Shocking: The Dutch eat ridiculously little vegetables
On average, we Dutch people eat ridiculously few vegetables. We are even the worst vegetable eaters in all of Europe. The minimum recommended amount is 88 kilos per year, and we fall far short of that. This can be seen at a glance on the map from Landgeist.
How many vegetables do we eat per person per year? 58 kilos. Wait, what?!? That is really very little. Converted, that is just over 150 grams per day. Figures from the RIVM are even less encouraging: they arrive at an average of 131 grams of vegetables per day. Only 16% of all Dutch people neatly finish their serving of vegetables every day, reaching the recommended 200 grams per day.
Tomato, lettuce and cucumber
According to the RIVM, highly educated people eat more vegetables than people with less education. And the older, the wiser, because older people eat more vegetables than young people. The favorite vegetables: tomato is the most popular, followed by carrot, lettuce and cucumber. Sorry, people, but these are not exactly vegetables bursting with vitamins and minerals. Cucumber and tomato mainly contain a lot of water, right?
Croatia is vegetable country number 1
In Europe, we are right at the bottom of the list of vegetable eaters, together with Slovakia (64 kilos per year) and Norway (71 kilos per year). Where are the most vegetables eaten? Surprise: in Croatia (302 kilos), Albania (298 kilos) and North Macedonia (269 kilos).
Full belly
Landgeist has also created a map showing meat consumption in a country. In that respect, the Netherlands is average, with 69 kilos of meat per person per year. So the explanation for that small amount of vegetables is not that we are already stuffing our bellies with slavinken and smoked sausage. So what do we eat? Mainly bread and potatoes: an average of 66 grams of potatoes per person per day, and 64 grams of bread.
Six o’clock dinner
Even more striking figures: on average, we eat our evening meal at 6:00 p.m.; on average, five out of seven days, it is a perfectly ordinary agv meal (potatoes, vegetables and meat), and on average we also eat too little fruit—just 119 grams per day.
