Isn’t it better to import the tomato than the tomato picker? Almost at the same time that Joost Eerdmans (JA21) asked that question to Caroline van der Plas (BBB) in the House of Representatives debate about our demography – Wednesday afternoon, just after one o’clock – two or three shots rang out at an employment agency in Piet Heinstraat in The Hague. Working area: pepper and tomato cultivation.
The bullet holes were covered the next day with rain-soaked A4 sheets: ‘No bicycles here’. One in the wired glass of the door, one in the wall next to it, one in the window. The office recruits for the Westland, mainly among Eastern Europeans. Opposite it A.D suggested the owner that someone was angry because he was paid late.
Shootings. Will they become yet another by-product of tomato picker imports? In addition to the overcrowded bunk houses in the Laakkwartier, the housing shortage, the tents in the bushes near Scheveningen and Moerwijk, the water, energy and environmental tax during cultivation, the light pollution, the filling of holiday parks with half-liter cans of Tyskie?
Eerdmans’ example was not random. Our tomato cultivation covers 1,771 hectares. Peppers: 1,555 hectares. Jointly the glass vegetable city is therefore bigger then the municipality of Haarlem (32 km2). Ninety percent of those tomatoes travel in trucks out of the country.
For that reason alone, Van der Plas’ defense was downright bizarre. We had to think about our food supply. “You won’t die if you don’t eat tomatoes,” but if you want to import products everywhere instead of migrants, you will experience “scarcity” and that often leads to “civil wars.”
Just so you know, dear people in the Zeeheldenkwartier: better a few bullet holes than the Total Tomato War.
Suddenly the BBB was also deeply concerned with our “climate challenge”. If we saddled dried-up Spain with tomato production, we would never achieve those European targets.
In reality, our tomato greenhouses consume much more energy than those in warmer countries where they ripen outside. In the sun. That’s why they taste better. But you don’t have to worry about that with Van der Plas. She said indignantly: “In Italy you often get Dutch tomatoes.” Once again the bullshit buzzer sounds: Italy only accounts for 7 percent of tomato exports. But according to her it was all just an “experience”. “Then you are in Italy, enjoying the sun, with a glass of wine. And gosh, that tomato tastes so good here. It’s just the same tomato!”
Exactly the same, yes. Except that the genes that once gave that crop flavor are here with us refined with surgical precision.
Add to that: too much water, premature picking, too cool storage and transport, et voilàexactly that cowardly juice bag with the taste of a poached sponge that our vegetable departments dare to classify as ‘tomato’.
“Experiencing” an asylum crisis was enough to declare a state of emergency, but when “experiencing” a cowardly juice bag – an objectively existing state of emergency – Lientje declares our collective fate.
We must oppose such a state of affairs. But how? What is an appropriate Promotion Tomato? Import Pomodori, canned or as puree? Forget it. There contains Uyghur blood. Some Italian wholesalers source tomatoes from China. Harvested under appalling conditions, they are canned in Italy and transported to countries that need to be rescued from their culinary barbarism.
‘Made in Italy‘ it says on the label. ‘No bicycles here’ could also have been stated. Or: may contain traces of hypocrisy. But compare that to the Lientjes Tomaten leaflet. This product contains political choices (10%), willful peasant stupidity (10%) and slavish loyalty to commercial horticultural interests (80%).
No one actively wanted this product. Consumers prefer to taste a wild, sun-ripened tomato with flavor. The ordinary hardworking Dutchman prefers brick cities to glass cities. Only the grower is happy. And the employment agency, as long as it remains out of harm’s way. Well, no, you won’t die if you don’t eat tomatoes. But Lientje’s do have a nasty side effect. This is equal to the net drained weight: only vicarious embarrassment.
Christiaan Weijts is a writer.