The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
Unfortunately, they are quite flavourless. The type of tomato (and price) makes no difference (organic, vine-ripened, salad). Most of them are usually semi-ripe. Even if you allow them to ripen at home for a few days, they are still quite tasteless.
Presumably, Italy keeps its best tomato produce for themselves and I don't blame them (although Italian tinned tomatoes are widely available in the UK, just not the fresh variety).
Tomatoes from the Netherlands are almost always tasteless.
Tomatoes from Spain are often tasty, but sometimes tasteless.
Tomatoes from Morocco are sometimes tasteless and sometimes horrible.
So I look for Tomatoes grown in Spain and wish for the best...
There is a huge difference in taste between in vine ripped tomatoes and the one they are picked up still green.
The northeast US has the same problem. Tomatoes in California are usually pretty good, tomatoes in Boston taste like crap. (the joke is that Boston is the last stop for a tomato truck, before they get thrown in the ocean as trash).
In next door Albania they are called "Zemërkau", which it translates "cuore di bue". Very delish, and fortunately local farmers like to grow them for themselves, so you will always find cheap good ones during the season.
The reason they are really good as they are the most similar to the original wild tomatoes, and less likely to have been modified just because their color and shape as most grocery common tomatoes are.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_cuore_di_bue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-j3ZxGnMC8
#foodporn
the Vorlon is also very tasty
I've had amazing tomatoes of this species, but I've also had many watery ones...so I'm guessing the greenhouse-to-supermarket waterbombing effect is more important than the actual species.
It's also common for cows to graze outside for part of the day (true of Ireland and Sweden too). It's subjective, but I think it makes for much nicer tasting fresh milk (compared to the UHT variety that is more of the norm in other European countries).
I'd read even as a kid, in English novels, that greenhouses were somewhat common in the UK. Do tomatoes not grow well even in greenhouses there?
I speak as an Irishman who had a terrible time merely finding decent bread when I moved here (there is zero good soda bread in any British supermarket, I actually imported and froze mine for the first few years, then I went the bread maker route, until I made my peace and stopped eating bread at home), with a German partner for the past ten years who feels even more strongly about it than I do.
I feel like the UK supermarket industry took The Paradox of Choice too seriously.
The UK produces more varieties of cheese (about 700) than any other EU country. A lot of that is from small independent producers. Obviously, you'll find a narrow(ish) selection at the supermarket, but it's pretty easy to find a wider variety from specialist or online retailers.
And then this gets exacerbated when the varieties are selected for shipping and shelf life rather than flavor.
US greenhouse tomatoes are generally bland and watery too.
My garden tomatoes got severely damaged by some fungus this year and barely produced and I'm still not at all tempted to buy store tomatoes.
Unfortunately, many people are okay with this and expect it. I honestly can not imagine Netherlands farmers and engineers unable to simulate that stress. So its a purely lack of customers knowing the difference.
Fungi-Symbosis: http://orgprints.org/12844/1/12844.pdf
But yes, i was wrong on the water tomato. They simply have been bred to look good and be transportable, disregarding taste.
OTOH, if I buy the $5-$6 per pound heirloom varieties, the flavor is better.
even better: tomatoes grown in people's backyards.
Best tomatoes I've ever had were indeed grown in a backyard. In volcanic soil.
Eventually customers started revolting, and now there are plenty of very tasty tomatoes available. They're more expensive, though, and not everybody can afford them. To a lot of people, cost is still a factor. And maybe even more so for export.
Do you have a citation for or more info about this? Were genetically modified tomatoes introduced after the war? I would have thought that came much later with the rise of Monsanto[1].
Just regular evolution with human selection still works fine, with no need to directly interfere in the genetic makeup.
During my student days in the early 1990s, I started buying organic whenever possible, and organic potatoes weren't bintjes. When fellow students came over to eat, they were stunned at the taste. "What did you do with your potatoes?" I just boiled them, nothing more. (I'm a pretty mediocre cook.) They just had no idea that potatoes could taste like that. Tasteless crap was the standard. Even when people could afford better, they didn't know it existed.
Now you can buy everything every time, but even the meat is less tasty. Personally, I'd still rather buy food according to the season.
