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Hello everyone and welcome to English Pod. My name is Marco.

My name is Katherine. And today we have a delicious lesson all about Chinese food for you.

That's right. Today we are ordering Chinese food. Now for many of you listeners that are actually Chinese, you may not recognize these dishes because we are talking about American Chinese food.

That's right. So long, long ago, people came over to America from mainly Hong Kong. And so a lot of the food we have is kind of more like Hong Kong food.

Cantonese food.

Cantonese food. But it's also very American. So let's take a listen to today's dialogue and find out exactly what we're eating.

Dialogue (First Listen)Waitress: Hi, welcome to Happy Buddha. Can I get you anything to drink?

Manny: Uh Coke for me, please.

Andrea: I'll have a Sprite.

Waitress: Okay, I'll go get that for you. Are there any questions with the menu?

Andrea: Do you use MSG?

Waitress: No, ma'am. We are MSG free.

Manny: Oh, man. I haven't had Chinese food in so long. I want everything. This place has the best sesame chicken.

Andrea: Yeah, I've been craving Chinese for such a long time. I used to get takeout all the time. It's definitely been a while. Let's start off with some crab rangoon.

Manny: Oh, yeah. That sounds good. I think I'm going to get the sesame chicken with fried rice, a spring roll, and egg drop soup.

Andrea: It's so tempting to order everything on the menu. It all looks so appetizing. I think I'll get General Toast's chicken, hot and sour soup, fried wontons, and white rice.

Manny: Aren't you supposed to be on a diet? You should at least get brown rice.

Andrea: I don't think so. I hate brown rice, and I'm so sick of eating healthy all the time. I've been eating so much salad, I swear I've forgotten what meat tastes like. There's no better remedy than some nice greasy calorie laden Chinese food. I might even get an order of broccoli beef.

Manny: Oh gosh, I'm so hungry. Let's call the waitress over.

Language Takeaway: Part 1All right, we're back. So, obviously everything seems so good. Very typical American Chinese dishes. And we have a lot of things that we can take a look at. So, let's start with language takeaway.

Language takeaway. In language takeaway today, we're going to be talking about some general food words, words that you can use when you're ordering food. So, the first one we should talk about is this MSG.

Right? Andrea asks, "Do you use MSG?" So, why is she asking this? And what is MSG?

MSG is an ingredient in foods. It's kind of like a condiment, something that you put on the food after the food has been cooked.

And it makes the food taste better, brighter, you know, it intensifies the flavors a little bit.

Yeah. And it's kind of it looks like salt or sugar. It's on the tables usually at Chinese restaurants, but a lot of people don't like MSG because they don't think it's very safe for their bodies. And so, actually, the waitress says that the food is MSG free, which means there's no MSG in it.

That's right. Okay. So, she says our food is MSG free, which is this chemical. I think it's kind of like a chemical that you describe.

That's right. Right? And a lot of people don't want that. So you can ask, is this food MSG free?

You could also ask, is it fat free? Is it salt free? So this is a very helpful way of asking about what the ingredients are in a dish.

That's right. That's right. And actually, Manny is talking about the food as well. And he says, "Yeah, I've been craving Chinese for such a long time."

Okay. So the verb here is to crave, but he said he's been craving. So he really has been wanting this food for a long time. So if you say I'm craving Italian food, what does that mean?

That means I really want to eat Italian food.

You feel like having Italian food.

That's right. So I'm craving some kind of food. I really want to eat it.

Okay. And he said that he used to get takeout all the time. So he's obviously talking about Chinese food. What does he mean by takeout?