In the United States, cows are infected with the bird flu virus. “We didn’t think that was possible,” said a bird flu expert. I immediately flashbacked to Esther Ouwehand. He warned even before Covid that the Netherlands is a ticking time bomb because millions of animals are locked up in warehouses here. An epidemic is then quickly born. At the time, the livestock industry only had traditional lobbyists, but they have now been promoted to politicians. Even a self-proclaimed animal lover like Wilders turned under the power of the lobby. They voted in favor of burning the ends of living animals if that makes it possible to cram more of them together.
Jaap Korteweg, founder of the Vegetarian Butcher, calls himself a farmer because he makes food from nature. After developing plant-based meat, he is now working on plant-based cheese with the aim of removing animals from the protein process. That does not mean that farmers should disappear. After all, the grass for the bioreactor in which cow-free cheese is made must also be grown.
Caroline van der Plas remains rather silent about this. Well, quietly, in the House of Representatives she raged because a Lenny Kuhr concert had been disrupted by people who, under the guise of protest, poured out their lawless aggression on others. Caroline apparently only finds that palatable if you do it with a tractor. She thought the House should speak out against the pro-Palestinian and possibly anti-Semitic protest. Someone shouted for flowers to be sent to Lenny. That is the community center level at which the House debates. The members dutifully spoke out against anti-Semitism, as if insulting groups was not already prohibited. They will soon speak out against double murder.
Jeroen Siebelink published a new book about animal liberators in the Netherlands. He discussed the theory of extremes: extremists in ideologies normalize the middle. The activist who disrupts a bullfight makes a Party for the Animals moderate. If that is true, then as extremes move toward the middle, new extremes must arise. Now that xenophobe Geert and livestock farming phenomenon Caroline are occupying our political center from the extremes, companies like ASML are packing up. The Netherlands will therefore remain a major exporter of animal meat for longer. We risk going down in history together with China as creators of pandemics, but China will still export technology and we, cavemen of Europe, mainly meat and bones.
Caroline, Minister Adema and the agricultural lobby are holding back progress. They don’t want a protein transition, no cultured meat and certainly don’t want farmers to learn to make cheese from grass. They want to maintain livestock farming. When people still burned oil lamps with whale fat, these types of politicians had opposed the arrival of electricity. They would claim they were doing it for the whalers and encourage them to invest in new harpoons, knowing there was no future for animal energy.
Carolina Trujillo is a writer.
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