I love the Netherlands, and not just for their livable street design, I just wish they food weren't so bland. They make even German cuisine look adventurous in comparison.
Apparently World War 2 is to blame for the shift in food culture. Somehow we never recovered from that.
I think we just internalized that Dutch cuisine sucks and focus on getting good food from other cultures (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
after being here for 2y, holy shit it's true. one dutch coworker said "we just eat for fuel, not for taste".
thankfully it's quite easy to buy amazing ingredients and just do really tasty home meals.
> (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
i would also say dutch bar/finger food is delicious. it's impossible not to have bitterballen while having a beer.
(although technically bitterballen and kroketten are local variations of the croquette, which originated from France[0], so even there we can't quite claim originality, haha)
The weather is fine, it's basically the same as you get in Northern Germany or London, too. (Very nice and comfortable compared to eg Singapore.)
Stroopwafels are ok in small amounts. The Pannenkoeken are great, but pretty much the same experience as what I ate growing up in Germany, so they are practically 'invisible' to me.
> [...] focus on getting good food from other cultures [...]
That's a good coping mechanism, yes. But alas, even the Indian and Cantonese food I had in the Netherlands was comparatively bland: adapted to the local tastes.
Then again, skimming through the article: Greece and Austria did have a famine (with more deaths than the Netherlands too), Germany experienced a famine in 1918, and in Italy "food consumption fell from a pre-war mean of about 2,600 calories a day to 1,900 calories by 1944; classic famine symptoms may have been absent, but both infant mortality and deaths from infectious and respiratory diseases rose"
So clearly this isn't the whole story since I've never heard anyone complain about Austrian or Greek food. One thing that stands out to me is that the "bad food" countries the religiocultural heritage is mainly protestantism, whereas in the "good food" countries it is catholic (or orthodox in the case of Greece). I can't speak for England, but Dutch Protestantism has the mentality of "having fun is a sin, so don't", whereas Catholicism is more like "sure, but Jesus died for our sins so bring on the indulgences!" if I understand correctly. So that might be a part of it. At the very least the protestants lack events like carnival that celebrate good food!
How does Germany's northern (protestant) food culture compare to its southern food culture? That might be a decent litmus test for this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944%E2%80%931...
Huh? England had more food than Europe under Nazi occupation.
Though crucially, the Brits kept their food under rationing for long after the war had ended, and the rationing actually got worse. They were on a major socialist bender.
(France perhaps kept their food culture better, because even though officially they had rationing for quite some time after the war too, people didn't actually follow the rules in France, at least not as much as in Britain. So the 'black' market alleviated the worst of the effects of rationing.)
Dutch supermarkets offer an impressive variety of products, and there’s no shortage of specialty or “ethnic” shops where you can find virtually any ingredient for any type of cooking. Major cities are brimming with restaurants serving world cuisines, and people with diverse dietary restrictions are well catered to, with a plethora of options available. Plus, Indonesian and Surinamese food can be considered "local" by this point (if you ignore the historical complexity of the topic) and are simply delicious.
While it’s true that the availability of cheap street food might not be as prominent, to say the food here is “bland” couldn’t be further from the truth.
Local produce is fine, too. They export some great fruit and veggies and cheeses to the rest of the world, too.
it's super easy to go to albert heijn and get really tasty ingredients and cook amazing food. it's also super easy to find great restaurants that are not dutch, and get incredible food (shout out to tacolindo, in amsterdam west).
but dutch food is incredibly bland, focuses way too much in things like mashed vegetables with sausage. you can only eat so many stamppot until you are done with it.
even dutch people say that while yes, you can cook literally anything you want (my wife and i cook brazilian food literally every day), natives in general do not do that.
But being more like the Italians or French in terms of food would mean being more like the Italians or French...
> But being more like the Italians or French in terms of food would mean being more like the Italians or French...
Singapore shows that you can combine amazing cuisine and a culture of efficiency.
Flanders also has much better food than the Netherlands, and is otherwise fairly similar (to an outsider that is, I'm sure the locals will find plenty to disagree about).