February 6, 2018

Dutch supermarket offers pink baskets for singles

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 10:26 pm

I think I can often tell if someone is only buying food for themselves, but that means absolutely nothing about the state of their love live. Maybe because Valentine’s Day is around the corner or spring, or both did the Jumbo supermarket in Woerden, Utrecht decide to let singles use pink shopping baskets to advertise their singledom. Frozen pizzas and beer it is, then. Or rice crackers, almond milk and tampons, that sort of thing.

Jumbo says it has done this before and that it was a success. How on earth they can claim it was a success if they have no way of knowing if it was, except possibly that nobody complained about it. By Dutch standards, that would indeed be a major success.

(Link: ad.nl, Photo by Doratagold, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)

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January 16, 2018

Gross drinks people order in Dutch bars

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 11:59 am

In an article about gross drinks people order in Dutch bars according to the bartenders who work there, one drink that came up a lot was red wine or white wine with cola. I’m thinking the wine has to be really cheap and used purely to put some alcohol in the cola, but the person ordering it is too cheap or broke to ask for rum, vodka or something else half way decent to go in their cola. Or it’s really great and/or very popular and we’re missing out.

Another questionable combo was alcohol with any kind of dairy: Malibu (coconut flavored liqueur) with chocolate milk or Safari (liqueur flavoured with exotic fruits) with Fristi (Dutch dairy drink with red fruits, usually for kids). Both drinks tell me you’ll still a child, but want alcohol to help you grow up. Unscientifically, since the 1990s more and more young people start drinking alcohol by way of sweet drinks, and as you get older, you move into more normal tasting alcohol.

Last weekend I was in a bar in Amsterdam and a couple from London was trying to ask for a glass of half Amaretto and half brandy. I didn’t mind my own business and asked why they wanted to drink that, if it had a name and what it tasted like. The answer came from the woman: “this is what my grandmother used to drink at Christmas and it reminds me of her”. The drink had no name and she just said, “here, try it” and I did. It’s OK, but the story is much better.

For all the newcomers, if you want to blend into a random Dutch bar, order a ‘kopstoot’ (a head butt): a shot of jenever (aka genever, no, not gin) and a beer (don’t specify any further). If you’re feeling adventurous, ask for ‘zeer oude jenever’ (very old genever) and skip the beer altogether.

(Link: munchies.vice.com)

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January 13, 2018

‘Dutch produce tons of food, but it’s bland’

Filed under: Food & Drink,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 9:42 pm

Saying that this small country can feed the world sounds very impressive, but when the crops are only for profit, you wonder what you’re buying. Subjectively, most people who live in the Netherlands and who are either not of Dutch origin or have lived abroad wonder very often on social media and at parties why Dutch-grown tomatoes and cucumbers taste like water. Google ‘Wasserbombe’ and find out what Germans think of these red-coloured ‘water bombs’.

“A country [like the Netherlands] can become an agricultural powerhouse without having a rich food culture, but the focus on price, efficiency, and practicality has undermined how the Dutch both consume and produce their food”, says Pinar Coskun of Erasmus University of Rotterdam, also echoed by Leo Marcelis, Professor of horticulture at Wageningen University, according to Yes Magazine.

In September 2016, National Geographic sung the praises of Dutch agriculture, with no discussion at all on taste, purely on output, saying that “more than half the nation’s land area is used for agriculture and horticulture.” Sure, if it’s just about feeding people like in a sci-fi series, sure. But if you want some sort of quality, that’s the not the point. To be fair, that’s possibly the case in many countries around the world.

There was also the onion-shallot war between the Netherlands and France. The Netherlands produce cheap shallots by replanting shallot bulbs and harvesting mechanically, while the French plant seeds and harvest manually. The Dutch shallots are cheaper, that’s for sure.

(Link: yesmagazine.org, Photo by FotoosVanRobin, some rights reserved)

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January 12, 2018

Dutch chain uses ‘ethnic profiling’ for training

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 7:52 pm

Using a series of illustrations, Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn teaches its new employees, many of which, according to my shopping experience, are not white, that ‘Premium’ clients are represented by ‘white men with glasses’ (‘the good clients’) and that ‘Budget’ clients are represented by ‘black women with children’ (‘the poorer clients’). Albert Heijn is considered the pricier shop by the general Dutch public. The goal of pointing out which clients are which is to make sure their shops stock food suited to the neighbourhood.

