English Lesson – 6th Portfolio

(M)Island

Student in hotel management

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 Todde Kevin – 1BGHHA
Contents

Articles———————————————-3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Sardinia, Italy. Home to the world’s longest living men.—————3, 4
Casu marzu: The world's 'most dangerous' cheese—————5, 6, 7, 8

Vocabulary ———————————————————9

(M) Island—————————————————-10, 11

Plan for the structure ——————————————12

Three questions about the text——————————12

My debate question.——————————————-12

What I learned with this 2nd part of the portfolio—-13

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 Sardinia, Italy
Home to the world's longest-living men.

A cluster of villages in a kidney-shaped region on this island make up the first Blue Zone
region we ever identified. In 2004, our research team set off to investigate a rare genetic
quirk carried by its inhabitants. The M26 marker is linked to exceptional longevity, and due
to geographic isolation, the genes of the residents in this area of Sardinia have remained
430_Sardiniamostly undiluted. The result: nearly 10 times more centenarians per capita than
the U.S.

But even more importantly, residents of this area are also culturally isolated, and they have
kept to a very traditional, healthy lifestyle. Sardinians still hunt, fish and harvest the food
they eat. They remain close with friends and family throughout their lives. They laugh and
drink wine together.

Read more below about the lessons that Sardinia, Italy can teach you about longevity.

Videos From Sardinia, Italy

SARDINIA MELIS SOUP- Blue Zones

Set up your lifestyle and environment like a Sardinian centenarian to live a longer, healthier
life. Following these practices will promote habits that can keep you living well to 100+.

Eat a lean, plant-based diet accented with meat.

The classic Sardinian diet consists of whole-grain bread, beans, garden vegetables, fruits,
and, in some parts of the island, mastic oil.
daily-diet-sardiniaSardinians also traditionally eat pecorino cheese made from grass-fed
sheep, whose cheese is high in omega-3 fatty acids. Meat is largely reserved for Sundays and
special occasions.

Put family first.

Sardinia’s strong family values help assure that every member of the family is cared for.
People who live in strong, healthy families suffer lower rates of depression, suicide, and
stress.

Celebrate elders.
Grandparents can provide love, childcare, financial help, wisdom, and
expectations/motivation to perpetuate traditions and push children to succeed in their lives.
This may all add up to a healthier, better adjusted, and longer-lived children. It may give the
overall population a life expectancy bump.

Take a walk.

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Walking five miles a day or more as Sardinian shepherds do provides all the cardiovascular
benefits you might expect,430_Sardinia_02and also has a positive effect on muscle and bone
metabolism without the joint-pounding of running marathons or triathlons.

Drink a glass or two of red wine daily.

Sardinians drink wine moderately. Cannonau wine has two or three times the level of artery-
scrubbing flavonoids as other wines. Moderate wine consumption may help explain the
lower levels of stress among men.

Laugh with friends.

Men in this Blue Zone region are famous for their sardonic sense of humor. They gather in
the street each afternoon to laugh with and at each other. Laughter reduces stress, which
can lower one’s risk of cardiovascular disease.

Drink goat’s milk.

A glass of goat’s milk contains components that might help protect against inflammatory
diseases of aging such as heart disease and Alzheimer’s.

This is an excerpt from Blue Zones: Lessons For Living Longer From The People Who’ve Lived
The Longest by Dan Buettner, copyright 2008, all rights reserved.

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 TASTING THE WORLD
Casu marzu: The world's 'most dangerous' cheese

Agostino Petroni, CNN | Lead photo by Andrea Serreli • Updated 18th March 2
casu marzu-1
(CNN) — The Italian island of Sardinia sits in the middle of the Tyrrhenian Sea, gazing at Italy
from a distance. Surrounded by a 1,849-kilometer coastline of white sandy beaches and
emerald waters, the island's inland landscape rapidly rises to form hills and impervious
mountains.
And it is within these edgy curves that shepherds produce casu marzu, a maggot-infested
cheese that, in 2009, the Guinness World Record proclaimed the world's most dangerous
cheese.
Cheese skipper flies, Piophila casei, lay their eggs in cracks that form in cheese, usually fiore
sardo, the island's salty pecorino.
Maggots hatch, making their way through the paste, digesting proteins in the process, and
transforming the product into a soft creamy cheese.
Then the cheesemonger cracks open the top -- which is almost untouched by maggots -- to
scoop out a spoonful of the creamy delicacy.
It's not a moment for the faint-hearted. At this point, the grubs inside begin to writhe
frantically.
Some locals spin the cheese through a centrifuge to merge the maggots with the cheese.
Others like it au naturel. They open their mouths and eat everything.
Casu marzu is made with sheeps' milk.
Casu marzu is made with sheeps' milk.
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
If you are able to overcome the understandable disgust, marzu has a flavor that is intense
with reminders of the Mediterranean pastures and spicy with an aftertaste that stays for
hours.
Some say it's an aphrodisiac. Others say that it could be dangerous for human health as
maggots could survive the bite and and create myiasis, micro-perforations in the intestine,
but so far, no such case has been linked to casu marzu.
The cheese is banned from commercial sale, but Sardinians have been eating it, jumping
grubs included, for centuries.
"The maggot infestation is the spell and delight of this cheese," says Paolo Solinas, a 29-year-
old Sardinian gastronome.
He says some Sardinians cringe at the thought of casu marzu, but others raised on a lifetime
of salty pecorino unabashedly love its strong flavors.
"Some shepherds see the cheese as a unique personal pleasure, something that just a few
elects can try," Solinas adds.
Archaic cuisine
casu marzu 2-1
It's illegal to sell or buy casu marzu.
Giovanni Fancello

