22-07-2016
The colours are authentic: this is the super-technological greenhouse at Koppert Cress, the Dutch giant of micro greens. It’s the new frontier for indoor farming for fine dining and beyond. According to their managers, this is the agriculture of the future
Is Rotterdam the nerve centre of contemporary gastronomy? Of course not. Yet The Netherlands’ largest town, and the largest port in Europe, is a sort of food lab, today’s projection of what food might be like in our future. It shows clear trends, which not everyone might like, but are certainly significant: urban vegetable gardens, organic farming, recovery of small productions, healthy food. Rotterdam is a sort of neutral field: there are no sound culinary traditions, plus it’s a multi-ethnic town. It’s clean, tidy, civilised, very pleasant to visit, organised, modern: even in terms of architecture it’s a sort of experimental model, a neutral and vaguely aseptic place where – far away from strong roots, family recipes, overflowing classics, yet very close to a concept of balanced progress – one can not only discuss but also put into practice these possible models for food development that combine environmental sustainability, healthy food and correct diet.
Put it this way, it would look like a gourmand paradise. Perhaps this is not really the case. For instance, there are no not-to-be-missed restaurants, no absolute points of reference for fine dining. Yet it offers an exceptional reference point for how our daily diet can be made better, and even more sustainable. Indeed local rural farms and labs work in unison perhaps not necessarily to reach the highest excellence – Italians at least don’t need to travel so far to find it... – but a correct everyday diet. Rotterdam has many stories worth telling: floating cultivated fields, experimental fermentations, food waste recovery techniques… Here are some excerpts from the future.
The greenhouse goes as far as the eyes can see. It’s technological, lit by thousands of small led lights; it’s eight metres tall, so as to allow a production of 5 different layers of sprouts. An inner circuit makes it possible in the summer for the water warmed up by the atmosphere inside the greenhouse and by the lights’ cooling system to be stored in a huge tank underground and later used for the winter heating; a second tank (a total of 100K cube metres!) allows for the opposite mechanism, favouring an ecological air-conditioning 365 days a year.
But let’s return to the “bad” famer. «We must feed 7.4 billion people in the world – says Zallot – Those who say you can do so with your uncle’s vegetable garden are kidding you. Agriculture must produce large numbers, hence it has to be intensive. Yet to be so, if it stays outdoors and thus exposed to bad weather, insects, parasites and bacteria, it requires massive quantities of chemicals.
Outdoor agriculture is in other words terribly polluting». The indoor one, instead, yields 10 times more, they say at Koppert Cress. And it is “naturally protected”: «We spend 70 thousand euros in beneficial insects, which help us fight parasites. We insert them in the greenhouse – they would scatter outdoors – and we can thus perfectly protect our sprouts». Zallot: «Ladybugs work 365 days a year and have no unions. They are worth 26 cents each for us».
The Dutch Cuisine manifesto
Rob Baan, patron at Koppert Cress, is one of the Dutch Cuisine ambassadors: «We eat too much meat. In Rotterdam we should eat a total of 250 thousand kilos of vegetables every day. Instead, we eat 220 thousand kilos of meat, worth 700 cows, and waste 35% of the food resources. In order to have 250 thousand kilos of vegetables, we’d need 2 thousand hectares. To have the equivalent in meat, we need 85 thousand. We were the first overpopulated country in the world, we don’t even have space for urban farms, but we have plenty of water. This is the perfect place to teach everyone a new type of diet».
A dish by Jim de Jong
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journalist born in 1974, for many years he has covered politics, mostly, and food in his free time. Today he does exactly the opposite and this makes him very happy. As soon as he can, he dives into travels and good food. Identità Golose's editor in chief