Unit 6 Eating and Drinking
Dialogues /monologues:
1、 I’m in a hurry.
我得赶紧。 “in a hurry”指匆忙,有时用作口语也表示轻易地做好某件事情。
2、 These days the most sought-after tables are hidden away, several floors above ground, in the city’s high-rise apartments, which are run by chefs out of their own homes or from rented spaces..
这句话的意思我翻译为:目前,很多广受欢迎的餐馆总是藏匿在公寓大厦地面上方的楼层,就在厨
师们自家门口或是租的空地外面营业。
3、 Merely requesting a reservation can be as difficult as getting one.
哪怕是仅仅要求预定(房间)都有可能象真要得到它一样那么难。
4、 Exclusively is the main attraction for customers in a city that is still obsessed with status.
独有性(专用权)是吸引城市消费者的主要因素,因为人们还是会被身份地位(带来的虚荣感)所迷惑的。
5、 I can’t make up my mind about what to have for dessert.
make up one’s mind:下决心、作决定。
本句的意思是:餐后吃什么甜点,我还没能做出决定。
Passage:
The ladies were puzzled. Cheryl Spangler, Valeria Borunda Jameson and Susan Puckett, three university-admissions workers on a training visit to Florence, Kentucky, had walked into a local barbecue joint called Chung Kiwha. But instead of sauce-covered mutton served up from the kitchen, they saw a buffet of uncooked meats and vegetables. Instead of knives and forks, they were given large scissors, chopsticks and metal tongs. No candle flickered at their table, but a bucket of fiery wood charcoal hissed in the tabletop grill pit. Chung Kiwha served barbecue, all right—cook-it-your-self Korean barbecue. “I didn’t realize there were restaurants like this,” marveled Spangler to her friends, who hail from Knoxville, Tennessee, and I worked in restaurants for 20 years.
The secret is out, thanks to the growing popularity of restaurants where the customer is the chef. Long a staple of immigrant communities in big cities, restaurants where diners chop, grill, boil, or dip their dip their food are hot in the American heartland. St.Paul, Minnesota, has Thai hot-pot cooking. Indianapolis, Indiana, has Japanese shabu-shabu (another type of hot pot). A pizzeria in Las Vegas lets customers roll the dough.
Why would people bother going out to cook their own meal? “Americans want control,” says Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of research for the National Restaurant Association. “The cook-it-your-self experience embodies the American values of freedom of choice and independence.” With families spending 46% of their food budget on meals outside the home, they miss the cooking experience—sort of. “Psychologically, people want to be a little involved,” says Pamela Parseghian, executive food editor at Nation’s Restaurant News.
Not every diner, however, embraces the experience. Dragged in by enthusiastic wives, “men often sit with their arms crossed…that is, until we fill them up with good wine,” says Will Layfield, owner of the Melting Pot in Westwood, New Jersey. At the Vinoklet, diner Grey Schafer says, “I don’t cook at home, and if I’m going to pay good money, I want someone to do the cooking for me.” What’s more, do-it-your-self dining isn’t cheap. At the Minturn Country Club in Minturn, Colorado, Kobe beef costs $49.95—uncooked. Still, restaurant-owners insist that the customer knows best. “Who knows what to them is rare?” says Mikulic, owner of Vinoklet. “This way, if they screw it up, I get no complaints.” Back at Chung Kiwha in Florence, diner Puckett sees it this way: “We don’t have to clean up, do we?.”