The Germans are extremely interesting in this respect deriding the lowest quality Dutch vegetables with all kinds of name-calling ('waterbombs') but at the same time they keep buying them because they are cheap.
If you want quality you will simply have to be prepared to pay for it, this goes for many more things than just vegetables.
I always think of us as having two eyes, two ears for stereo vision and sound but never think of us as having 'two noses' to determine the direction of a small or two different smells at the same time.
Doing that in supermarkets here is also looked upon as a bit weird. But I don't care, I prefer to look weird and eat the best tomatoes ;)
They won't beat summer sun grown tomatoes in warmer climates, but they're available all year round.
A bit of sugar and a bit of acidity can boost the flavor of sub-par tomatoes, for example for a sauce.
- smell them. Smell is part of flavor and also correlates with the other parts of flavor. Odorless tomatoes are 90% of the time tasteless
- choose tomatoes which are still attached to a part of the plant when possible. They keep their flavor a bit longer.
Also the per capita household expenditure on food[1] is above the average of European countries. Higher for example than in the UK or Austria, which have comparable incomes.
[1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/per-capita-hou...
You don't have to go far to see the difference either: Austrians and south Germans are already much more "food-oriented" than north Germans, so this may be a regional thing rather than encompassing the whole country.
I guess you're talking about various prejudices of others. But that's a whole other topic.
I think the locals wouldn't joke about themselves that way cause to them the way they are is just "normal".
And surely you've heard Berliners say that Berlin's local food tradition is the Döner (i.e. there is no "local food")? I guarantee you no Bavarian or Austrian would say that about their own food tradition.
(And BTW I have no ill will towards Berlin or Berliners, I think it's one of the best places in the world to live in)
But the quality of basic food stuff was amazing. The real black bread with honey (razowiec) at every shop, good white bread, fresh milk delivered to your door by 6am every morning, cheese, cottage cheese, butter, potatoes, tomatoes, apples. Most people were first generation city dwellers and they knew how to select good potatoes and tomatoes. And it was all dirt cheap.
Now tomatoes - imported or grown in Poland are tasteless and potatoes are just a commodity - you cannot find any tasty variations. Sausages are mostly disgusting and unhealthy - few years ago it had been discovered that multiple companies are using chemical salt (for de-icing roads in winter) in sausages. Ham is mostly water.
The comparable black bread, good cheese, real sausages etc. one can buy in fancy, hipster, organic shops but at prohibitive prices. Prices that lower class cannot afford.
The income levels in dollar term over last 30 years had grown expotenially in Poland, farms are heavily subsidies also through EU CAP.
So how can one explain that the economy cannot deliver relatively cheap and tasty basic food products (at much higher profit margins as the consumers are now more wealthy and more health conscious) - a task that ineffective, communist economy fulfilled with relative ease.
That's pretty simple: Poland is now importing a lot of stuff that it used to grow at home. And since Poland is not the wealthiest country it doesn't get the high priced quality stuff.
A lot of stuff that worked under communism does not work equally well under capitalism until a long period of leveling has passed. And on that front Poland has done exceptionally well compared to some of the alternatives, even so there is still a long way to go.
Incidentally, I lived in Poland before the wall fell, and of course what you should add to your story is that if tomatoes were available they tasted better, but they really weren't available all that often.
Isn't over 30 years of market leveling enough in case of tomatoes? If the choice is between growing tasteless tomatoes or importing similarly tasteless tomatoes then I am under impression that market isn't working well in that case. At least not for a consumer.
If you are telling me that growing tasty tomatoes at large scale is absolutely impossible under capitalism then I will cry "Komuno wróć" :)
The article that started this discussion is about super modern technology used in farming. It reminds me of old joke about modern farming in USSR - they plow with tractors, they sow with airplanes and they watching bread on TV.
Actually, most vegetables seem to be a lot better in Spain. And I tend to go for the best quality organic veggies I can actually buy in Belgium.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/10/why-you-can-and-sometimes...
It's the same reason people tell me that bananas in banana-producing countries are way better than what you can find here: our bananas ripen during transportation, and the end result is very different.
PS: it's much easier to find very tasty cherry tomatoes, but they're also much more expensive.
