A quick Google search with ‘Netherlands’ and ‘food waste’ (albeit in Dutch) produces all kinds of links from the past few years, summed up as ‘it’s terrible that we waste so much food, we’re going to do something about it’ when the reality today is that the Netherlands is still number one in Europe when it comes to wasting food.

Despite goals that were set between 2009 and 2015, one third of all food gets thrown out in the Netherlands, as no progress whatsoever has been made since then to curb this bad behaviour. Reasons include the government saying that the goals they set back in 2015 of 20 percent less waste was not realistic and that consumers buy too much, get rid of it on the expiration date unnecessarily and don’t keep food in the right place. As well, supermarkets are guilty of putting unnecessary expiration dates on fruits and vegetables, while growers throw out perfectly good produce instead of transforming it into other products.

(Links: lunchroom.nl, brusselstimes.com)