参考译文:
这些女士有些迷惑不解。谢丽尔.斯潘格勒,维丽瑞尔.波兰达.达姆森,和苏珊.帕克特是大学招生工作人员。在肯塔基州的弗罗伦斯培训时,她们走进了当地一家叫做强.吉瓦的烧烤酒吧去吃饭。然而,他们看到的并不是从厨房端出来抹好了酱的羊肉,而是生肉和蔬菜。服务员给她们端上来的餐具也不是刀和叉,而是剪子、筷子和钳子。餐桌上没有闪烁的烛光,有的只是一桶在烧烤架上嘶嘶作响的燃烧着的木炭。强.吉瓦经营的是烤肉——韩式自助烤肉。“我在餐馆里工作了20年,从来不知道还有这样的餐馆。”,来自田纳西州洛克思尔的斯潘格勒好奇地对她的朋友说道。
由于就餐的客人就是厨师的餐馆数量在不断增加,秘密也就随之而被公开了。在美国中部大城市的主要移民聚集区,一些由顾客自己切、烤、煮、泡食物的餐厅非常火。明尼苏达州的圣.保罗有泰式火锅,印第安纳的印第安纳波利斯有日式涮锅(另外一种火锅)。拉斯维加斯的一家比萨店让顾客自己动手和面团。
为什么人们不怕麻烦在饭店里自己动手做饭呢?国家酒店协会一个研究项目部的副主任哈德逊.瑞艾尔说,“美国人有很强的控制欲,这种自己动手做饭的体验表现了美国自主选择和独立的价值观。”对于那些把46%的饮食开销都用于在外面吃饭的家庭来说,他们有点怀念自己动手做饭的体验。“从心理学角度来说,人们想要参与进来。”帕米拉.帕斯伊恩这样说,他是《国家酒店新闻报》食品专栏的主编。
然而,并不是每个去饭店吃饭的人都渴望有这种体验。男人们被充满热情的妻子拉进饭店。“他们常常是双臂交叉地坐在那儿…也就是说,直到我们用好酒填满他们的肚子。”新泽西州威斯伍德一家叫做坩埚店的餐馆老板威尔.雷菲尔德说到。在维诺克利特餐厅,一名叫格瑞德.斯凯夫的就餐者说,“我在家从不做饭。如果在外面吃饭要花好多钱的话,我就希望别人来为我做。”此外,在自助餐厅吃饭并不便宜。在科罗拉多州明特恩乡村俱乐部,一份生的神户牛排要49.95美元。餐馆的老板仍然坚持说顾客清楚自己想要什么。“谁知道对他们来说,什么样才是适合他们的?”维诺克利特的老析米库利科说道,“这样,如果他们兴致很高,我也不落抱怨。”我们再回头说说弗罗伦斯的强.吉瓦吧,在那儿就餐的帕克特这样看问题:“最起码我们不需要收拾碗筷,不是吗?”
Passage:
When it comes to air pollution, the simple life isn’t necessarily the safest. The most poisonous atmosphere in Asia is found not in rapidly modernizing cities like New Delhi or Beijing but inside the kitchens of homes in rural Asia. Millions of families in the countryside heat their abodes and cook with open fires using cheap fuels that belch carbon monoxide and other noxious fumes at level up to 500 times international safety limits. Rural women and children often spend hours each day in poorly, ventilated kitchens, breathing this putrid air. “This is a problem that has been around forever, as long as humankind has existed, but it’s been ignored,” says Eva Rehfuess, a World Health Organization expert on indoor air pollution. “If you walked into these kitchens, your eyes would start tearing and you would find it difficult to breathe. It’s terrible. ”
The WHO estimates that indoor air pollution cause 1.6 million deaths per year in developing countries around the world, up to 555,000 of which occur in India alone-and overwhelmingly it’s the poor who are dying. Villagers have no choice but to use wood, coal or dung fires, raising the risk that young children will be killed by carbon-monoxide poisoning or a bad case of pneumonia ravaging weakened lungs. Likewise, the women who typically keep their home fires burning are vulnerable to chronic respiratory diseases. “Day in and day out for 50 years, some of these women might be cooking six hours a day, exposed to pollutions,” says Rehfuess.
Curtailing indoor air pollution can be as simple as replacing open wood fires with better-ventilated cookstoves, but more sophisticated stoves can cost up to $120. China and India, home to the world’s largest rural populations, have launched ambitious national programs in recent decades to supply villagers with safer stoves at subsidized prices. But the programs have not always worked, in India, for example, some 33 million stoves were given out free to villagers in rural areas from 1984 to 2000—but because of a lack of health education or follow-up maintenance, most families abandoned the cookstoves for their old fires within a few years.