Here's what they look like: http://www.desteptarea.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/rosii-p...
Note: 6 LEI (RON) is 1.2 GBP, but can find them as cheap as 0.8 GBP, depending on the city, market or seller.
The problem is that I don't think we produce enough of them for export as they're only grown naturally, they don't last more than a few days, even when in the fridge, and they are seasonal. Households tipically pick them as they ripen for immediate consumption, sell any surplus on the local markets and, by the end of the season, harvest them for around 10 gallons of tomato juice for winter.
The countryside folk also lack the education to seriously market them, lack the money to produce in larger quantities, etc. Which leads to supermarkets being chock full of import tomatoes though (we also have the Dutch ones) :/
Unfortunately that's not a particularly efficient way to farm and also fruit is only available in season this way.
I am asking because I've moved back/forth a couple time between the US and Canada, and tomatoes made in the USA or central/south America are tasteless in the US. When I see tomatoes made in Canada in a US store that's what I buy, no matter what the price is, organic or not. Savoura is the brand that I prefer, but then again, I am not sure it is Canadian, and they make it all over the world and it taste different depending where they come from...
So they're plentiful and cheap, but generally lack flavor.
I think this also comes down to the trouble with transporting those types of tomatoes without loss due to spoilage.
The tomatoes you describe are exact the same as tomatoes sold here in Australia.
These Australian tomatoes have been genetically selected for characteristic that allow them to be picked green, ripen on the way to the supermarket and hit the shelves blemish free.
They look great on the supermarket shelf but their skin is as tough as nails and they pretty much tasteless.
The only
Interesting, as the Netherlands would be closer geographically! But maybe the UK is just far enough from the south-med to make shipping vegetables from there not as economical.
1. Homegrown (in good soil) 2. Italian 3. Albanian (heirloom) 4. Spanish
Smaller, darker and more aromatic are generally better (cherry a good bet), and they're all best in the summer. Did I forget anything?
It's gross how strong the lobby is against our farmers, even though they're clearly among the most competent, intelligent, sustainable farmers around the world.
They always use cherry-picked facts (and even blatant lies), decades old photo and video materials and examples from foreign farms against our farmers, in order to put pressure on the government to regulate our farmers even more, to the point where our farmers feel that they are nothing more than underpaid workers for a huge governmental organization.
No 'decades old photo' either. I find it hard to believe someone loving live animals would put them in such a place.
It comes across as though you are demanding impossible standards of evidence here in order to cut off a side of an argument you don't agree with, and don't want to begin to consider?
"Citation needed" is not a universally acceptable reflexive alternative to discussion of things you don't personally agree with.
> Having a dozen chicken in a large yard seems to me to be pretty nice for the chicken.
Citation needed.
Bird flu has been a big problem historically because of the large amount chickens in urban areas, although it had different names then. It's still a problem now, but it's now only spread by migrating birds.
When it comes to diseases. Do you think 10.000 amateur farmers know all ins and outs of chicken diseases as well as the professional chicken farmer?
And do you think they are more exposed to diseases in a farm with hygenic corridors or in someones backyard?
I read the parent post as a statement on production and media representation. I didn't see any claim about farmers loving animals. I'm sure many do, but your argument is addressing something different.
I love animals. I eat meat. I want humane treatment of animals when they are bred for consumption. I know this is frequently not the case. But this is a different cause than what parent post addresses (aside from the 'decades old' bit about photos, which I am not qualified to address as someone outside the Netherlands).
Do you like it when your mother blames you for bugs in her printer's Windows driver?
That's what they had to explain, because it endangered the did supply
What spiderfarmer is talking about is a scandal in a Belgian slaughterhouse, where animals were being abused. This was filmed[1] by an animal rights organization, sparking outrage.
What you are talking about is the Fipronil scandal[2]. A Belgian company, Poultry-Vision, bought Fipronil from Romania and mixed it with DEGA-16. A Dutch company, Chickfriend, bought the mixture and knowingly used it to clean hundreds of farms.
[1]: Warning, shocking imagery: https://vimeo.com/209349326
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Fipronil_eggs_contaminati...
