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Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Actually a bit of a myth (I'm Dutch). It's more a case of targeting different markets with different price and quality ratios. E.g. Germans love to complain about Dutch water bombs but buy them by the kilo anyway because the stuff is cheap. They don't realize the more expensive varieties also available to them come from the same country. You don't have to buy the cheap ones but they do; it's their poor tastes that are driving the demand for this.

Likewise, Italy imports a lot of tomatoes (more than they export according to this: https://www.freshplaza.com/article/2158667/italian-table-tom...). Most of those come from the Netherlands. Italians are of course famously picky when it comes to their food. Yet they seem to buy Dutch produce.

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The reason that Italy imports Dutch tomatoes is probably for using them in tomato sauce and other tomato products.

Italy's export of tomato products is far greater than its raw tomato export: see e.g. http://www.tomatonews.com/en/global-tomato-products-trade-20...

So no, I wouldn't say that Italians like Dutch tomatoes as much as their own.

In the UK, supermarket tomatoes imported from The Netherlands are also common. The tomatoes are mostly tasteless, regardless of the variety. Even the premium-priced organic ones have little flavour.

That's what modern, mass-produced agriculture gives us: tasteless, low-cost produce all-year round because price mostly trumps other factors for many, if not most, consumers. But it seems that even expensive mass-produced varieties are just as tasteless as their cheaper counterparts.

Tomatoes flavour often gets killed by chilling them too far - https://www.newscientist.com/article/2109336-heres-why-putti...

There are probably other things going on as well, but this seems to be one of the major factors at play.

The UK used to be infamous for low quality bland food. So, it's not surprising that people tend to buy cheap low quality stuff there. Same in Germany (I live there currently). The quality of the produce in the super markets is quite poor. I recently was in Poland; they seem to have even lower standards/expectations there. Don't blame the Dutch, blame the local food culture (or lack thereof). The premium stuff gets shipped to where it most appreciated.

The UK, famous for bland food? The most popular dish in the UK is curry. The relative lack of spicyness in European food vs British food is very noticeable.

The other problem is the Netherlands are at risk of getting wiped out by rising sea levels.

Your example of Italy is bad news - in effect countries that could produce their own are buying Dutch because it’s cheaper, presumably because economies of scale now work in Holland’s favor.

In other words we depend on a country that’s at risk of being wiped out by flooding for food _and_ that same countrys dominant market position is also holding back food production in other countries.

Sounds like the back story for a bad movie.

Sea level changes are not that much of a challenge. We have centuries of experience building infrastructure to manage that and decades more to leverage that. Much of the country is already below sea level and already well prepared for extreme water levels. Some of the infrastructure will need some upgrading of course. The reality of sea level changes is that they will be most devastating in places where they won't be able to pull together the economic resources to put infrastructure in place or where they are making the historic mistake of assuming it won't happen.

This is a myth. Despite the global warming, Dutch sea level rising has not accelerated. See e.g. https://www.clo.nl/en/indicators/en0229-sea-level-dutch-coas...

I was worried about that too, only it turns out that due to the exact location the risks due to the sea level are much lower than in other countries. Having the British Isles as a buffer from the Atlantic really helps.

Changes to the weather pattern (particularly the rain) are a bigger cause of concern.

I wonder if Dutch tomatoes imported to Italy are canned and then branded as "made in Italy"?

That'd be illegal for food, which must state the country of origin.

You are probably right in the straight forward example. I'm sure most of the schemes below are legal though.

-"packed in Italy"

-Add herbs and seasoning to the can.

-Process it to pasata.

-Add lots of Italian branding, Italian head office address with "made in EU"

Labelling law is not that strict in the EU except for meat and fish. The idea of a single country of origin is pretty dubious anyway.

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