That’s left nongovernmental organizations like the shell Foundation to step into the gap. It has begun a pilot program with local Indian NGOs in a pair of rural states to develop and market clean, wood-burning stoves that cost just $5-$10 yet can reduce emissions by up to 40%. The project is on track to sell 1000,000 stoves by the end of 2005, and the groups plan to expand the program nationally in the future. Program manager Karen Westley says Shell and its partner NGOs made an effort to sell their customers not just more efficient tools but also the idea that different is better. “You have to make sure people actually want that damn thing,” says Westely. “They need to make the connection between having a better stove, breathing less smoke and experiencing better health in the end.”
But habits ingrained by tradition can be hard to break. “They’ve been living with this always, and so have their mothers and grandmothers,” says Rehfuess. “You have to give people the felling they can do something about it.” And that they’ll breathe a lot easier for their trouble.
参考译文:
说到空气污染,并不是说简单的日常生活就必然是最安全的。研究显示,在亚洲,毒气最浓的空气并不在新德里和北京这样的现代化速度很快的城市,而是在亚洲农村家庭的厨房里。在农村,上百万的家庭用明火取暖或是做饭,他们使用的是廉价的燃料,这些燃料所释放的一氧化碳量和其他有毒烟雾量是国际标准的500倍。农村地区的妇女和孩子经常每天在通风不好的厨房里待上几个小时,呼吸这种有毒的空气。“这个问题从人类诞生以来就一直存在着,但是却一直被忽视了,”一位名叫伊娃.瑞弗丝的世界卫生组织室内空气污染方面的专家说道,“走进厨房你的眼睛就开始流泪,而且你会觉得呼吸困难,这太可怕了。”
世界卫生组织估计,在发展中国家,室内空气污染造成每年160万人死亡,其中印度占55万——而且死亡的大部分都是穷人。村民们除了用木头,煤或者是粪肥来烧火之外别无选择,这样会增加小孩子一氧化碳中毒死亡的危险,肺功能减弱,肺炎得病率增加。同样,那些在家里生火的妇女很容易得慢性呼吸道疾病。瑞弗丝说“有些妇女一天要花6小时做饭,五十年里日复一日,每天都生活在污染中。”
减少室内空气污染其实非常简单,只要用一套通风比较好的厨灶来代替木头生火就可以了,但是比较高级的厨灶要花120美元。中国和印度是世界上两个农村地区人口最多的国家,在最近几十年里启动了全国范围的救助项目,以补贴价格供给农村居民安全性能最好的厨灶。但是,这个项目并不是一直起作用。例如,印度政府在1984-2000年间免费发放了三百三十万套厨灶给农村地区农民,但是由于缺少健康知识教育和相关维护,多数家庭几年之后就又回到他们原来的取火方式了。
这使得一些像谢尔基金会这样的非政府组织参与进来。该组织与印度当地非政府组织在一些乡村地区开始小规模实验项目,开发和推广干净的、燃烧木头的厨灶,并使之市场化。这样厨灶可以减少40%的氧化排放量,并且只需要5-10美元。这个项目计划到2005年底出售15套厨灶,该组织准备今后在全国范围内推广这个项目。该项目的经理凯温.威斯特里说谢尔和它的非政府组织合作伙伴努力销售给顾客的不光是一种最高效的工具,而且还有一种理念,那就是:有所改变会更好。威斯特里说:“你必须要确定人们确实想要那东西与他们最终需要的联系,即在拥有一套好的厨灶,少呼吸烟雾和体验到健康的身体这三者之间建立一种联系。”
但是根深蒂固的传统习惯很难改变。瑞弗丝说:“他们一直是这样生活的,包括他们的母亲和祖母也是这样生活的,你需要给他们一种感觉,那就是他们可以对此做些改变。”这样人们会对自己的麻烦事感到轻松许多。