(2) was the only link I knew, so I was aware that I probably talked about something else. If I'm not mistaking, Poultry Vision didn't deliver to farms in the food sector, while Chickfriend did ( chicken farms) -> illegal
https://www.volkskrant.nl/opinie/de-vee-industrie-is-de-grot...
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/magazine/right...
I mean yes, in the grand scheme of things, treating animals well before slaughtering them is better than treating them poorly, but it misses the forest for the trees.
It's only a matter of time until lab-grown meat is as good and cheap as the original, and then society will turn. Eating real animals will be something like hunting is now, a tiny thing and with huge image costs.
As anecdata, consider the outlawing of fox hunting in UK, declining hunting love in France[0], and a similar decline in the US[1].
The more hunting becomes unusual, the higher the number of people who will consider it in negative light compared to those who view it favourably.
[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37865215 [1] http://deerfarmer.com/wiki/hunting-decline
Furthermore, whilst it may not be obvious in activist circles, seeing the topic was about eating animal produce, the obvious counterpart in hunting would be game animals, and not a sport (which fox hunting is, more or less). My (unsourced) guess would be that most non-vegetarians do not condemn hunting, and it would also be a somewhat hypocritical stance. Furthermore, meat consumption isn't exactly on declining in the world, but you can make your own conclusions about that.
(I'm a city dweller, and haven't hunted anything in my life. I'm not saying that to validate my opinion, but regardless I know quite a bit about the realities of hunting that probably apply to most places, and the reason it is in decline may well not be because of a shift in the moral landscape. It is a consuming hobby, but that doesn't in itself imply that all non-hunters would automatically start to disapprove it more and more.)
It is obviously an opinion not a fact, but as an example, you can consider the attitude of people to eating animals that they ate in the past and not now (porcupine, turtle, cat, dog).
Not only it's considered disgusting, but it's often considered worse than eating other animals.
Perhaps that will convince me to stop eating meat. Meanwhile I have bigger worries.
I can dig the exact page from On Food and Cooking for reference if needed.
Stress should be avoided, don't get me wrong, but I don't think our tastebuds are this advanced.
From an evolutionary point of view you could say that cows, chickens, pigs (and cats, dogs, horses) are one of the most successful animals, exactly because we eat (or pet) them.
From the farmers point of view.
There have been campaigns for both types of chicken to improve their quality of life. Here in NL they were conducted by an NGO called Wakker Dier. There's the campaign against the 'plofkip' (huge chicks who are unable to move, and are force fed) so that grocery stores quit selling these. Then for the sale of eggs (itself harmless for chickens, if unfertilized eggs, and if chickens are treated without abuse) there's a star system ranging from 1 ('kooi') [1], 2 ('scharrelei') till 3 ('vrije uitloop'). Note that this system says nothing about their diet. Now, if you'd translate 2 and 3, you'd both end up with 'free range'. This Wikipedia article on free range [2] explains the EU has strict rules on that term, while the US does not. Its worth noting that due to campaigns of Wakker Dier eggs of type 1 are almost never sold anymore directly, but they are still being widely used within products! If not, they will mention the name of type 2 and 3 ('scharrel-ei' usually or more uncommon in the case of products 'vrije uitloop ei' otherwise).
Regarding the picture you linked if that is from NL, that might very well either be accurate due to fipronil scandal [3] (millions of chickens were killed due to that hence near empty cages), or otherwise a propaganda picture.
Its very important to be critical of farmers. They're treating thousands upon thousands of animals with various degrees of treatment (from loving/caring to downright abuse), as well as affecting our soil (as in, "the inhabitants of Earth's" which also makes sense since our soil is deeply connected with the rest of Earth's ecosystem as well as literally your neighbors's soil).
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Eisen_ko...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-range_eggs
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Fipronil_eggs_contaminati...
I never said farmers are 'evil' people. Farmers can do good (and if you read my post well you'd have seen my examples), but we live in a capitalist world where profit is an important factor, if not the most important factor. So we need others to force the farmers to keep checks and balances: consumers, NGOs, and the government. Case in point: the fipronil scandal, where ChickFriend was a cheap solution to a problem, and where the government (NVWA) failed to look into an anonymous tip in november 2016. If they did, we'd have a lot less economic damage as well as less potential health damage. Another example is as I explained how Wakker Dier's campaign stimulated the sales of free range eggs of type 2 and 3 (although first and foremost in fresh eggs; not products containing eggs), and how they managed to reduce the amount of 'plofkip' in grocery store.
