From Yum to Yuck: Talking About Food Like a Native Speaker

🌟 Episode Highlights

• food vocabulary
• food expressions
• food culture

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Transcript

Hello, hello! Welcome to English Extras! I’m Jean, and this is the podcast that takes you beyond textbook English. If you’re tired of boring grammar drills and dry vocabulary lists and you want to sound more natural, more you, then you’re in the right place. Every episode is packed with real-world English, cultural tips, and smart strategies to boost your fluency. So, are you ready? Let’s learn some English.

If your favorite word to describe food is ‘delicious,’ then this episode is for you. There’s a ton of different ways to describe food and today, we’re going beyond your textbook to talk about them. How do Americans really describe food? I’m going to talk about real food vocabulary, casual expressions, and some cultural terms that you probably won’t hear in a course.

First, let’s talk about delicious food. Food is not just delicious–how is it delicious? Is it savory, crispy, buttery, rich, decadent, or God forbid meh?

Let’s take the first word in the list: savory. So, there are two major categories of flavor: savory and sweet. You can think of savory and sweet like opposites. Savory food doesn’t really have sweetness; it’s often salty and maybe even meaty. An example of a savory food would be a hamburger: cooked meat, cheese, vegetables, etc.

But what if something is sweet? Well, it might be rich. Now, “rich” can also mean someone who has a lot of money, but we also use this word to describe food that is very sweet in a heavy kind of way. For example, a double chocolate cake is probably very rich. Not just sweet, but the kind of sweet where you might feel like going to sleep after you eat it. That’s something we would call rich.

A word that is very similar to rich is decadent. This word is used almost exclusively to describe desserts, and typically chocolate cakes for some reason, or chocolate in general. Decadent is something smooth and luxurious, which often describes chocolate.

Now, if we want to describe the texture, some common texture words are: buttery, flaky, and crispy. 

For the word buttery, the clue is in the name. If something is made with a lot of butter or has a very strong or noticeable flavor of butter, we can say it’s buttery. So buttery can describe something sweet or savory. A cupcake can be buttery, for example, but so can popcorn.

For the word flaky, this word can also describe a person. Why is that? Because a flaky texture means a food that has a lot of layers that are very delicate and fragile and fall apart pretty easily. So we can also use this word to describe a person who is unreliable and inconsistent–that would be a flaky person.

For the word crispy, this could also be something sweet or savory. If something has a nice crunch, meaning if it is slightly hard and thin and makes a bunch of small cracking sounds when you bite it, then we would say it’s crispy. So, for example, potato chips are crispy. 

Now, sometimes, we all have food that is not amazing but not terrible. How do we describe that? A few ways. If we want to talk about the flavor, we can say it’s bland. Bland means something doesn’t have a lot of obvious flavors; it’s flavorless or almost flavorless. Bland food is good for when you’re sick, if you have an upset stomach, but not always great at other times. So it might be insulting to say this about someone’s cooking.

If a food is bland, we can also say it’s meh, but there’s an important difference here. “Meh” is our emotional reaction to something; it’s not describing the food itself. We can use “meh” for anything, not just food. “Meh” means you’re unimpressed or maybe even a little disappointed. It means you think something is so-so. 

Now, I just gave you a ton of words: savory, sweet, rich, decadent, buttery, flaky, crispy, bland, meh! And you might be wondering: how am I supposed to remember all these words? You’re working hard to learn English, and you want to be able to use these new words.

If you’ve been looking for a user-friendly tool to help you collect vocabulary that you want to learn, that’s relevant to your life, I recommend you check out Wöör. Wöör is a free vocabulary app that helps you learn vocabulary in a way that works for you, and you know I love that because I always say that language learning is very personal.

The great thing about Wöör is that it does all the heavy lifting for you automatically, so you get to learning right away. Wöör has a built-in dictionary where you can see the definition–or multiple definitions, if there’s multiple meanings of the word–descriptions, and example sentences. So it’s very easy to add a word to your deck and immediately see it in context.

