VOA慢速英语2011--Fathers Who Cook; Food Trucks Roll Acros

THIS IS AMERICA - Fathers Who Cook; Food Trucks Roll Across America

FRITZI BODENHEIMER: Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I’m Fritzi Bodenheimer.
MARIO RITTER: And I’m Mario Ritter. This week on our program, we hear about fathers who cook for their families. Then, we look at the spread of food trucks in American cities.
(MUSIC)
FRITZI BODENHEIMER: John Donohue is an editor and cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine. He discovered a new job for himself when he became a father for the first time.
JOHN DONOHUE: “I started cooking a lot for my wife and the baby. It was a lot of fun.”
FRITZI BODENHEIMER: Now Mr. Donohue has published a book called “Man With a Pan: Culinary Adventures of Fathers Who Cook For Their Families.” He asked other men to share their stories. He collected thirty-four essays written by writers and chefs
Kimchi fried rice
One of them was Mark Bittman , a food writer for the New York Times. Mr. Donohue explained how Mr. Bittman became a food writer.
JOHN DONOHUE: “He was married, he had a new baby. He was driving a taxi. He was kind of working odd jobs and so he started to cook. That led to his first book, which actually put him on the map as a writer.”
MARIO RITTER: “Man With a Pan” also includes an essay by the author Stephen King.
JOHN DONOHUE: “Steven King started cooking for his family in Maine after his wife lost her sense of taste and lost interest in doing any cooking. He wanted better food for his family, so he went into the kitchen. He talks about using the microwave and other basic things about keeping things simple. That’s his motto. He has great advice: ‘don’t set the kitchen on fire.’”
FRITZI BODENHEIMER: Author Mohammed Naseehu Ali shared childhood memories of his mother’s kitchen in Ghana.
MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI: “I grew up in a Hausa Muslim community. And, in our community, it's highly frowned upon for men to be around a kitchen. But my mother, she allowed me to hang around while she cooked.”
And that experience in the kitchen may have also helped prepare Mr. Ali to become a writer.
MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI:: “I’ve actually kind of compared cooking to writing. It’s pretty much the same thing. In writing, you have a blank page for you to start with. In cooking, you have an empty pot to creatively start thinking of what you going to put in the pot, to mix it together to create some food.”
MARIO RITTER: Travel writer Jack² Hitt also wrote an essay for “Man With a Pan.”
JACK HITT: “In the essay, one of the things you discover when you start to cook is that following a recipe wasn’t simply just a matter a measuring out cups and tablespoons, but something much bigger and more metaphysical that that. It’s a very minimalist sort of form that implies so much more than what is actually written. And it’s like gardening, in some sense, or driving that becomes second nature and becomes instinctive³.”
Mr. Hitt says his cooking skills have evolved over the last sixteen years. In the process, he discovered a way to better connect with his family.
JACK HITT: “All of sudden, I found that there was this little kid in the room who had been watching me doing this from a chair, confined, and suddenly was very interested in participating. So the next thing I know, I had an assistant. And then a few years after that, I had another assistant. And, we’ve been sort of experimenting in the kitchen, the three of us, and then whenever my wife is around, which it was increasingly more common, four of us, in the kitchen, cooking, and essentially⁴ raising a family.”
(MUSIC)
Mark Kurlansky, is a writer, cook and pastry⁵ chef. He says anyone can cook.
MARK KURLANSKY: “Cooking is like everything else. You just need to do it all the time to get good at it. In fact I know people who just can’t, they can't cook. And I don’t understand why. It’s just like I encounter people who can’t write, no matter how hard they try. And I don’t understand why they can’t do that. I mean if you can talk, why can’t you write, and if you can eat, why can’t you cook?”
MARIO RITTER: Mr. Kurlansky has advice for men who want to cook.
MARK KURLANSKY: “Make it simple. If you buy good ingredients and you cook them very simply, you will always have a great meal.”
MARIO RITTER: “Man With a Pan” editor John Donohue says he expects more fathers will cook as the need grows and society becomes more accepting of a man with a pan.
(MUSIC)
FRITZI BODENHEIMER: Food trucks are an increasingly popular way to buy food on the streets of American cities. Some of these kitchens on wheels combine different ethnic⁶ dishes to satisfy American tastes. One example is a Mexican taco with a Korean flavor.