Putting the blame on the farmers is wrong too. How on earth could they have known that what the cleaning company used was illegal?
I've always felt that it's a bit ironic for people consuming animal products to be critical of breeders. Kinda passing responsibilities on them so tadaaa ! No more consumer guilt.
If you really want to reduce animal exploitation and world GHG emission, cut down your consumption instead of putting even more pressure on producers without accepting to get more money out of your pocket for products. Because generally speaking, people don't want to spend more money on food, as there is so much other essential trash to buy. To each his priorities...
Its relative, not absolute, and history teaches us we need to be critical of farmers. The recent fipronil scandal only underlines that. Our government failed as well, don't get me wrong.
If you want to reduce harm done to sentient beings (or animals with a CNS) there are many ways to achieve that. Yes, the best way would be going vegan overnight, but that is tough for an individual and quite unrealistic to achieve society-wise. Right now, we are better off reducing meat consumption (ie. via 'meatless monday' initiative) since we don't need to consume that much meat to begin with. If you eat less meat, you can use that money to eat quality meat. Eventually we can irregularly eat lab meat. So, yes, we should be critical to ourselves as well. But that's a different, and very complex discussion (I'm on a Facebook group where this is the main subject, finding the grey between the two extremes and supporting each other).
(Also as a side note there are some non-animal products which are rather bad for GHG emission, btw.)
The recent fipronil scandal I'm not especially hostile to. It's like the horse meat thing, no risk for the consumer, it's simple fraud from the antiparasitics producer afaik and not latent farmer malignancy. You're way more exposed if you use antiflea products on your pets... And fipronil is really low risk for mammals overall. Oh, and of course this was in the cheap industry side of laying hens, so your wallet could vote on this beforehand.
Yet people still don't want to spend more on food. Most already shop first price, its just not a priority when you need to get a new phone and other stupid stuff. And this is the exact kind of consumer who can leisurely insist that we need to be critical of farmers. Oh, the irony. Sweep before your own door, you know.
But good on you, I hope your taking part in this Facebook group (probably known for it's high scientific and intellectual qualities, as everything that is on facebook) is comforting enough that you don't have to drastically change your consuming and behavior (and chronically, as "scandals" break out, underlines that farmers have a HUGE responsability in this), because what a shame that would be.
(I didn't come up with that joke. Gaiman and Pratchett did.)
It's easy to fetishize and "love" nature while we sit in our climate controlled boxes looking at pictures of the 1% most scenic sites in the world.
It is not a competition.
It is a difference of opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsoil#Erosion
And vertical farming, hydroponics is cool tech and RGB LED's are cool to increase size, weight etc for increased profits. None of that has a positive influence on sustainability.
There a new phenomenon btw called Herenboeren, http://www.herenboeren.nl/, basically crowdfunding, for farmers. This is getting quite some attention. This at least gives me the impression that there's a bigger part of our country starting to see otherwise.
Compare our farmers to the rest of the world. Study it. Please tell me in detail how they are not among the most intelligent, competent and sustainable.
Far longer allowed caged chicken raising than even Germany? Check.
No control at all over the raising process, leading to over a year of time before the fibronil scandal became public? Check.
They’re good farmers, but they’re not any better than the industry in other parts of western Europe.
Did you even bother to read the article? That has massive implications on the amount of water, energy and chemicals used.
Regarding the story of feeding the world. How about the West changes their diet? We don't need to go all out right now on farming, we could fix obesity levels, healthcare cost, excess levels of waste before we need that. But that's not cool science, and there's a lot less profit to be made. So I guess that's not what's going to happen.
Now I know that there is a big lobby in favour of agriculture in the Netherlands, that is highly successful and had basically a political party in its pocket up until the mid-90s - the CDA, you might want to google Gerrit Braks for example. This lobby was one of the enablers of the rise of the high-tech agri-cultural industry in the Netherlands as we know it today.
