📙 Part 2: Describe a time when you tried a new food for the first time

This episode's vocabulary

Appetizing (adj.) - interesting or attractive, esp. because you think it will be good to eat.

Prohibit (verb) - to officially stop something from being done by making rules or laws that do not allow it.

Close approximation - close to something.

Gut (noun) - a way of deciding what should be done or what is right, that is based on how someone feels rather than thinking about reasons.

Be taken aback - to be very shocked or surprised.

Sensibility (noun) - the ability to feel and react to something.

Delicacy (noun) - something especially rare or expensive that is good to eat.

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Questions and Answers

M: Rory, yum, yum, yum, yum. Are you ready?

R: I am.

M: Fire away, baby.

R: So I suppose I should talk about the time when I accidentally ate dog. This was while I was staying in Wa, which is a town and indeed the name of the township in northern Ghana. That's a country on the west coast of Africa. It's sort of, it's on the coast and it's just south of Burkina Faso. Um, and there, in this particular township there are quite a lot of dogs, which are kept for this purpose. Or I discovered later that they can just grab one off the street and butcher it in a wet market, which doesn't sound particularly appetizing. A wet market, by the way, is just it's a place where animals are kept and they're butchered there as opposed to being butchered or slaughtered in a separate place and then brought to the butchers. It all happens at once. Sometimes it happens in front of the customer. I'm glad it didn't happen in front of me. Anyway, I first had it at a restaurant after I ordered something from a menu. I wasn't actually particularly paying attention since I can eat just about everything. And I was speaking to a friend at the time, but the waiting staff seemed impressed with whatever I'd done, so I thought I'd made the right call anyway. I thought whatever I ordered tasted good. So I talked to the chef and the waiting staff there and I said. Wow, I knew you guys were Muslim because it's a Muslim majority area in the country, the south is more Christian, the north is more Muslim. And Muslims don't really eat dogs. In fact, I think it's prohibited. And so I said, and I didn't think they eat pork either. And so I said, I wasn't expecting such good pork here. But this is great. And and I had no idea what I'd eaten, but it was a close approximation to pork. So I just went with my gut and the chef stood there, like, you do know that you just ate dog, right? And I was very surprised, to say the least. I wasn't ill or anything. But at the thought of this. Like I say, I was quite taken aback, I suppose. It was pretty good if heavily seasoned with spices. And I think like other sort of leaves and things that are used to season foods there. But if I had known what I'd ordered, I think I would have chosen something different just because it's kind of a shock to the Western sensibilities. However, I got over it. And indeed, I tried it again a couple of times after that. And at my leaving party when I left Ghana. So what started out as a primary experience or the first time wasn't the last by far.

M: And what about your friends? Have they ever had it?

R: Oh, my friends in Africa have.

M: Yeah. Did they like it?

R: Um, well, yeah, they cook it, not regularly, but it's considered a delicacy.

M: Thank you for your surprising answer.

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Discussion

M: Oh my God, dear listener, look at that. Dog. Yum, yum, yum.

R: Eating man's best friend. Yeah.

M: Oh, Rory. Oh, I'm speechless. So was it like a dog sandwich, a dog salad?

R: It was just pieces of meat. If you imagine what shashlik looks like when you take the skewer out.

M: Dog barbecue.

R: Yeah.

M: Oh, my God. Wow.

R: With lots of pepper and seasoning. Like I said, there was lots of it. And we should talk about the preparation of the food because food can be seasoned.

M: Seasoned, yeah.

R: And we have a whole, um. Oh no, we didn't. We talked about seasons like favourite seasons. But we haven't talked about seasoning.

M: You season food. You kind of put salt and pepper and all other spices. Like rosemary, you put basel... So the dog was heavily seasoned. We are very sorry if you love dogs. Sorry about that. But yeah, this is a true story. Oh, I ate a guinea pig once.

R: Yes.

M: In Peru.

R: However, if you haven't eaten dog and maybe the thought of it turns your stomach, we can focus on just how to structure the story. So I started off with I suppose I should speak about the time when...

M: I accidentally a dog. Oops.

R: Yes. But here the focus is on the time when it's the time when you have something. So it can be a specific time or you could talk about a festival, food. So you could talk about a specific time in that regard, it happens regularly.

M: Make sure you do use the past continuous. When I was staying, when I was visiting, when I was going out with my friends. past continuous.

R: And then you could say, I first had the food, I first did something. To describe, well, just to set the scenery, I suppose, and you talk about what you were doing at the time, I wasn't paying attention as well.

M: Yeah, I ordered something from a menu.

R: You can usually say in terms of to introduce the next stage in the story, but you can also just say anyway and then move on to the next thing.

M: Yeah, anyway is a good one. Yeah.

R: Yeah. And I said it a couple of times, just to give you a few examples of when to use this, and people do this a lot when they're speaking. Yeah. Just to change the subject because you realize that you're rabbiting on for a while.

M: Yeah. In the previous one we mentioned the word in terms of. So in terms of taste, it was quite good.

R: Yeah, but then you can say just say, anyway, it tasted nice.

M: Or it was delicious. And then you can say I complimented the chef. Even if you didn't compliment the chef, we just can use this words. Not the chief, but the chef. The main person in the kitchen is the chef.

R: There were chiefs there. I met the chiefs of the local villages.

M: And then the conditional, Rory. The conditional. I had no idea what. No, that's past perfect, yeah.

R: For once I get to make the grammar correction. It's not a conditional. It's past perfect.

M: Yeah, there's no if. I had no idea what I'd eaten, I had eaten because first he ate it and then he had no idea.

R: But it was a close approximation, which is like saying it was close to tasting like pork. But a close approximation is another way of saying like it's close to something and its higher level.

M: nd then again, when you prepare for this topic, make sure that you know the name of the specific dish. You can describe this dish or food like the taste. And you have some vocabulary about this. The conditional. So if I'd known, if I had known what I had ordered, past perfect, then I think I'd have chosen something different. Oh my God.

R: You could use this to talk about any kind of food, though. If I'd known what I'd ordered, then I would have chosen something different.

M: Hmm. Yeah. Again, a new food could be kind of any food. It could not be like some exotic food. Right. But you, for example, can make up a story when you ate a cockroach or you ate some bugs, or snakes. I don't know know, what else do people eat. The whale, tiger. A tiger steak. Kangaroo. Oh, gosh, it's horrible.

R: I've had kangaroo.

M: You've had kangaroo? Oh, baby kangaroo. Oh, you're a horrible man.

R: Not a baby kangaroo , a full grown kangaroo.

M: Oh, he ate dog and kangaroo. God...

R: They do in Australia. They're considered pests.

M: Oh, come on. Yeah, but even if you had like a new food like pizza or pizza with seafood for the first time in your life, why not talk about pizza? Again, you should choose something that you can talk about. Don't choose what you can't talk about. Logic.

R: It seems like an obvious piece of advice.

M: Now, but really, some of my students, they chose a topic that they couldn't talk about. They didn't know the words. They couldn't keep going. They were talking about something they had no idea of. But they chose to do that. Don't do that.

R: Don't do that.

M: Don't eat dog. Hopefully it was fine for you to listen to this horrible, horrendous, overwhelming, heebie jeebies story.

R: And if you're still with us, then follow us on to part three, where we're going to talk about eating food in general.

M: No dogs, dog free episode. Promise.

R: Is it?

M: Bye!

R: Bye!

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