2022
Even better than her book is her interview with Lex Bohlmeijer for De Correspondent.
De Boer writes here in a kind of free-associative style, each paragraph is long and it starts somewhere and segues along the way, ending up somewhere else. It is maybe an appropriate style for the kind of book she wanted to write, herself pondering a whole set of interrelated issues, exploring her emotions and life experience in addition to her thinking and her scientific investigation of food systems, biodiversity, what seems to need changing and so on.
One detail that was completely new to me was her discussion of various 'reststromen' - vegetable wastes - that could potentially be used to feed livestock, such that a small number of cattle and pigs and goats could actually be raised in this country without any imported/added foods. Using certain pieces of land for grazing that are not useful for other things and where the grazed grass is a good thing for the ecology of the place. Things like the solids left over after the process of brewing beer [bierbostel - and this is already fed to dairy cattle]. And all the food humans throw away [household and restaurant waste and past-used-by-date food products] are fine for pigs. PIgs can be let loose on a harvested field and they will eat up all the remains of the crop [roots etc.].
De Boer notes she lately often feels bad about eating meat and even eggs, knowing full well how many animals are killed because they are not convenient for us [male chicks of egg-laying breeds, male cattle of dairy breeds] and that *all* the animals we eat are killed way before their 'appointed time', not to mention the animal-unfriendly living conditions of livestock and chickens.
The evening after reading parts of her book, I ate in a restaurant and noticed that I felt an aversion to ordering anything with meat or poultry! Ordered tofu instead.
The book discusses many factual issues I had not known about, how phosphate is needed, how it can be obtained. Also how nitrogen oxide is very complicated, cannot be reduced to zero.
She doesn't mean her book or thinking to be pessimistic, but it still left me pessimistic, because she stresses the complexity of this whole area. At one point she says she can't give us a plan to fixing everything, that that's what politicians are for!!!! For heaven's sake, politicians are the *last* people from whom we can expect a systematic vision for the necessary changes!!!
Too bad there is no index in the book.