Stories about how our farmers are bad? Missed the whole fipronil hype that completely unsubstantiated?
Talk to a farmer. Ask him who speaks for him nowadays. The lobby is "doodgepoldert". There is none.
Check how the NPO, Wakker Dier, Pvdd, Milieudefensie and Greenpeace are connected and you'll see the size of that lobby.
https://www.nieuweoogst.nu/nieuws/2017/01/19/objectieve-jour...
It is however interesting that there is overlap between stichting wakker dier membership and producers of NPO shows. Moreover it is very worrying that Diederik Stapel has any public advisory function. I wouldn't call this 'evidence of close organizational ties' though.
The one thing that jumps out if I think about Dutch farming and the news lately is the Fipronil incident. But even that was obviously one bad actor - however bad it is that it spread through so many farms and had such a large impact on Dutch farming.
There are some farms with bad reputations, but farming in general seems to do quite well here!
I can't speak for the Netherlands, but in Australia, while there is an active and growing green movement, I would consider the industry-specific lobbying groups to be more successful at landing media pieces to influence the public. These would be lobbyists representing mining, banking, meat production, etc. This is usually because those industries are very well-funded and consolidated compared to environmental groups.
Especially in India, farmers have been moved even to suicide [1] during times of drought and flood, which seems to come up every other year (and farming is a very climate sensitive field anyway), I really wonder how tech can work to improve the status quo
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India
A lot of these systems require enormous (and growing) up-front investments, not feasible for small independent operations. There are a lot of family business in Westland, but they require massive mortgages and/or loans to keep up with the times (and the investments that they require). There are fewer and fewer small farms and more and more 'mega-barns'.
Little space is needed, but a lot of it is high carbon and high capital.
It can be argued if this is caused by the government, but the Dutch seem more maintenance-minded than most other countries I visited. Probably caused by all the dikes: if not maintaining something properly will kill your entire village, you have a lot of incentive to become very good at it.
> These regional water authorities are among the oldest forms of local government in the Netherlands, some of them having been founded in the 13th century.
As far as I know (I am not a farmer, nor do I know any greenhouse farmers very well), lots of it is private capital though.
One of the biggest banks in the Netherlands (Rabobank) has a (positive) reputation for financing farmers and other agricultural firms. (also a negative one due to the LIBOR scandal, incidentally)
Both of those are chicken & egg problems to some extent.
There isn't an easy answer. Unifying property under a co-op system won't solve the problem because you can't have every decision deliberated by committee which is content to play politics as opportunity passes it by. People simply need to sell, and they simply need to accept that the land will be worth more after they sell it. People will simply have to surrender control, one way or another. People will simply have to adapt to a new economy. Creative destruction is the price and the engine of progress.
The alternative is the backwards system that exists today, and it is not sustainable, not in the face of foreign competition, not in the face of the people who suffer from starvation caused by mismanagement in poorer years, and not in the face of the persistent, rampant poverty that farmers keep themselves in as they cling to the control of what they know rather than the fear of uncertainty.
Unfortunately we've all been brainwashed by neoclassical economists and such to believe that free markets should dictate everything.
Interestingly, this is a nearly 200 year old problem in America. Most spectacularly in Chicago[1], where the city was barely above the natural water table (Lake Michigan). As the city grew they produced more sewage and the ground was unable to absorb water quickly enough, so water began to backflow into the sewage system. A single Cholera outbreak in these conditions killed 6% of the population.
The solution at the time was to just build the sewers above ground, which was obviously a terrible idea. Over 20 years they began raising most of Chicago over 6' into the air. I think this isn't necessary with modern sewage, but in the coming decades we may see stuff like this again for east and west coast cities in the US. It's cheaper to raise entire cities than rebuild them.
More energy in the atmosphere means more violent storms, so Southern coastal cities will probably have to move inland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Sanitary_and_Ship_Cana...
It's kind of amazing that such a poorly-formed plan didn't go catastrophically wrong, but it's worked okay for over a century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_1885_cholera_epidemic_...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_settlements_lost_to_...
The video on this page is pretty neat: https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/water/waterbeheer/bescherming...
Mind you, perhaps it's not that big a thing if bland tasting food has done so well.
