THE SHEEP IS LYING ON THE KITCHEN TABLE

Picture stories by children about their food

 

Production: FoodMuseum in cooperation with InnovatieNetwerk

program manager: Hans Rutten

concept and realization: Linda Roodenburg

 

Photobook with texts in Dutch To be ordered in the museumshop

176 p. full color

14,95 euro

 

About the project:

 

Behind the front doors of Dutch houses, cooking and eating habits differ widely. To illustrate this diversity we asked children between six and twelve years old to make photographs. All these children share a Dutch 'foreground', but their cultural, social and geographical backgrounds are quite varied. Through their photographs, they offer us a glimpse of their daily meals at home and at school, the special food at feasts and parties, and of the sweets and snacks they are eating in between.

 

And so we see a Somali father, sitting on the floor eating spaghetti, a Pakistani family eating together on the couch, and a Ghanese mother eating separately at a small one-person table. A family from Scheveningen have their meals at a special diner table – except on thursday, when mother isn’t there, for then father and children lounge in front of the telly having hamburgers and French fries. We see how advertising leaflets double as instant placemats, and that a whole sheep can be cut to pieces on the kitchen table. We learn that older brothers often make the nicest meals, that few children like fish and that they all love French fries and pancakes. And that in all households mobiles and remote controls lie next to the cutlery.

We are shown who does the cooking, and what the children eat, when, where, how and with whom. We literally get a picture of the role played by eating at home and with the family, and therefore of the children’s' cultural environment. Eating together is fun, that is what all the contributions show.

 

However, they also teach us that the daily fare at home often is miles apart from what the children consume at school. A few slices of bread with cheese or choc spread are the mainstay of the average midday meal of Dutch primary schoolchildren. That is not a complete diner, of course, just a cold bite to ingest some calories. In fact, two crucial ingredients are missing: time and attention – for the food and for each other...

 

This project on culinary diversity actually also is a plea for upgrading the Dutch lunch to a true meal, starting with lunch at primary school. This is not a revolutionary idea of course. In most countries around the world, it is self-evident that children have a regular warm meal together in school. This may range from a bowl of pounded maize in Kenya to a three-course lunch with fruit desert in a restaurant scolaire in France. However, everywhere it is a social occasion that in later life often will be remembered with fondness.

 

Children growing up in the Netherlands nowadays will find it hard to imagine that only half a century ago nobody ate 'outdoors'. As difficult to image is the daily fare that was common back then: boiled potatoes, a green and a piece of meat. Everybody ate about the same food, though some more luxuriously than others. And everybody kept the same regular hours for his or her meals. The differences in eating habits were small.

 

It was the prehistory of the culinary age. Since then the diversity in ingredients and dishes has exploded. The number of restaurants has multiplied at least twenty times and the popular television chefs that lack a star compensate it by their attitude. As for the number of top-rated restaurants per inhabitant, the Netherlands now ranks among the best in the world. A growing army of eco-conscious foodies goes for biological or otherwise responsible products and in weekends will surprise friends and family with spectacular dishes from all over the world.

 

Yet from another perspective, the culinary situation is rather bleak. Judging by the average daily meal, the Netherlands still linger somewhere at the bottom of the ladder of culinary civilization. Not the ubiquitous mashed potatoes with endive or whole wheat bread with cheese are at fault though, but the lack of care, time, and attention spend on the daily meal, in particular lunch. The Netherlands may be the only country where people do not spare an hour or more for a genuine midday break. Foreigners look on in astonishment when small packages of breads slices are conjured from brief cases, opened and consumed within minutes, washed down – of all things – with a glass of milk

 

The time when the Dutch still had a proper warm midday meal is long past us. In the sixties of the last century, rapid social changes occasioned a shift of the main meal of the day towards the evening. Primary schools adopted a 'continuous time-table' – the shortening of the midday break – and in so doing frustrated the possibilities of eating a proper lunch at home or school.

 

This seems to be uniquely Dutch. In the rest of the world, school lunch may not always be substantial, tasty or healthy. However, the infrastructure to make a nutritious meal possible at least does exists. Schools possess a kitchen as a matter of course, a proper staff or a catering arrangement, and a school cantina. Not so in the Netherlands. Here the children open their lunch boxes at the same table were they sweat over their sums. At top speed as well, for mealtime eats into the available playtime, which is short enough anyway. And their parents lunch as frugally. Perhaps just a quick one in the office cantina or even more time saving at the bread-finishing spot in front of the computer. For at the end of the working day there awaits the proper meal: at home.

 

'The household as the cornerstone of society still reverberates in our notion of the major hot meal of the day. It is not thought quite proper to share it with your school palls or colleagues. This has it positive side, not doubt, but lately we have made it almost impossible to comply with this moral code. For the main meal of the day is in danger as well. Around six in the evening it is rush hour outside and inside the Dutch home. Everything has to happen at the same time: collecting the children, shopping, cooking, and eating. Homework assistance, music lessons, sports training, drawn out meetings and traffic jams, make it more and more difficult to get the family together around the dining table at the same time. Therefore, parents and children would profit greatly from a real midday meal and so have done with the stress of homecoming. A simple dinner (a soup, leftovers) would then do and the time spared can be used for quality communication. No feelings of guilt anymore about instant food, the magnetron awaits the next car-boot sale and the remaining deep-freeze pizza's may be burned ritually together.

 

A few schools in the Netherlands do experiment with school lunches. Some of the children taking part in these projects show their images here. Yet the absence of a Dutch 'luncheon culture' and a supportive national school lunch program make these rather lonely experiments, in which the schools are forced to invent the wheel themselves all over again. Jamie Oliver voicefully propagated the amelioration of school meals in England and the USA, but in the Netherlands he would be a rebel without a cause. There is no lunch here. Existing schools have no kitchen and new schools have to fight for it – íf they want one at all. Many parents simply do not want to spend some extra Euro's on their kids school meals. That is a kind of meanness that rather contrasts with the rise of glamorous and expensive cooking in the Netherlands. It shows how less we care about the daily food of our nearest and dearest.

 

Happily enough there is no typical Dutchman. Recent immigrants have brought new ingredients, new tastes and new dishes, as well as new eating habits. It might be worthwhile having a closer look at these, or even copying them. Though we rightly worry about the decline of bio-diversity, we could profit much by paying attention to the increase in cultural and culinary diversity.

 

Linda Roodenburg