IELTS Speaking Part 3: Food
4 Part 3 discussion questions on food, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
What food do you eat on special occasions?
In my family the menu depends entirely on the occasion, but plov remains the one constant for anything of real significance. Birthdays, weddings and the arrival of relatives from abroad all culminate in my mother's plov, cooked with saffron and lamb and served with the crisp rice crust everyone quietly jostles over. It takes most of the day to prepare, which is really the whole point, since nobody produces it on an ordinary Tuesday. For Novruz the emphasis shifts entirely towards sweets, and the table becomes a display rather than simply a meal. We bake pakhlava and shekerbura in quantities that make no sense for four people, precisely because half of it ends up with neighbours and anyone who calls by during the holiday. I'm a hopeless cook, so my job is folding pastry badly and getting scolded for it. Either way, the aroma of saffron or cardamom drifting from the kitchen is usually enough to tell me exactly what we're celebrating.
Is food now better than in the past?
In terms of choice and safety it's unquestionably better, and that's easy to overlook. My grandparents ate whatever the season yielded and lived off what they'd preserved through winter, whereas now you can buy fresh vegetables in February, food is refrigerated properly from farm to shop, and the kinds of poisoning once fairly common are now rare. A family in Baku today can rustle up Italian, Turkish or Georgian food on a whim, which simply wasn't feasible in the eighties. What's clearly deteriorated is the processed end of the diet. A staggering proportion of what's sold now is engineered to be cheap and moreish rather than nourishing, loaded with sugar, salt and additives, and the surge in obesity and diabetes tracks that shift fairly closely. The best food on offer is better; the average food people actually eat probably isn't. So my honest answer hinges entirely on whether you're asking about what's available or about what most people actually put on their plates.
Are there any differences between the food people eat today and the food people ate in the past?
The clearest difference is that food has stopped being anchored to a season or a place. My grandmother's cooking was dictated by whatever the garden produced that month and what could be preserved through winter, whereas a supermarket today stocks strawberries in January and bananas that travelled halfway round the world. That's given people extraordinary variety, though it also means most of us have no real sense of when anything actually grows. The second shift is in how food reaches the table at all. A generation ago almost everything was cooked at home from raw ingredients by somebody who spent hours over it, whereas now a large share of meals is bought ready-made, delivered or eaten out. Traditional dishes that once ate up a whole afternoon, like dolma, have become holiday food rather than everyday fare. So the range of what we eat has broadened enormously across two generations, while the share we actually cook ourselves from scratch has shrunk just as dramatically.
Do you think fast food has a negative effect on people's health?
It does, though I'd pin the blame on frequency rather than the food itself. A single burger and chips isn't going to harm anyone, but a typical fast-food meal crams most of a day's calories, salt and saturated fat into fifteen minutes of eating, and because it's low in fibre it doesn't keep you full for long. Eat that three or four times a week and the arithmetic eventually catches up with you, which is roughly what the surge in obesity and type two diabetes reflects. The subtler damage lies in what fast food displaces rather than what it contains. Once a family gets used to ordering in, they stop cooking altogether, children never learn what a home-cooked meal actually tastes like, and the convenient option becomes the default for the next generation too. That habit proves far harder to reverse than any single meal. Eaten occasionally it's genuinely harmless, and the whole problem is that it's very rarely eaten only occasionally.
Reading a model answer is not the same as saying one. The sample above shows what a strong Part 3 answer sounds like. What it cannot tell you is how yours sounds — whether you hesitate, repeat the question back, or run out of things to say at forty seconds.
You can record an answer to this exact question and get it marked on fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and pronunciation — the same four criteria the examiner uses.
Common questions
How is Part 3 different from Part 1?
Part 1 is about you; Part 3 is about people in general. The questions move to society, causes and consequences, and the answers are expected to be longer and more developed — an opinion plus a reason plus an example, rather than two sentences.
What if I have no opinion on the question?
You are not marked on the opinion, so pick one and support it. Saying you have never thought about it and stopping there leaves the examiner nothing to assess.
How long does Part 3 last?
Four to five minutes. The topics develop out of your Part 2 card, so the discussion is usually connected to what you just described.
Model answers written and reviewed by The English All-in-One IELTS team. They are teaching models showing what each band looks like, not real candidate scripts.