KAMALA SAXTON: “It’s wrapped in a corn tortilla – Mexican, taco truck. We have a spicy⁷ pork, which is very Korean.”
Korean tofu taco
MARIO RITTER: Kamala Saxton owns Marination Mobile, a food truck in the northwestern city of Seattle, Washington. A Korean taco might be a new taste for a lot of her diners. But Ms. Saxton says where she comes from, Hawaii, people like to combine different dishes.
KAMALA SAXTON: “It’s truly the mixed plate in Hawaii. For instance, I’m Korean, Hawaiian, Filipino and Spanish. And given that, you have someone in your family that knows how to cook one of those ethnic dishes.”
FRITZI BODENHEIMER:Jane Ziegelman writes about the history of street food in New York. She says the city’s push cart vendors⁸ offered a way for people to taste different ethnic foods long before modern food trucks came along.
JANE ZIEGELMAN: “You had Irish kids eating Jewish pickles⁹. You had Italian immigrants eating Jewish potato pancakes. You had all kinds of people drinking seltzer, which was, in fact a street food. So people were eating each others’ food all the time.”
And Ms. Ziegelman says this exchange affected¹⁰ the street food itself.
JANE ZIEGELMAN: “Food brought over by immigrants grew in size. This is like something that happens to a lot of food once they come to the United States. They get bigger [laughter] and they get blander¹¹.”
MARIO RITTER: And in some cases they get served in a way that makes them easier to eat while standing¹² or walking. Ms. Ziegelman says hot dogs, for example, moved from a plate to a bun. A similar idea of serving food on bread can be found at a food truck in Portland, Oregon, called Viking Soul Food. The owners are Megan Walhood and her future husband, Jeremy Daniels.
MEGAN WALHOOD: “The sort of foundation product that we serve is lefse, this Norwegian potato flatbread, and I grew up eating that every year at Christmastime. And it was Jeremy who kind of had the idea to start using it like a tortilla or a crepe, and just stuffing it with all manner of different things.”
FRITZI BODENHEIMER: Viking Soul Food’s most popular lefse wrap is filled with meatballs. The recipe comes from Megan Walhood’s grandmother. The meatballs are topped with pickled cabbage, and a sauce of melted Scandinavian cheese. Megan and Jeremy say a wrap like this would never be seen in Norway, but people in Portland seem to enjoy it. 
JEREMY DANIELS: “Because it’s meatballs with melty cheese sauce over the top.”
MEGAN WALHOOD: “It’s like a cheese gravy¹³.”
JEREMY DANIELS: “Yeah, people see pork and beef meatballs, and then they see cheese sauce, and they don’t look anything further.”
MEGAN WALHOOD: “It’s like everything shuts down at that point, they can’t look at anything else.”
(MUSIC)
MARIO RITTER: Combining food from different cultures has a name: fusion¹⁴. Food historian Jane Ziegelman says the most important thing is that it has to taste good to succeed.
JANE ZIEGELMAN: “I have had a Korean taco. It’s really, really good. It’s really interesting the way these foods which never grew up together and have no particular reason to harmonize, harmonize in this really gorgeous way.”
(MUSIC)
FRITZI BODENHEIMER: We just heard about food trucks that serve dishes whose flavors blend like singers in harmony. Yet harmony is not what some food trucks are creating with established restaurants.
Some restaurant owners complain that they are losing business to their mobile competition. At the same time, in some cities, food truck owners complain that local rules are keeping them out of popular areas.
Matt Geller is president of the Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association.
He says food trucks are filling a demand in areas where workers have few choices of where to go for lunch.
MATT GELLER: “So, I call it your workplace island. You don’t have enough time to jump in your car drive somewhere, park, eat, come back. So you’re really relegated¹⁵ to the two restaurants that happen to be in your walking distance.”
(MUSIC)
MARIO RITTER: Hudson Riehle, senior vice¹ president of research at the National Restaurant Association, says food trucks are here to stay.
HUDSON RIEHLE: “The evolution of food trucks is definitely a long term trend – not a fad¹⁶ – that will continue in the years ahead.”
In fact, Mr. Riehle says that established restaurants are increasingly buying food trucks of their own.
HUDSON RIEHLE: “Mobile food trucks are becoming a much more important force in driving the growth of the restaurant industry ahead.”
(MUSIC)
FRITZI BODENHEIMER: Our program was written and produced by Brianna Blake, with additional reporting by Faiza Elmasry and Deena Prichep. I’m Fritzi Bodenheimer.
MARIO RITTER: And I’m Mario Ritter. You can find transcripts¹⁷ and MP3s of our programs and learn English at voaspecialenglish.com. Join us again next week for THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English.

