Forbidden Food Assignment for ESL Students, Speaking and Listening

Ah, the rewards of teaching!  My students wrote reports on their interviews on the subject of Forbidden Food, and I spent hours doing what might be called synthesizing. 

Who were their interviewees?  Present and past classmates, present and past teachers, an instructor at the CLAD (CCSF’s Center for Language and Academic Development), a relative born in the US, an ex-roommate’s girlfriend (any particular reason the interviewee is in touch with the girlfriend but the roommate is ex?), a teacher at a child’s school, a husband’s friend and part-time employer, a housemate, a co-worker.

How did they make the appointment?  Texting, running into someone who might be willing, knocking on a neighbor’s door.

Where did they conduct their interviews?  In Washington Park, at coffee shops or restaurants, at the interviewee’s home, at the interviewer’s home, at church, where the interviewee works, in the library (conference room).

What was their interviewee’s favorite restaurant?  Tomatora, House of Prime Rib, Oyaji on Clement between 32^nd and 33^rd, Park Chow in the Sunset, Outback Steak House, Sakana, Miller’s Deli, Elephant Bar, All-American Café at North Beach, Café Puccini in Chinatown, Sushi Rock on Grant, The Cheesecake Factory, Tay Gian, Burma Star.

Favorite food?  Sushi, Indian, Filipino, ice cream, Thai, fish, Thai noodles and taco fish, meat lasagna, chocolate, potatoes, noodles and grilled fish, clam chowder.

What food will they not eat?   Dogs or horse, food in Chinese restaurants just in case, foie gras, meat, tropical fruit, chicken, lima beans

What is the most unusual food they’ve ever eaten?  Cockroaches in a Korean restaurant in LA, mussels in Boston and rabbit at Stinky Rose, frog’s legs, crickets fried with chili powder, chocolate-covered ants, cow’s tongue, snake, pig’s blood, a live octopus, and asparagus.  Asparagus didn’t give us much to work with, and the student whose interviewee didn’t like snake tried to give him her favorite recipe, and he refused to hear it.

The special vocabulary I came across included sprouted brobiotic, viscera, grody (turned out to be gross), peziza, and some with which I was more familiar:  gluten, dairy products, mimosas, tripe, and “fat-food restaurants.”  (I did ask, “Is it fat-food or fast-food, or both?”)  After reading about an interviewee who wanted to have six-pack abs, I confessed to the students that when I first heard that expression, I thought it meant a bear belly.  I even printed out pictures to show them the difference.  It did appear that one interview was trying for the beer belly.  He said he drank beer every day to put on weight.

Interviewees were also asked whether they’d ever given up a food they liked, and some spoke of giving up meat for Lent or sugar for a diet, and an interviewee I recognized gave up meat because he thought he’d lose weight on a vegetable diet, but he gained.  My favorite response was the interviewee who said that, yes, he sometimes gave up the food on his plate to someone at the table who really wanted it.

It was nice to hear that some interviewees felt no need to diet.  “I’m sexy the way I am,” one of them said. 

Fasting was a different matter.  They did it before blood test, during “Famine” when Catholic, for spiritual reason, and during Ramadan. 

The interviewees, when asked about their best memory of a meal, mentioned an Arab restaurant where they ate with their fingers, eating in China with uncles, Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners, a grandfather’s 80^th birthday, cooking dumplings with Mom during childhood, eating homemade ravioli, a surprise 40^th birthday party in Florida.  Many seemed nostalgic about the years when they ate wither their families and “both your stomach and your heart are full of love.” 

We’re moving on to Burger Bacteria, so the students asked about food poisoning too.  One good sick from undercooked chicken.  “I guess she was just too hungry and couldn’t wait until it was done,” the student reporter wrote.  One interviewee was sure that it wasn’t the crab she ate but the mayonnaise and milk in the sauce.  Another got sick from a Burger king sandwich, a Mexican restaurant, a bad piece of steak oil in Vietnam that sent the oiled diner to the hospital, expired pudding, expired bread.  (I read that the same day I got “Buyer’s Choice” bread for two dollars off—with a date that had passed four days earlier.) 

Language challenges:  Has she ever fasted?  Yes, she has ever fasted.

The nicest part of all this was hearing the students react to what they heard.  One student felt very sympathetic to the interviewee who didn’t like tropic fruit “because it is so delicious.”  Another liked the description of her seventy-one-year-old interviewee when she spoke about her dinners at a child with a father who always talked about science.  “It look like so warm.”  That was the comment by a Chinese student who’d watched her neighbor play with children and give them trick and treat candy on Halloween.  The assignment gave her an excuse to knock on the door of this nice neighbor and get to know her better.