After a complaint from an anonymous employee saying this was discriminating, Albert Heijn pulled it offline right away and ‘didn’t mean anything by it [didn’t realise it internally themselves], but because employees have been offended, they will have a good look at it’. Their system has been in use for two years, but it took an employee’s anonymous tip to the press to wake up the management who teach their young impressionable employees that white folks are desirable clients and others, not so much.

(Link: ad.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)

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January 2, 2018

Worst slogan of 2017 about sausage rolls

Filed under: Animals,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 4:08 pm

Slogan-cat

The winner of the worst business slogan of 2017 is De Korenbloem in Mill with ‘Van kop tot kont, worst in de mond’ (roughly, literally and figuratively, ‘From top [head] to bottom [arse], sausage in the mouth’, as in from beginning to end, sausage in your mouth. You get the idea and it sounds gross in Dutch as well.

Second place goes to ‘Voor iedere gleuf een doos’ (Moniss packing materials, Lelystad), which is ‘For every slit (possibly, tab), there’s a box’; ‘gleuf’ is slang for female genitalia and so is ‘box’. Third place is ‘Alles om uw poes mee te verwennen. Ook als u een kater heeft (‘Everything to pamper your pussy, even if you have a (male) cat.’) from 4 Cats. Yes, the image I snapped from the Amsterdam shop is Dunglish and there should be a space between ‘cat’ and ‘food’.

This was the sixth edition of the Dutch Bad Slogans Awards and if they are not disgusting, they are usually sexist or really bad puns, from head to arse.

(Link: www.sloganverkiezing.nl)

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December 8, 2017

Dutch liqueur with rude name causing waves

Filed under: Food & Drink,Weird by Orangemaster @ 6:10 pm

Screen Shot 2017-12-08 at 18.01.51

A German alcohol company is causing a stir with a liqueur they sell in the Netherlands called ‘Neuken’, which means ‘to fuck’. Neuken liqueur is made from red vodka and raspberries, and has been fuelling a legion of adverts with bad puns.

Different parties in the Dutch alcohol business have submitted complaints, claiming that alcohol advertising has to be done ‘responsibly’ and Neuken’s sex-related puns are not fitting the bill. The funny part is that the German company, whose Dutch website is full of mistakes, is laughing all the way to the bank and enjoying all the ‘negative’ publicity on Facebook.

UPDATE: On 5 January 2018, Parool reports that Neuken has to stop.

(Link: gelderlander.nl, Screenshot: Facebook)

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November 28, 2017

Nigella Lawson upset about Dutch book translation

Filed under: Food & Drink,Literature by Orangemaster @ 10:23 am

Famous English gourmet Nigella Lawson has criticised the Dutch title of her cookbook ‘How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking’, which in Dutch is ‘Hoe word ik een goddelijke huisvrouw?’ (Roughly, ‘How can I become a divine housewife?’. The irksome intruder is ‘housewife’ because there’s no ‘housewife’ at all in English. Although there is a reference to women with the word ‘goddess’, implying that women would be the target market, the Dutch title clearly goes one backwards step too far for Lawson.

“I’m not a housewife at all. I don’t have anything against housewives, but I’m a business woman with a career”, said Lawson to Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf. Hey Nigella, the Netherlands still has the highest rate of European women who work part-time with and without children (!), where roughly 60% of them cannot financially support themselves and rely on their partner (usually a man willing to pay for them) or the government to take care of them.

Let’s unpack the mistranslation then: my Facebook friends’ best guesses are that it would sell better to women that way, that it was a man came up with this title and that Dutch women, having come very late and part-time to the labour market (1970s) as compared to their European counterparts, basically deserve to be talked to down to like this and will still buy the book receive the book as a gift because, hey, it’s Nigella Lawson.

(Links: nu.nl, scp.nl – PDF)

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October 18, 2017

Sign language coffee bar opens in Amsterdam

Filed under: Dutch first,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 12:01 pm

Signing-guy

After the arrival of cat cafés and the likes, Amsterdam is now jumping on the bandwagon of having a sign language café called the Sign Language Coffee Bar where everyone has to order their coffee by signing. The café will open its doors on 19 October at noon, and you can already start practicing your order (videos, very cool).

