How to write a descriptive essay about food with examples (2024)

When you have been instructed to write a descriptive essay about food, you should first of all find a topic. The subject must be something that has a taste, smell or texture. You have to make sure that your description is vivid and shows the readers how the food tastes, looks or smells throughout your essay.

Writing a food descriptive essay with examples

In order to write an effective descriptive essay about food you should always:

• Start with describing its shape, size or physical features. When doing this you can use comparisons like big, small, hard and soft etc.
• Describe the color of the food,
• Describe the taste of food,
• Describe the smell.
• Describe the texture.

For example: peanut butter is characteristic by its smooth texture which is neither too thick nor too thin. It does not only taste good but smelling it will also give a pleasant experience. When it comes to smell, you can describe its particular odor and say if it is pleasant or not.

If the food has a texture like that of Jell-O, then you should focus more on describing its texture in comparison with something else.

For instance: Jell-O is very similar to Silly Putty when it is soft but as it gets colder, becomes much harder than Silly Putty and even retains its form after freezing. It also tastes good and gives a nice feeling in your mouth while eating it.

Before writing a descriptive essay about food you have to know what your reader will expect from this work because they are not going to be interested in hearing what kinds of foods are available in the market. By this I mean that you need to think about what your readers will want and more importantly, how they might read it.

As a final thought – when writing a descriptive essay about food, focus on describing only those aspects of the food that make it unique. For example: if you are writing about chocolate ice cream, do not talk about anything else except for its taste. In other words don’t compare it with vanilla ice-cream or any other kind of ice-cream in general because there is no point in doing so.

How to describe food in an essay

What are some descriptive words you can use to describe the food in your essay?

• Nouns – fruits, vegetables, proteins, fish and fast foods
• Adjectives – fresh, hot, cold, new/old, delicious, tasty (good taste), yummy (nice smell) , spicy (hot taste), crisp (crisp sound when biting into it) , soggy or moist (soft texture of food)
• Verbs – baked, fried, sautéed, steamed, grilled, boiled, smoked.

How do adjectives change the tone of a sentence in a food descriptive essay?

Use special details through special nouns and verbs to make it easier for a reader to mentally eat what you are writing about because images are easier to imagine and notice than just plain words.

Nouns hold importance when creating mental pictures of what is being described because using nouns will help readers see things as if they were there with you at the time you are describing.

Verbs also play an important role with descriptive sentences; they help convey action and enhance description by showing an activity under way or completed, thus providing information on how people feel, think, and behave.

Adjectives give us more insight of what is happening when reading your essay because adjectives are words that describe or modify things.

Examples of descriptive paragraph about favorite food

Below are a few examples on descriptive paragraph about favorite food. They further show how to describe food in an essay.

• Example 1: If you bite into a warm apple pie with vanilla ice cream piled on top of it from Original Joe’s next door to campus then the descriptive words you can use are hot and tasty.
• Example 2: If you smell the food as soon as it’s cooked then the descriptive word that matches this is yummy.
• Example 3: Crispy in “crispy fried chicken” describes how the chicken will sound when bite into it or if you scoop some fries from a deep fryer; crisp helps to describe what crispy sounds like.

You can review other examples of descriptive essay to learn how to write good essays.

This is an example of how nouns, verbs, and adjectives are used to describe something when writing a food descriptive essay.

Example 1: I like the way my mom’s grilled chicken is cooked because it makes my mouth water to think about how good her food tastes from the grill on hot summer nights. It’s a savory and sweet taste with a charred flavor in every bite if you cook your food right.

Example 2: Last summer I went on a trip to New York city with my family then we stopped at Chinatown for lunch; if you ever go there then you have to try the street food they have like the steamed pork dumplings served with soy sauce! Those little things were cooked perfectly because I was able to cut them open easily when putting them in my mouth. The filling inside of each piece was juicy and melted in your mouth with each bite that I had.

Example 3: Smells can be powerful and influence our moods in body language such as smiling or frowning while they impact feelings about what you’re smelling. Some smells help us remember earlier days of happiness but some other smells just make us think back on bad memories from the past; smell is one of our five senses so use it wisely.

Meaning: One thing synonymous with food is pleasure which makes me wonder if the word “pleasure” sounds better than “delight” because delight brings up more imagery of happiness which could be true because of how good food makes you feel and the smell of food can make us hungry by remembering events in the past.

Example 4: Food is one of the most important things humans need to survive because it provides us with energy and nutrients that can’t be found in fruits and vegetables like carbohydrates, fat, protein, vitamins or minerals.

Example of a descriptive essay about food

The school canteen is a cozy place that serves food to the students every day. It has several tables and chairs for the students to sit, and along with these are metal lockers where you can put your books safely. The walls of the canteen have posters displayed on them regarding different events that happen in the school but none of it is more enjoyable than when the delicious food gets served on your plate! My favorite food item there is a burger with lettuce, tomato and cheese spread all over it! In spite of being called burgers they are not made entirely out of meat; they have some veggies too which I love! But my favorite of all is a burger with ketchup, mayonnaise and lettuce. It is one of the best things I would be having in school!

