Another perspective on Dutch farming

I still don’t know what to make of the nitrogen “crisis” surrounding Dutch farms. It’s easy to see the argument of urban bureaucratic overreach shutting down small farms. But I think there’s more to the story. For context, I’ve previously pondered it here.

Despite the awful title, Big Veganism is coming for you is a thought-provoking read.

Is it not curious how veganism, which dresses itself in the hip clothes of animal welfare, anti-climate change and eco-feminism, can’t wait to get into the blender with big business? Sniffing around the multinationals of Food Valley are no less than 3,500 SMEs, a remarkable number of which are vegan start-ups. They can smell the money, and vegan ethics invariably melt when some suit from a corp opens the wallet — even when that suit is from the very meat industry vegans profess to despise…

And this is just the funding we know about. Transparency, in Food Valley, is limited. When Dutch investigative journalist Vincent Harmsen went to court demanding that Wageningen University, the driving force behind the Food Valley “ecosystem”, release information about its scientists’ relations with agrochemical firms Syngenta, Monsanto and Bayer, the court upheld the university’s right to keep schtum. During her tenure as president of the university, Louise Fresco was simultaneously a paid non-executive director of Syngenta. All of which begs the question, how objective is the science coming out of Food Valley, given who’s paying for it?

The article goes into much more detail, but it is curious that many of the least scrupulous producers of processes food are going all in on the vegan movement.

Actually, the Dutch model of agricultural surplus is a little less perfect than advertised. Post-War, the Netherlands’ agriculture minister Sicco Mansholt vaunted industrialised, mechanised farming — and, as the first European commissioner for agriculture, broadcast his vision across the continent. The Mansholt Plan — criticised notably by E.F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful — was upscaled into the Common Agricultural Policy, and it certainly resulted in plenty (there were wine lakes and butter mountains). But the CAP gobbled nearly 70% of the EU budget and left a continent stripped of nature. The Netherlands was among the worst cases.

As a result of its celebrated intensive farming, levels of nitrogen pollution in the Netherlands are so high that in 118 of the nation’s 162 nature reserves, nitrogen deposits exceed ecological risk thresholds by an average of 50%. In fact, the Netherlands is in the midst of a full-scale political crisis over nitrogen.

This is an interesting take. The Dutch should have been focusing on sustainable agriculture to feed the Dutch population instead of industrial agriculture for export that took up every square inch of the country, leaving much of it severely polluted.

The result would likely be less, more expensive meat, which I don’t see as a bad thing.

As for the whole argument that we can’t feed the world’s population with our current agricultural output and that going vegan would somehow change that:

Proponents of alt-protein claim that it is a necessity, required to feed the world’s growing population. The world’s farmers, however, already produce enough to feed current and future mouths. The problem is waste — a third of global food is binned, or left to rot — and distribution. You can produce as many plant-based burgers as you care to, but if the poor are unable to access them, they will still hunger.

And I tend to agree with the conclusion:

The Brave New World of Big Veganism will be, in other words, a corporate dream. Industrially-produced crops will be fed into factories owned by food multinationals and transformed — by energy-demanding and expensive machinery — into a meat substitute. That meat substitute is then likely to arrive in a supermarket in an expensive, value-added, ready-made form (“plant-based chicken tikka”, “plant-based spaghetti Bolognese”, ad nauseum). Big Veganism will kill home cooking — the making of meals from prime ingredients — which is a form of freedom, a creative act. Mind you, the veganised masses will be too feeble to protest against the loss of their humanity: in June last year the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that children on vegan diets were, on average, 1.2 inches shorter and had up to 6% lower bone mineral content than meat-eating peers.

Will meat substitutes actually provide us with any nutrients at all? We won’t know. The exact composition of the product will be, of course, a corporate, patented secret, meaning anyone who wants the ability to feed themselves in a world without farm animals will have to cough up. But if Big Vegan’s recipe for its fake steak is hush-hush, you can bet that the principal ingredients are wheat gluten, soy and water — so add a carbohydrate-induced obesity epidemic to the enervation of the masses.

I’m all for eating less meat, but I’d rather replace it with traditional low meat diets from around the world. More lentils, buckwheat, chickpeas, sweet potatoes and less imitation chicken please.