1 vice   

n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的

参考例句：

• He guarded himself against vice.他避免染上坏习惯。
• They are sunk in the depth of vice.他们堕入了罪恶的深渊。

2 jack   

n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克

参考例句：

• I am looking for the headphone jack.我正在找寻头戴式耳机插孔。
• He lifted the car with a jack to change the flat tyre.他用千斤顶把车顶起来换下瘪轮胎。

3 instinctive   

adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的

参考例句：

• He tried to conceal his instinctive revulsion at the idea.他试图饰盖自己对这一想法本能的厌恶。
• Animals have an instinctive fear of fire.动物本能地怕火。

4 essentially   

adv.本质上，实质上，基本上

参考例句：

• Really great men are essentially modest.真正的伟人大都很谦虚。
• She is an essentially selfish person.她本质上是个自私自利的人。

5 pastry   

n.油酥面团，酥皮糕点

参考例句：

• The cook pricked a few holes in the pastry.厨师在馅饼上戳了几个洞。
• The pastry crust was always underdone.馅饼的壳皮常常烤得不透。

6 ethnic   

adj.人种的，种族的，异教徒的

参考例句：

• This music would sound more ethnic if you played it in steel drums.如果你用钢鼓演奏，这首乐曲将更具民族特色。
• The plan is likely only to aggravate ethnic frictions.这一方案很有可能只会加剧种族冲突。

7 spicy   

adj.加香料的；辛辣的，有风味的

参考例句：

• The soup tasted mildly spicy.汤尝起来略有点辣。
• Very spicy food doesn't suit her stomach.太辣的东西她吃了胃不舒服。

8 vendors   

n.摊贩( vendor的名词复数 )；小贩；（房屋等的）卖主；卖方

参考例句：

• The vendors were gazundered at the last minute. 卖主在最后一刻被要求降低房价。
• At the same time, interface standards also benefIt'software vendors. 同时，界面标准也有利于软件开发商。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓

9 pickles   

n.腌菜( pickle的名词复数 )；处于困境；遇到麻烦；菜酱

参考例句：

• Most people eat pickles at breakfast. 大多数人早餐吃腌菜。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• I want their pickles and wines, and that.' 我要他们的泡菜、美酒和所有其他东西。” 来自英汉文学 - 金银岛

10 affected   

adj.不自然的，假装的

参考例句：

• She showed an affected interest in our subject.她假装对我们的课题感到兴趣。
• His manners are affected.他的态度不自然。

11 blander   

adj.（食物）淡而无味的( bland的比较级 )；平和的；温和的；无动于衷的

参考例句：

• Generally speaking, I prefer Blander food. 一般说来，我更喜欢吃清淡的食物。 来自互联网
• First turn on the blander, and then pour 2 teaspoons of yogurt into the blander. 首先把搅拌器打开，然后把两勺酸奶倒进搅拌器。 来自互联网

12 standing   

n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的

参考例句：

• After the earthquake only a few houses were left standing.地震过后只有几幢房屋还立着。
• They're standing out against any change in the law.他们坚决反对对法律做任何修改。

13 gravy   

n.肉汁；轻易得来的钱，外快

参考例句：

• You have spilled gravy on the tablecloth.你把肉汁泼到台布上了。
• The meat was swimming in gravy.肉泡在浓汁之中。

14 fusion   

n.溶化；熔解；熔化状态，熔和；熔接

参考例句：

• Brass is formed by the fusion of copper and zinc. 黄铜是通过铜和锌的熔合而成的。
• This alloy is formed by the fusion of two types of metal.这种合金是用两种金属熔合而成的。

15 relegated   

v.使降级( relegate的过去式和过去分词 )；使降职；转移；把…归类

参考例句：

• She was then relegated to the role of assistant. 随后她被降级做助手了。
• I think that should be relegated to the garbage can of history. 我认为应该把它扔进历史的垃圾箱。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

16 fad   

n.时尚；一时流行的狂热；一时的爱好

参考例句：

• His interest in photography is only a passing fad.他对摄影的兴趣只是一时的爱好罢了。
• A hot business opportunity is based on a long-term trend not a short-lived fad.一个热门的商机指的是长期的趋势而非一时的流行。

17 transcripts   

n.抄本（ transcript的名词复数 ）；转写本；文字本；副本

参考例句：

• Like mRNA, both tRNA and rRNA are transcripts of chromosomal DNA. tRNA及rRNA同mRNA一样，都是染色体DNA的转录产物。 来自辞典例句
• You can't take the transfer students'exam without your transcripts. 没有成绩证明书，你就不能参加转学考试。 来自辞典例句