Comment by txutxu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by txutxu | Hacker News Reader

Nice to read this.

Now.

There is no enough meat farmers in the Netherlands, to produce all the meat consumed _daily_ in the Netherlands.

I´ve been living and working there. I'm a meat lover. The Netherlands is the Hell for a person with the same tastes than me (many years of high quality meat and vegetables and cooking practices).

Meat in the Netherlands is of very bad quality and very high price (I will avoid more colloquial expressions of my basic english).

In those countries that dutch people call "monkeys" or "Moroccans" (this is, portugal, spain, italy and greece) the meat is much better in quality and price... but... we don't have the "autosuggestion" of "we are the best" than dutch people have (even with their street reality).

I don't trust news years ago, but I trust my experience.

The pseudo-nazi dutch people (the first place in the world where I did meet black-skin-nazis, gay-nazis, jew-nazis, etc), are very prone to believe, say and sell, that they are the best, this news are very well crafted for their mind, I don't want to live on a country with the meat quality and price of the Netherlands streets. I know the reality there.

I prefer to be a "Moroccan monkey discriminated european" for them, and take meat and tomatoes of the mountains of my not so auto-suggested, auto-inclined, people. And live with the bad reality (and crafted news) of my country.

Enjoy the meal, and sleep on ignorance and discriminatory abundance, and justify yourself your incoherent reality, dear dutch people.

Hi there. As a Dutch person I sympathize with your frustration, but just like the majority of the Dutch do not generalize like you describe I'd appreciate it if you did not generalize either. Because by generalizing like that you are positioning yourself more like the percentage of the Dutch that I'd rather not associate with than the rest of us, effectively making yourself part of the problem, not part of the solution.

That said I fully agree that this society needs to work on a lot of things such as immigration, all kinds of glass ceilings, discrimination (in fact, not on paper) and a ton of other aspects in which we are far from perfect. We used to be a fairly tolerant society and in the last decade or so have thrown away long term progress for some cheap political slogans and finger pointing. A single party is responsible for a lot of this and has successfully driven a wedge into our otherwise tolerant society.

This is a fairly common element historically, whenever there is some degree of trouble it can pay off politically to find a scape-goat. But please continue to see it for what it is: an appeal to the baser nature of those that are not smart enough to see through it and judge the rest of us by our actions rather than by the words of our co-citizens.

Thank you.

This post is actually one of the most positive reviews of Dutch food I have ever seen =)

Well, it may seem positive, but here in the inferior south, that photos could destroy the day of many (sub)people.

We prefer animals and tomatoes not grow in those conditions shown in the photos (we get them, at the same prices, but grow with space and natural food).

I don't know why the article does not talk about the technologies used to modify vegetables and animals. I don't care if they don't get antibiotics, while they are transgenics, clones, or grow with irradiation and other technologies.

Also sorry and excuses to those offended downvoters, I can probe each word, I said them with care of not let me go, but I could go on, if somebody clarify the disagreement

> Also sorry and excuses to those offended downvoters, I can probe each word, I said them with care of not let me go, but I could go on, if somebody clarify the disagreement

I just did (see above) and I did not even downvote you because I can see where you're coming from but I think you are categorically wrong in the way you are approaching this.

If you ever make it back to NL consider yourself invited, email in profile (assuming our travels overlap).

Every foreigner who has ever seen a Dutch meal on his plate, dared to take a bite, and then seen the bill, knows exactly what you mean. Rants usually follow, though maybe not always with quite so many Nazi references :)

As a dutchy, the first thing my wife and I do as we cross any border, is go to have a decent meal. True story.

Imagine the shock, when one sinks their teeth into one of those beautiful, perfect looking, huge, shiny, spotless and bright red strawberries, and instead of the expected explosion of sweet, fruity flavor, the mouth fills with the tart, watery and astringent culinary assault familiar to the poor flavor deprived Dutch. How can a fruit so perfect in appearance be so offensive in taste that one would only feed it to a horse as a punishment for kicking a child.

There isn't much (any?) transgenic farming anywhere in Europe, is there?

Also - the biggest, nastiest, most pesticide intensive greenhouse vegetable farming in Europe is not in The Netherlands but in Spain.

I would have tried to message you privately, but you don't have contact info.

Maybe you don't notice the nuance of your writing, as English is not your native language, but you are saying that ALL dutch people are racists. This is why you are getting a negative reaction. If you think that is true, you are wrong, and guilty of the sort of group-oriented negative thinking you are upset about. It might help future interactions to say, instead of "x are nazis" (which indicates you think they all are) to, say, "I couldn't stand living there, there were too many people doing [negative racist attitude]"

Haha, Dutch food can be quite bland if you are not used to it. I'm Dutch myself and my Chinese friends are pretty shocked at my eating habits, they even go so far to claim that I don't know how to live. But I genuinely enjoy some whole wheat bread with hard cheese or a Stamppot.

Luckily there are plenty alternatives as there are restaurants from every imaginable culture or country. Dutch people are still quite open-minded and open to other cultures. Maybe not as much as in the past, which is a shame.

Netherland definitely comes out of a period where food was not judged on taste at all, which led to very tasteless potatoes and tomatoes. But with increasing access to good international food (during the '90s in particular), many started yearning for good food with taste again, and since then there's been a real turnaround with much tastier vegetables, more local produce, and more free range and organic.

It hasn't reached all corners of society yet, but there's definitely change in the Dutch attitude towards food.

This is not the place. Your post is irrelevant to the topic at hand, is itself guilty of overgeneralization, and contains not just one but a whole series of political statements of the type that originate flamewars. A favourable reading (ignoring the parts that go flagrantly against either the style guide or the community standards) reduces your post to 'nice to read this', which is contentless. Please stop.

You're generalising the Dutch as right-winged neo-nazi extremist racists there, I don't agree. That's just a few political outliers that try to get votes via extreme statements.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest bigot of them all?

You seem prejudiced, narrow minded and borderline delusional.

Or just simply very frustrated at recent events in his/her life.

It takes a certain mentality to turn frustration into the kind of rant you can read above. Into blaming some abstract common denominator in your environment instead of blaming yourself, (part of) your immediate environment or luck. Into making statements exactly as ridiculously wrong as those he alludes to.

And to top it off, it's completely devoid of factual correctness. It's just repeating the same boring urban legends about Dutch food quality.

I have a Croatian friend in The Netherlands that's a meat lover to the bone. He doesn't complain about the quality of the meat for sale: he simply finds and buys good stuff.

If you want to see some real dangerously bad quality meat for sale, you have to go to one of the countries where those checking and ensuring the quality of the food can be bribed.

Fair enough. I know that there is a lot of bad blood between Moroccan people and the right-wing Dutch. I see this in light of that rather than that the OP was trying to make any sense at all and even though I disagree with everything he wrote I can see that if it were motivated by frustration that that would be a legitimate excuse.

But going on what was written you are absolutely right.

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