An unexpected lecture on the politics of European immigration
I went to Amsterdam for two days last week. This was a classic of hallucinatory, placeless business travel, more time on planes than in country, mostly a prisoner of the Airport Hilton Schiphol. All airport hotels are liminal, but at least I had an outside-facing room with sunlight rather than one looking into the atrium, which was a sort of luxury panopticon. I believe Nietzsche wrote, “When you look long into an atrium, the atrium also looks into you.”
The Dutch have splendid cheeses, but don’t otherwise seem to be a big cuisine culture. I recognize this is dangerous turf for an American who was there for all of two days, but when you factor out cheese what are you left with? Stroopwaffels? Bitterballen? Hagelslag? When was the last time you went to a Dutch restaurant? Was it Rijsttafel? Thank the Indonesians!
Even Germany has managed a certain amount of cuisine and we go to our local German place periodically for beer and sausage. Admittedly, beer and sausage is a layup. But the Dutch had a spanning Southeast Asian empire, invented the global spice trade and fought a brutal war with the English over it. All that history, and the condiment hill they’ve chosen to die on is mayonnaise. That’s commitment!
