Meaning:
Meat and two vegetables, that is, meat with potatoes and another vegetable,
is a traditional English meal.
Background:
The term, in an allusion to the commonplace nature of this type of meal, has
also been used metaphorically to denote an ordinary, run-of-the-mill
offering. In the 20th century it has also been a jokey reference to male
genitalia.
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
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Meat and two veg would've sounded haute cuisine to many Chinese in the 50s and
60s. The British used to sail abroad and pillaged the world to better their
life-style. We landlubbers looked inward and lived on our atavistic wits and a
newly acquired faith, the triumph of the spirit over the material. We had vast
land and hard-working people, we reasoned, and we settled with nothing ordinary,
let alone failure. Production brigades reported in some years unheard of
bounty: thousands of catties of grain, tens of thousands of catties of sweet
potato, and 250 catties of cotton a mu. (千斤粮，万斤薯，棉花产量二百五)