Sometimes when there are festivals like Holi celebrated within the campus we also get some very delicious food there. When this festival arrives everyone likes to play with colors and our teachers allow us to do so as well because it’s fun. To celebrate Holi many people prepare special dishes for us that are spicy but very healthy too! We love to have jalebi this day; it is sweet though salty but hot at the same time which makes its taste irresistible! After playing till late afternoon we get tired and hungry too so sometimes we order food from outside as well, especially Chinese food! We love to have it as we feel it’s a different and exotic taste.

Then there are times during the assembly when everyone would like to listen attentively to what is being taught in class but will end up getting distracted by hunger pangs! In such situations food always comes to our rescue as this gets us the required energy for the week ahead of us. There are many other items on the menu from which I can choose; all of them sound very tempting, and I get confused about where should I start from? And then going back home with my tummy full, rested and happy makes me feel at peace with myself. This feeling that I am always looking forward to having is one that truly defines “happiness”. The canteen gives me a chance to listen to the music that I like without any distractions and also read the books of my choice, so it’s always considered as one of my most favorite places in school.

Then there is another item on their menu which sounds very interesting for me: Chicken Manchurian! It is delicious too and goes well with fried rice! Both these items are famous here but at times when I do not have enough time this item gets replaced by some other dish because they cannot be kept waiting for long. The meals that are served during breakfast are usually light ones; they consist mainly of paratha, puri sabji, chivda and masala dosa. All these items sound very yummy especially when we think about having them after waking up from a sound sleep. But sometimes my friends and I would like to have some different items on the menu; as we are in our teens these things become very important for us so that we can test out new tastes!

I love eating eggs too, but they tend to be kept covered during school period; once it gets over then you will see them being served with ketchup or chutney. The school canteen serves most of the food items at a low cost because education is taken care of by the government and thus such facilities should also be provided free at schools. So, these meals are actually subsidized for students in order to make their childhood better than what it already is! Having set meal timings makes studying more efficient for students as they do not get distracted by hunger pangs during classes.

7 Tips on Writing a Descriptive Essay About Favorite Food

1. Have an idea about what kind of food you would like to describe in your food essay.
2. Choose three or four things that make your favorite food unique .
3. Describe these things by writing sentences using adjectives, adverbs and other forms of descriptive language, rather than reciting a list of ingredients. Come up with as many descriptions as there are characteristics and you can come up with for the food.
4. Instead of telling the reader how something tastes directly, compare it with another item that is more familiar to the reader (such as cake or pizza). This gives the reader an easier idea of what the food tastes like without trying it themselves .
5. Make sure your descriptions include all five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. They should also be in chronological order: For example, if you’re describing how a food smells first thing in the morning, and then again after a few hours have passed.
6. Use figurative language to paint a picture of what your food looks like .
7. Give yourself enough time to write the descriptive essay about your favorite food. Don’t rush through it; make sure you spend at least 30 minutes on it so that you can inject quality into it rather than letting it become an assignment where you wrote for quantity’s sake . A descriptive essay is supposed to bring a smile to your face when you read it and not cause eye-strain or insomnia!

If you can sum up all these tips into one sentence then it would be this: Before you write your descriptive essay about food, take time to plan your essay, create a descriptive essay outline, and research on the best food descriptive essay topics to write about before you begin to to write a paper describing what makes the food special and how it affects you.

Writing about my favourite food essay with an descriptive example

When writing about my favourite food essay, here are some of the questions you need to ask yourself:

What is my favorite food? – Identify and start the essay with ‘My favourite food is……’

This is an example of an introduction paragraph about my favourite food:

Prompt: Write a descriptive essay on: My favourite food essay

My favorite food is seafood. I love seafood because it is so healthy and when you cook it right, it can be delicious also. I am going to tell you about the different kinds of fish that I like. My favorite fish to eat is salmon because while other people might think tuna is better than salmon, I personally feel that full-fledged taste of salmon beats out any other type of fish in the sea.

How best can I describe favorite food?

I feel that salmon is the best tasting fish because it combines juicy flavor with a tender texture. Before I ate salmon, I was scared of eating fish but when someone gave me some to taste, I fell in love with salmon and have eaten it ever since. The fact that you can cook salmon on many different types of dishes makes this my favorite food and I would recommend that anyone who likes to eat to give this dish a try.

I am not very familiar with other types of seafood such as shrimp or lobster because they are not really popular in my area and my family did not like them either so they were never offered for me to eat when we had family get-togethers where we cooked food at home. I do not really think there is anything special about this meat other than the fact that you can prepare it many different ways. My friend loves onion rings but she used to be scared of trying things like seafood which he thought were gross until someone introduced him to salmon, shrimp and lobster after which he never looked back.

Favorite food essay writing tips

Follow these tips to write a grade winning essays with good descriptive paragraph about favorite food:

• Make yourself comfortable before writing the descriptive text about food
• Find more information: if you think you not ready enough to describe your food, research and find content related to the favourite food you wish to describe. You can also find some pictures or videos from internet and put them together to describe the food.
• Seeing is believing, just look at the food and discover its characteristics one by one. It would be better if you can cook this kind of food and feel the process of cooking just like professional chefs do.
• Remember not only writing detailed content but also illustrate them with the help of pictures or videos that related to food, At last, don’t forget to use “I” and “me” instead of “you”.

When you follow these tips, you will be more confident and ready to write a descriptive paragraph about your favorite food.