Of course, you’ll be able to hone your signing skills with the same short videos mentioned above at the café. The coffee bar is part of a group of companies that find work for people who have visual or hearing impairments. Locals may already know the restaurant Ctaste where you can dine in the dark and be served by blind wait staff.

It’s interesting to know that the Dutch have five sign language dialects because they had five different schools that went their own way. Even though the coffee bar’s menu has items in Dutch (‘Jus d’orange’ is French, but in common use for ‘orange juice’ in Dutch), English and Italian, follow the videos and you’ll be fine.

If you want to take your skills up a notch, learn to sign the names of Dutch cities (sure, also learn the alphabet if you weren’t in Scouts or Girl Guides and know it already). I used the one for Amsterdam once and I know the one for Rotterdam, but this guy has you covered.

(Link: missethoreca.nl, screenshot of signing video)

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October 7, 2017

Eastern Europeans berated for picking mushrooms

Filed under: Food & Drink,General by Orangemaster @ 11:30 am

Shiitake

A Dutch friend who really enjoys a good walk in the woods of Noord-Brabant and talking pictures of mushrooms and other fungi not far from their village has been very upset at all the Eastern Europeans picking ‘buckets full of mushrooms’. I don’t know if they saw any of them pick the mushrooms (I think so) or if they read it in the papers and found culprits to get angry at, but either way, Eastern Europeans really like to pick mushrooms, as I know from that part of my own Eastern European background. And this year is a grand cru year for mushrooms according to experts.

To Eastern European this is harvest time: they will make soups, marinated mushrooms, many dumplings stuffed with mushroom and the likes. It’s free food in the woods and they know which mushrooms to pick and which ones not to. Many cultures are taught not to pick mushrooms at all because some of them are poisonous and they could make a mistake and get sick, just like another part of my own culture taught me.

However, even if the culprits ‘plunder’ the woods, straight up blaming a group of people for a behaviour that is 1) not fully understood by the locals and 2) where the rules are unclear even to the Dutch, then you’ll cultivate racist and bigoted comments in no time, which is exactly what happened to my friend’s post.

There are roughly 5,000 types of mushrooms in Dutch nature, of which about 100 are poisonous, which is why the Dutch learn not to pick them, and people do get sick every year from eating the wrong kinds. Forest rangers explain that mushrooms are not protected by law, but if you do pick too many of them, you’ll mess up nature. They say picking 250 grams is socially acceptable, again none of this is the law and I can imagine that groups of people of all nationalities are going to ignore this. More than the suggested 250 grams is considering ‘stealing’ and can ring up a fine of about 100 euro. However, none of this is a deterrent for someone who wants to just pick a whole lot of mushrooms and has been doing so since they were children.

Besides not knowing the rules and not understanding why the Dutch would leave food lying around in the forest, Eastern Europeans know their mushrooms well. It’s up to the Dutch authorities to find a way to get their vague yet well meant message across instead of making blanket racist comments on social media. That’s not going to work at all.

(Links: ed.nl, nhnieuws.nl, Photo of shiitake mushrooms by pjah73, some rights reserved)

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September 28, 2017

Hot wall pizzas in Eindhoven in 2018

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 5:22 pm
pizza

A European first for Domino’s pizza, in Eindhoven you will be able to pull pizzas out of the wall from Europe’s first Domino’s pizza branch… in 2018. However, grabbing a hot pizza out of the wall is definitely not a European or even a Dutch first this time around, as there has been pizza from vending machines in Groningen since November 2015.

Domino’s claims to have been inspired by Amsterdam’s fast food chain FEBO, synonymous with pulling food out of the wall, while the guy in Groningen was inspired by France and actual pizzas coming out of the wall. It’s interesting to see a student think internationally, while an entrepreneur only looks within their borders in this case.

The bosses at Domino’s said they chose Eindhoven to showcase the wall pizzas because of the city’s reputation for all things technical, while the pizza vending machines in Groningen were designed by a student, which also reflects the reputation of Groningen as a student city.

True, Domino’s will surely offer more types of pizzas than in Groningen, but for now patrons will have to wait until 2018 for a proper working version of the vending machine showcased this week that if successful, will be introduced to the rest of the country.

Real pizza trumps virtual pizza for now. And Groningen is quite a train ride from Eindhoven.

(Link: ed.nl, Photo of Pizza pie by Adam Kuban, some rights reserved)

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