But these things also change. Look at how coffee has improved so much in the past 20 years for many consumers.
High yields in a country that does not have record sunlight throughought entire year, can only be achieved by abusing chemicals in the process, faking natural conditions, etc. Low amount of natural sunlight can easily be tested using your taste buds.
If their farmer switch to other varieties, without slowing down and reducing the yields, they will still harvest tasteless produce in comparison to other countries that have better conditions or "slower" production.
Poland has lower yields, we have much more land than they do (lower pressure for efficiency), being a bit backwards to the Western Europe actually results in better food.
In early Spring and late Autumn, I'd always pick imported French or Spanish produce over Dutch.
We found some actual farms around that we got some actually tasty stuff during season .. but the stuff in the supermarkets tastes like grass.
The Hague produces vegetables and fish in a self sustaining loop:
Fish waste fertilizes plants, which filter the water for the fish.
Local restaurants proudly offer the veggies and “city swimmers.”
See more at https://qz.com/907971/the-netherlands-basically-reinvented-t...
[0] https://www.agdaily.com/insights/not-just-u-s-farmland-forei...
The article makes much of exporting knowledge. But how much of the “sustainability” of this model is tied to cheap renewable energy sources? Like geothermal in the Netherlands.
One researcher notes “on the assumption of efficient LED lighting, I estimate that plants like potato or tomato that produce a fleshy food product require about 1,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity for each kilogram of edible tissue they produce.” About the same as what a refrigerator uses in a year.[1]
For example there’s a New York indoor farming startup called Bowery Farms. Its gotten some tech VC and coverage in the tech press. Its marketing is all “green”. They claim to use “far fewer resources” while producing “100x more on the same land... 365 days a year.” They mention how very little water they use.
But if you look closely, they’re suspiciously silent on energy use.[2]
[1] http://www.salon.com/2016/02/17/enough_with_the_vertical_far...
Obviously USA-style food is already here that taste bad.
For example, Mac Donalds is always considered terrible here...
Grapes without pits, soft bread that stays good for 2 weeks, chickens that shrink to half after baking, everything is full of sugar, ...
This is what we can appreciate about the South, lots of things are done not so efficiently but quite often with higher quality.
This is the point. Dutch earn a lot of money with vegetables because they sell most of the seeds of vegetables that Spain, Italy, Morocco and other mediterranean countries use industrially. Because disease resistance, homogeneity of size and time of production, research, availability, and sometimes... plain piratery and renaming of old varieties. Read about the napoleon cherry for example.
1) Tomato is a tropical plant that loves warm and light. More sun means more flavour. You can pick the seeds of the same variety of tomato and culture some in Germany and other in Spain. Unless you can afford to spend a lot of electricity, the last will be always better. The reality is that the bland and the yummy tomato will often belong to exactly the same industrial variety, because...
2)... different grades of quality. Wouldn't be fair to match the cheapest tomato against the better.
3) Consumers do not select only by flavour, they have other interests and will reject a soft and dented tomato. You can sell the first strawberries of the year for a higher price, even if they have virtually no time to develop any flavour. People still love it because strawberries with low flavour is still a better deal that no strawberries at all.
4) more rippen tomato taste better, but if you want your tomato to travel 3000 Km before to reach your table in perfect shape and colour you need to sacrifice something. Small farmers and amateurs that sell locally can afford to pick the fruit more ripe.
5) Antique varieties "taste better", you can enjoy the different flavour variations that came with a bigger genetic diversity, but tomato is a short living species and, unlike good antique apples or plums, seeds of good and true heirloom varieties of tomato are very difficult to find and there is almost not profit in selling it online.
Tomatoes are seasonal too, best ones are in summer. That's why people made sauces and kept them for the winter. Willing to have fresh tasty tomatoes during the whole year is not an easy task...
Another factor is that tomatoes are harvested green and ripened using ethylene gas just before hitting the shelves.
Because vegetables are mostly water by weight quite a lot of produce leaves the country in freeze dried form to save on shipping.
Talking about three sector theory
Usually inequality between countries or people is reduced by rich and poor trading with each other.
But what if the poor have nothing to offer to the rich? Then the only option is to work for their own sustenance which means farming.