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When tourists visit Sardinia, they usually wind up in a restaurant that serves porceddu sardo,
a slowly roasted suckling piglet, visit bakers who sell pane carasau, a traditional paper-thin
flatbread, and meet shepherds who produce fiore sardo, the island pecorino cheese.
The Italian town where they eat 500-year-old meals
Yet, if you are adventurous enough, it's possible to find the casu marzu. It shouldn't be seen
as a weird attraction, but a product that keeps alive an ancient tradition and hints at what
the future of food might look like.
Giovanni Fancello, a 77-year-old Sardinian journalist and gastronome, spent his life
researching local food history. He's traced it back to a time when Sardinia was a province of
the Roman empire.
"Latin was our language, and it's in our dialect that we find traces of our archaic cuisine,"
Fancello says.
casu marzu -6
The cheese can only be produced at certain times of year when the sheeps' milk is right.
Alice Mastinu
There is no written record of Sardinian recipes until 1909, according to Fancello. That's when
Vittorio Agnetti, a doctor from mainland Modena, traveled to Sardinia and compiled six
recipes in a book called "La nuova cucina delle specialità regionali."
"But we have always eaten worms," says Fancello. "Pliny the Elder and Aristotle talked about
it."
Ten other Italian regions have their variant of maggot-infested cheese, but while the
products elsewhere are regarded as one-offs, casu marzu is intrinsically part of Sardinian
food culture.
The cheese has several different names, such as casu becciu, casu fattittu, hasu muhidu,
formaggio marcio. Each sub-region of the island has its own way of producing it using
different kinds of milk.
'Magic and supernatural events'

Foodies inspired by the exploits of chefs such as Gordon Ramsay often come in search of the
cheese, says Fancello. "They ask us: 'How do you make casu marzu?' It's part of our history.
We are the sons of this food. It's the result of chance, of magic and supernatural events."
Fancello grew up in the town of Thiesi with his father Sebastiano, who was a shepherd who
made casu marzu. Facello shepherded his family's sheep to grazing grounds around rural
Monte Ruju, lost in the clouds, where magic was believed to happen. He recalls that, for his
father, casu marzu was a divine gift. If his cheeses didn't become infested with maggots, he
would be desperate. Some of the cheese he produced stayed for the family, others went to
friends or people who asked for it.
Casu Marzu is typically produced at the end of June when local sheep milk begins to change
as the animals enter their reproductive time and the grass dries from the summer heat.
The coastal town of Alghero in Sardinia.
If a warm sirocco wind blows on the cheesemaking day, the cheese-transforming magic
works even harder. Fancello says it's because the cheese has a weaker structure, making the
fly's job easier.
After three months, the delicacy is ready.
Mario Murrocu, 66, keeps casu marzu traditions alive at his farm, Agriturismo Sa Mandra,
near Alghero in the north of Sardinia. He also keeps 300 sheep and hosts guests in his
trattoria, and keeps casu marzu traditions alive.

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"You know when a form will become casu marzu," he says. "You see it from the unusual
spongy texture of the paste," Murrocu says.
Nowadays, this isn't so much down to luck as the ideal conditions that cheesemongers now
use to ensure as many casu marzu as possible. They've also figured out a way to use glass
jars to conserve the cheese, which traditionally never lasted beyond September, for years.
Sardinia's unusual cheese dates back to Roman times.
Though revered, the cheese's legal status is a gray area.
Casu marzu is registered as a traditional product of Sardinia and therefore is locally
protected. Still, it has been deemed illegal by the Italian government since 1962 due to laws
that prohibit the consumption of food infected by parasites.
Those who sell the cheese can face high fines up to €50,000 (about $60,000) but Sardinians
laugh when asked about the prohibition of their beloved cheese.
In the past few years, the European Union has begun to study and revive the notion of eating
grubs thanks to the concept of novel food, where insects are raised to be consumed.
Research shows that their consumption could help reduce carbon dioxide emissions
associated with animal farming and help alleviate the climate crisis.
Related content
How this fruit became the star of Italian cooking
Roberto Flore, the Sardinian head of Skylab FoodLab, the food system change laboratory of
the Technical University of Denmark's innovation hub, has long studied the concept of insect
consumption.
For a few years, he led the Nordic Food Lab research and development team -- part of the
three-Michelin-starred NOMA restaurant -- trying to figure out ways to insert insects into
our diet.
"Lots of cultures associate the insect with an ingredient," Flore says. That said, Sardinians
prefer the cheese to the maggot and are often horrified by the idea that people eat
scorpions or crickets in Thailand.
Flore says he's traveled around the world to study how different cultures approach insects as
food and believes that while psychological barriers make it difficult to radically alter eating
habits, such consumption is widespread.
Insect consumption is more commonplace in countries such as Thailand.
Insect consumption is more commonplace in countries such as Thailand.
PORNCHAI KITTIWONGSAKUL/AFP via Getty Images
"How do you define edible food?" he says ."Every region of the world has a different way to
eat insects."
He's convinced that Sardinia's delicacy is safe to eat.
"I believe that nobody has ever died eating casu marzu. If they did, maybe they were drunk.
You know, when you eat it, you also drink lots of wine."
Flore hopes casu marzu will soon shed its clandestine status and become a symbol of
Sardinia -- not because of its unusual production, but because it's emblematic of other foods
now vanishing because they don't fit in with modern mainstream tastes.
30 classic Italian dishes that everyone should try
In 2005, researchers from Sardinia's Sassari University made the first step in this direction:
they raised flies in the lab and made them infect pecorino cheese to show that the process
can happen in a controlled way.
Islanders and researchers hope that the European Union will soon rule in their favor.

