Languages / English / Level 1 · Unit 3

Is This Fresh — Produce Questions

Lesson 11 of 170 · Level 1 of 6All lessons
In this lesson

You are learning produce questions: you will read the scene it happens in, take apart the pattern behind them (freshness + market questions), hear them in a conversation, rehearse them, and finish by saying one thing out loud to be graded.

The scene

Union Square Greenmarket — open Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday year-round, with around 140 regional farms selling direct. One of the best farmers markets in the United States.

Union Square — Saturday Morning

The Union Square Greenmarket on a Saturday in late summer is one of the finest expressions of what food can be in New York. Hundreds of farmers and food producers, tables piled with tomatoes in every color, stone fruits, sweet corn, summer squash, fresh-cut flowers.

The stranger is at a tomato stand — thirty varieties from a farm in New Jersey. The farmer, a woman in her sixties with sunburned arms, is slicing samples. She hands him a piece of a striped German heirloom. "Is this fresh?"

She looks at him patiently. "Picked yesterday."

He tastes it. The tomato is warm from sun, sweet, acidic, intensely flavored. "This is incredible — where is this from?"

"Ironbound Farm. New Jersey."

"I'll take three pounds, please. And what else do you recommend this week?"