Live data from Hacker News

The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant

nationalgeographic.com

31–40 of 297 posts

Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant

#32
post #26
post #6

I'm afraid Netherlands is only good for food that's over-engineered, cardboard-tasting and geneticaly modified for quantity. But that's future I guess.

It will probably improve as time goes by.

As long as there's an incentive for it to get better. Based on my experience in the US the incentives run the other way :-(. All about cost.

Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant

#35

Here in the UK, tomatoes from the Netherlands are the most common sold in British supermarkets. 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…

In much of the UK (presumably in the far north it wouldn't work well?) the way to get tasty tomatoes from mid- to late-summer would be to grow them oneself... Of course during the winter tasty fresh tomatoes are unavailable.

Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant

#36
post #6

I'm afraid Netherlands is only good for food that's over-engineered, cardboard-tasting and geneticaly modified for quantity. But that's future I guess.

The article said the country produces no GMOs. Regular size tomatoes can be lacking in flavor. But I find the small tomatoes from there delicious. Some other vegetables like peppers are pretty tasty too. It's not all bad.

Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant

#37

Here in the UK, tomatoes from the Netherlands are the most common sold in British supermarkets. 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…

Dutch farmers recognised this and focused on new/other kinds of tomatoes with much better taste like cherry tomatoes and vine tomatoes.

Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant

#38
I think that how much a country is "feeding the world" would be more properly measured in metric tons, rather than dollars. So saying that the Netherlands are "feeding the world" on account of the total value of their agricultural exports seems to me a bit misleading. Staples are cheap.

Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant

#39
I am from the Netherlands and I have to say that regretably a large part of our country thinks that our farmers are incompetent, stupid, nature-hating animal bashers because of how the media treats them.

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.

Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant

#40

Here in the UK, tomatoes from the Netherlands are the most common sold in British supermarkets. 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…

It's not just the tomatoes. Everything in the UK supermarket is quite bad. It's a cultural thing I suppose.

Its not culture, it is for the benefit of big companies. The best tasting vegetables also spoil easily. The ones sold in supermarkets are the varieties that can be sold longer, usually with poor flavor.
Post reply on HN