Five hundred million kilos
A country with food banks is letting half a billion kilos of potatoes rot. That is not a harvest problem.
The figure was in the paper this spring and I could not shake it: five hundred million kilos of potatoes sitting in Dutch barns, waiting to spoil. The 2025 harvest was the largest in more than twenty-five years. Exports collapsed. And the Dutch themselves eat fewer and fewer potatoes.
Put another figure beside it. Every week tens of thousands of households in this country queue at a food bank. At the same moment, in the same country, food is rotting because nobody wants to buy it.
That is not bad luck with the weather. It is a system with two exits, the export container and the supermarket shelf, and nothing else. Let one fall away and the other shrink, and there is no third route to a plate. The chain has become so efficient that it can no longer improvise.
In April a social enterprise, No Waste Army, declared a National Potato Week. You could order potatoes, donate them, or go and gather ten kilos at a farm yourself. A good initiative, and exactly the kind of repair that demonstrates what is broken. When citizens have to go into the field with a hessian sack to correct the system, the system is not working.
Something has disappeared on our side too. Anyone who grew up before 1980 still knows what a winter store looks like: a sack in the shed, cool, dark, dry. Between five and ten degrees. Colder and the starch turns to sugar, and the potato goes sweet and limp. Warmer or lighter and it sprouts. Damp and it rots. That is not folk wisdom, it is basic knowledge every household had and that has been replaced in a single generation by a kilo in plastic with a use-by date.
So buy ten kilos. From a farm, at the market, direct. Store them as above. And make gnocchi with them, the simplest way to turn a floury potato into something people look up from their plate for: boil them in their skins, peel them hot, through the ricer, as little flour as the dough will allow, knead as briefly as possible. Everything you can get wrong is too much moisture and too much flour.
Five hundred million kilos is a system failure. Ten kilos is a decision.
Sources: Janneke Vreugdenhil, “Red een aardappel, eet ’m”, NRC, 18 April 2026; No Waste Army, National Potato Week 2026; Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking (Scribner, 2004).