As soon as you add a word, a program with different types of exercises is in place and you can start learning. And you won’t have to worry about trying to remember words, because it’s not just flashcards: there are exercises like selecting the right word or writing it in an example sentence, so the words you learn will stick with you.

If you wanna check this app out–and like I said, it’s free, so why not at least check it out and see if you like it?–then you can follow the link in the description.

Now, we talked about specific words to describe food, but what about phrases? 

First of all, talking about all these different types of foods is making me hungry. If you’re super hungry, too, then join me in saying: “I’m starving.” Of course, starving is not literal; it’s an exaggeration, but it’s a very common thing to hear. Now, if you really want to exaggerate and you want to be more fun about it, another common thing you’ll hear is: “I could eat a horse.”

To be clear, nobody is eating horses around here. (That I know of.) This is just an expression you might hear and it means that someone is very, very hungry.

When you finally get to eat, you might hear someone say: “This hits the spot.” This expression means that the food is really good and it perfectly satisfies you. A simpler and more straightforward thing to say is: “This is so good.”

But what if it isn’t that good? Well, remember about bland. You can say, “Eh, it’s kinda bland.” Using kinda is a way to soften the statement. So if the food doesn’t have a lot of flavor and it’s a little disappointing, you can say, “It’s kinda bland.” Or, another expression we use is, “Nothing to write home about.” This expression means that it isn’t very exciting or interesting, and we can also use this expression to describe anything, not just food.

Now let’s pivot into food culture in general, because there’s a lot of new vocabulary in that category. Here’s the vocabulary I’m going to talk about: foodie, comfort food, fast casual, meal prep and cheat day. Five phrases–let’s go.

First word: foodie. A foodie is a person who is very passionate about trying new food and finding new restaurants. Me, for example, I am not really a foodie because yeah, I like to try new food and new restaurants sometimes, but I don’t make a habit of it. I like the food I like and only occasionally branch out, meaning try something different and new. But if you are a foodie, make sure to let me know and tell me what your favorite type of food is!

Speaking of favorite type of food, let’s talk about comfort food. Comfort food is the food you eat when you’re feeling a little down or stressed and it’s typically food that makes you feel good emotionally, probably because it reminds you of better times in your life. So, for a lot of people my age in America, a common comfort food is macaroni and cheese, but the specific kind of food will be different depending on the person. 

Moving on to the text term: fast casual. This is a term that describes a category of restaurant, not food specifically. So, first, let’s describe a few related terms. A fast food restaurant makes food very quickly and it typically has a drive-thru feature. So, McDonald’s is a fast food restaurant. The opposite of that is a sit-down restaurant. A sit-down restaurant doesn’t have a drive-thru. You go into the restaurant, sit down, you’re served by a server, and the food is slower to arrive. A fast casual restaurant is in the middle: it’s faster than a sit-down restaurant but has better food than a fast food restaurant like McDonald’s. If you live in America, a fast casual restaurant would be Chipotle or Panera.

But you know, a lot of people don’t want to eat outside of their house so often. Nowadays, a lot of people are trying to have healthier habits by meal prepping. To meal prep means to choose a day and make all of your food for the upcoming week. So you’re preparing your meals in advance; that’s meal prepping. My husband meal preps, for example. Every Sunday night, he prepares all of his lunches and all of our dinners for the week.

He does this because he’s very health-conscious, meaning he pays a lot of attention to his diet and exercise. He’s also very strict about it; he doesn’t even have a cheat day. That’s our next term: cheat day. A cheat day is a term used in fitness culture and it means a day to eat whatever you want. A cheat day, of course, is usually a day where you’re going to eat a lot of food that people think is “unhealthy.” The idea is to have a cheat day, then return to your stricter eating plan.

So, are you hungry now? Because I sure am. Probably because it’s lunchtime for me now. 

Well, we covered a ton of vocabulary in this episode. We talked about how to describe food, how to make comments about food, and how to talk about food culture in America. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s okay. You can find today’s terms in the Wöör app so you won’t forget them. Make sure to check out the description for the right links!

As always, thanks for being here, friends! Keep up the good work! I believe in you! You got this! Until next time! Bye!