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Until then, anyone who wants to sample it will need to ask around when they get to
Sardinia.
For those willing to suspend concerns about what they're eating, it offers an authentic
experience recalling a time when nothing was thrown away and when boundaries of what
was edible or not were less well defined.
Cheesemonger Murrocu says that, fittingly, locals keep an open mind about the best way to
eat casu marzu, but a few other regional treats have been known to help it slip down easier.
"We spread the cheese on wet pane carasau, and we eat it," he says. "But you can eat it as
you want, as long as there is some formaggio marcio and a good cannonau wine."
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 Anglais Français

Below En dessous de

Playgroiund Terrain de jeu

To dive Plonger

Borders Frontières

Well deserved Bien mérité

Coastline Les côtes

Gulf Golfe

Centenarians Population âgée de plus de 100 ans

Maggots Des vers

Pecorino grinding wheel Une meule de pecorino

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 (M)Island.

Located on the west of the Mediterranean Sea, below Corsican and between
France and Italy, Sardinia enjoys an idyllic playground to expose proudly its sea
and earth contrast, its culture, its inimitable way to offer a real piece of
paradise.
Today I’m going to explain why people are travelling just around where my
family is based, I’ll talk about two pairs of different out-landing topics. My goal
is to make you dive deeply in her clear seawater so that you’ll be able to say
“Grazie deu, su sardu”.

How is it possible to go there?

At 1440 kilometers from Brussels, to be faster on location, you can take the
plane and have a choice through 3 airports deserving the island from the top to
its bottom. But it’s totally possible to reach this Island by having a long road
trip, crossing border, passing through breathtaking locations before being on
your vacation destination. A kind of “first taste” of what you’ll discover next.
After having driven for hours, you’ll have, at the end of the day, to enter a
ferry, where you’ll be able to sleep in private cabins. After a repairing rest you’ll
be arrived, ready to join your booked place to finally have some well-deserved
relaxation time.

What will I do and how will I visit?

The whole coastline of the island is touristically developed. At less than 10
meters from the beach you will be able to have a drink, have some snacks or
going to restaurants. You can hire a bike, a boat, a car or even a Vespa to visit
Sardinia as quick as you want. Go sightsee and navigates under the gulf of
Orosei by boat, sunbathe while you’re eating an artisanal ice cream.

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What’s atypical?
There, you’ll meet local people who knows absolutely everything about this
piece of earth which seems completely lost in the middle of the sea. This is
possible because their healthy lifestyle makes their having 10 times more
centenarians than on the United States. The Sardinians are very proud of
where they live, proud to present it to tourists.
There, you’ll also be able to taste the most dangerous cheese on earth ; The
casu marzu. Milky product which has been fermented by maggots creating an
unique creamy hearth of pecorino grinding wheel.

That’s only pairs of facts about Sardinia but I’m sure you want to discover more
details about it now, if it isn’t by directly travelling there, I recommend the
online informations. With other words, keep online travelling for one of the
most beautiful Island on earth.

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 Plan for the structure

Introduction – Where is Sardinia ?

Body text
How is it possible to go there ?
What will I do and how will I visit ?
What’s atypical ?

Conclusion – What’s next ?

Three questions about the text

What is Sardinia ?
How long is the shortest intinerary from Brussels ?
What is the casu marzu ?

My debate question
What do you think about travelling somewhere you don’t know
anything ?

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 What I learned with this 2nd part of the portfolio.

By ending this portfolio, i can say that I achieve many things I would
do.
First, I would relate what was important to me. Things I would
maintain informed on.
I also did talk about personal subjects to express myself and gave to
my portfolio a turn very unique which suits me perfectly.
Finally, I would be more able to use the specific required words about
a topic. After I learned English, my project is to be fully fluent with it
to finally play as I can do with French. Then I’ll write texts, songs, full
of meaning, rhythms and rhymes.
I think that’s the best way to keep learning. Try, try and try.
It’s by making errors that you will be right, then.
You can create what you want, with no limits, you can achieve the
impossible. By using your creativity, you can create a new world, fully
yours.
I loved learning by creating this portfolio.

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