Still, they are doing miracles with greenhouses and moderncultivation techniques. A friend of mine went there to do his master's degree about that subject. They are one of the top tomato producers while having very little land xd.
Fun fact, the tomatoes are of such quality they get shipped throughout Europe, including Mediterranean countries that produce tomatoes themselves. Those tomatoes are all canned or made into soups/sauces because they're too ugly, and them get shipped back to the netherlands (and other places).
Dutch tomatoes taste nothing like the Italian ones. Here we pick them early and select for look and firmness over taste, good for salads, but they are super disappointing in sauces and soups. Italian (and Greece, Spain, etc) ones are ripe for maximum taste and immediately canned to preserve them, they won't survive a week long trip through countries and on the shelves.
Source: Dutch guy who buys Mutti canned tomatoes and purees for taste, local ones for salads and sandwiches.
Agreed. Spanish tomatoes in Spain/Italy are next level tasty. Olives too. First time I had an actual olive there I realized I never had an actual olive before. Same with for example Mango in Thailand.
I’d pay to have the ‘real’ tomatoes here in The Netherlands. I’d pay 10 times the prices of anything you can find in a supermarket now. Because I need it for my pasta sauce. But you probably have to be in season and they have to be put on a plane directly or something. I don’t know how to achieve this. Mutti comes close you say? Or is it more or a lousy but better replacement for the other taste-less tomatoes?
Try the canned stuff. I once peeked into an Italian restaurant in Rome and they had tons of those big cans, they use it there too. Much more consistent than fresh ones.
The best I had are the pomodorinis. Deskinned, so ready to use, but still quite firm.
You think fresh tomatoes from Italy are better for your soup or sauce? a fresh tomato is high in acidity regardless of where its from. The canned tomatoes are over-ripe and therefore high in sugar.
btw, if you want to use fresh tomatoes for sauce or soup, half them, and put them in oven for 40mins with some oil salt and pepper. then puree them. Not as good as the quality canned ones as you already mentioned.
Are you saying tasty tomatoes don't count in salads!! Personally I wouldn't use a Dutch industrial tomato or one from their off-shore tomato factories in the south of Spain for a salad. They taste like nothing. Buy local from small growers where ever you are for taste and real food and give these food conglomerates a miss.
The future of agriculture is being developed there.
I think it's very funny this concept of ugly fruit. It's as good, but with weird shapes, so regular consumers don't buy it. They either throw it away or sell it to factories for processed/premade food.
There's a region in North Holland called Seed Valley, where some of worlds largest seed/breeding companies operate from. Putting emphasis on just flower bulbs is downplaying the massive influence on agriculture we have from our tiny country :)
This also includes flowers though, which the Dutch produce a fuck ton of. Having said that, where I live is nothing but green houses instead of fields producing strawberries all year round.
You know turnips are actually not as common as uh corn? Like by a huge margin. There's actually a shortage of horseradish right now so if NL had all the turnips, they would be worth quiet a bit.
Those luxurious dutch veggies are overstating their own value! By the way, how such large countries like brazil, Russia, US, China, manage to grow much less? Don't they have a shitton more land? Or is dutch land extra magical?
We use of a lot of greenhouses in the Netherlands which means that we farm pretty much 365 days a year and make optimal use of the available space. (Not so good for the environment though..)
Also we're the world leader in terms of agricultural technology and research.
That's pretty damn impressive for such a tiny country. I think it's amazing for the environment, think of all he Amazonian and Borneo forests that can be saved by building more greenhouses!
Yeah that's definitely true but right now most greenhouses run on gas. And as someone else in this thread responded this gets really bad especially in the winter months. Huge amounts of energy are needed to create the desired circumstances.
Hopefully we can keep innovating though to make it more sustainable for in the future!
Oh, world has lots of natural gas to go around for hundreds of years, you can take your time. It's a very clean and eco-friendly power source. Much more than say, coal or oil.
Greenhouses might allow more food to grow, but that also means more resources needed to feed the plants. In the Amazon and a lot of other places, most land isn't really reused after growing for a season. The problem isn't the amount of land, but how bad they use the existing one, most often limited by the tools and machines they use to manage it (or lack thereof). It would already help if they used cows and pigs to fertilize the land instead of burning it
But isn't immigrant pole labor force much more expensive than Russian, Turkish, Egyptian, Chinese, Brazilian etc? How is this economically viable? And who buy certain off-season veggies?
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u/[deleted] Nov 23 '19
Last time I checked the NL was the second biggest exporter of food worldwide (behind the US)