We give that food to cattle instead. Or we just waste it.
I have 5 ha (1 ha = 10.000 m2) land in my home country, but I do not know how to use it, even for what I can use. I will be really glad if someone points out me profitable/most profitable things for this land.
(I am from Central Asia, traveling and working abroad)
I rarely buy the cheapest option. Most of the times we get the most expensive Bio (organic) ones. This legend needs to die. Just like the one that says that marked as "local" tomatoes (vegetables) taste better (or taste at all). For some times I thought I could smell it. Doesn't work anymore. There is no system anymore as long as you buy in a supermarket here. Unfortunately I'm asleep at local market times or they are when I'm at work but I'm sure you can get the good stuff there because my parents grow them in their garden. But this is not the problem we are talking about here. This is the 21st century. I can't believe that I can't get something as simple as tomatoes with taste for pretty hefty prices in a supermarket.
It's not like it was always this way. I can remember very good the moment where we switched from big tomatoes to those cocktail ones because they did not taste like water. Then those became tasteless, I've now seen micro tomatoes. Maybe there is some taste left...
Actually the model would work better in states with less arable land or with a colder climate.
Reasons:
1. Better food security, less reliance on imported food
2. As the article states, water use is much lower than open field farming, so it's better for places with constrained resources
3. More environmental if the food is grown closer to the consumers as there's less need for storage and transport. Similar to #1
4. Sunshine doesn't really matter for these greenhouses since a lot of them are using LED lights tuned to the species they're growing to increase output. [0]
[0] https://www.verticalfarmingconference.com/indoor-farming/jap...
I mean, really, try measuring it yourself. They're virtually always all about lettuce.
Lettuce doesn't feed the world, staple foods do. Virtually nobody eats a whole head of green leaf lettuce a day, but even if they did, it'd be 50 calories. That's less calories than in a lollipop.
Lettuce is 95% water. It means if you want to eat say 10% of your daily energy intake in lettuce, you need to eat 250 calories of lettuce, that means 5 heads of lettuce and basically a soda can full of water.
That's not food, the way we normally talk about food. It's water, with a bunch of fibers and a tiny amount of minerals and nutrients.
Which is also the reason it's so easy to grow. You can grow a head of lettuce indoors under artificial lighting in a shitty growth medium in 3 weeks flat from start to finish, because you're basically mixing a tiny amount of energy with a bunch of water.
And that's precisely why all these new companies demo it. Look at us, we can grow a gazillion pretty green nature looking things you put in salads, the pinnacle of healthy foods, in no time, using much less water, factory-style. It's a joke.
Same with tomatoes. Five regular tomatoes is about another 55 calories, just like an entire head of lettuce, or a lollipop. And who eats five whole tomatoes on a daily basis?
And don't get me wrong, I've eaten about 1/3rd of a head of lettuce and two tomatoes pretty much every day of my life for more than 20 years. I like eating them and will continue to do so. Oh and I'm Dutch, too.
But I also get tired of 'revolutionary' food tech pretending as their new ways of cultivating it changes agriculture. It doesn't. It's just a fancy story for a fancy urban farm that sells overpriced produce to a fancy 'local' salad bar that has zero impact on our environment. I want to see revolutions in the production of staple foods, too, as well as a cultural change in the way we shape our diets and the food we choose to consume.
So no, the Dutch don't feed the world because we've got a bunch of high-yield lettuce/tomato installations.
Nonetheless a lot of interesting points in the article, but I just wish it was a lot less about lettuce and tomatoes. It's really becoming a bit of a parody, anyone else feel the same? You could literally do an Onion piece on an article featuring a 26 year old design student who runs a hydroponics lettuce factory in an old city office.
This is not [yet] replicable to other places though.
Hopefully soon - unlimited energy would utterly change the world.
[1]: https://www.geothermal-energy.org/direct_uses/netherlands.ht...
"The growing environment is kept at optimal temperatures year-round by heat generated from geothermal aquifers that simmer under at least half of the Netherlands."
"The growing environment is kept at optimal temperatures year-round by heat generated from geothermal aquifers that simmer under at least half of the Netherlands."
Not as hot but definitely useful for greenhouse direct heating.