With the onion crisis still rocking the country (though prices are coming down) I think how English is such a delicious language steeped in foodie lingo. Sometimes, to be a writer, one needs to 'taste' words, roll them on your tongue, see how they feel, sweet, salty or odour free? Do they have 'bite'? Or like old beer, have they gone flat? You need to have a sensory feeling for the word to be able to convey precisely what you want to feel.

Maybe that is why those who coined this language thought of food and included so many gastronomic terms in the English lexicon to make people convey in the foodie way what they are exactly feeling.

Those who coined the English languageu00a0 thought of food and included so many gastronomic terms in the lexicon

Like, I can imagine the father (or mother) of the English language looking at a bright, red apple while writing down, "he or she was the apple of her eye" which means he or she was the centre of that person's universe.

Then, a packet of mozzarella has been forever immortalised in the phrase: big cheese, while a couple of pigs will surely oink in surprise if they hear that English has something called: to bring home the bacon, which also means to put the butter on the table, which simply means that one has to bring the money into the house. We do not know if the pigs would appreciate being made into bacon but that is another matter altogether.

Then of course, the humble spud has none too complimentary mention when you call somebody a couch potato, but there is some redemption in the phrase: that is the cream of the crop, which means you are the best of the lot.

Several references to pie are also part of this crazy angrezi, like pie in the sky, eating humble pie and also having your finger in too many pies, the last one meaning of course to do many things at once.

Then of course is the reference to the oven, when you tell somebody that his knowledge of the subject is half-baked or when you laugh and say, he is as nutty as a fruitcake. Cake in fact, is represented several times with phrases like: to have your cake and eat it too, take the cake, all in homage to the dessert that sits for one moment on your lips and forever on your hips.

All in all, there is so much to eat in English that you could come away feeling quite satiated simply with all the edible idioms in this beautiful language. And we haven't even come to the fashion plate bit. Nothing says it quite as aptly as a foodie phrase. Never go on a diet, English. Calories be damned.