I mean, really, try measuring it yourself. They're virtually always all about lettuce.
Lettuce doesn't feed the world, staple foods do. Virtually nobody eats a whole head of green leaf lettuce a day, but even if they did, it'd be 50 calories. That's less calories than in a lollipop.
Lettuce is 95% water. It means if you want to eat say 10% of your daily energy intake in lettuce, you need to eat 250 calories of lettuce, that means 5 heads of lettuce and basically a soda can full of water.
That's not food, the way we normally talk about food. It's water, with a bunch of fibers and a tiny amount of minerals and nutrients.
Which is also the reason it's so easy to grow. You can grow a head of lettuce indoors under artificial lighting in a shitty growth medium in 3 weeks flat from start to finish, because you're basically mixing a tiny amount of energy with a bunch of water.
And that's precisely why all these new companies demo it. Look at us, we can grow a gazillion pretty green nature looking things you put in salads, the pinnacle of healthy foods, in no time, using much less water, factory-style. It's a joke.
Same with tomatoes. Five regular tomatoes is about another 55 calories, just like an entire head of lettuce, or a lollipop. And who eats five whole tomatoes on a daily basis?
And don't get me wrong, I've eaten about 1/3rd of a head of lettuce and two tomatoes pretty much every day of my life for more than 20 years. I like eating them and will continue to do so. Oh and I'm Dutch, too.
But I also get tired of 'revolutionary' food tech pretending as their new ways of cultivating it changes agriculture. It doesn't. It's just a fancy story for a fancy urban farm that sells overpriced produce to a fancy 'local' salad bar that has zero impact on our environment. I want to see revolutions in the production of staple foods, too, as well as a cultural change in the way we shape our diets and the food we choose to consume.
So no, the Dutch don't feed the world because we've got a bunch of high-yield lettuce/tomato installations.
Nonetheless a lot of interesting points in the article, but I just wish it was a lot less about lettuce and tomatoes. It's really becoming a bit of a parody, anyone else feel the same? You could literally do an Onion piece on an article featuring a 26 year old design student who runs a hydroponics lettuce factory in an old city office.