A wet pizza

A delicious pizza margarita (check a recipe on  this blog by Shadrach)

To make a pizza you need 1216 liters of water! An incredible amount which almost makes me ashamed to order one. But have you ever wondered why does it takes so much water to make a pizza margarita? Go with me on a trip through Italy (after all its almost time to go on holiday)and discover the whole story.

This post is inspired by a research executed by some Dutch universities, published in 2009. They considered a pizza margarita contains bread dough, tomato sauce and mozzarella as ingredient, thus forgetting about the olive oil and the basil that ‘formally’ are also included but in such a low quantity that forgetting about is, is not such a shame. 

Let’s start with the base of the pizza and thus the dough. Pasta is usually made from durum wheat, while  pizza is usually made out of a softer wheat to which water and some salt is added to allow to make a soft pasta. In Italy this is mostly grown in Emilia Romagna, a region in the centre-north of the country which has a wet winter dry summers. For the specific type of cereal this can be called an ‘ideal’ climate. Of the harvested product, 72 percent can be used for the pizza dough.

To top-off the dough, a tomato sauce (industrial) or fresh tomatoes are added. Until a few years ago most tomatoes where grown in the southern part of the country, but recently there has been a shift towards the north, where there are more facilities to process them and where the soil is not (yet) exhausted. Thanks to the climate here, the waterfootprint is much lower than that for the fresh tomatoes that still grow in the south. However, the fact that nitrogen is used to ‘feed’ the plants means that an invisible side effect adds-up to the water foodprint in the form of polluted water.

Going north even further and we bump into the mozzarella factories. The cheese originally is made by buffaloes, but to lower the prices and to respond to the high demand, most mozzarella is now made out of cows milk and officially is called ‘fior di latte’. Before reading the article I referred to before, I did not know that this is kneaded as if it becomes a dough in order to mix the curt with heated whey and obtain the shiny white balls we all call mozzarella.

Even though for the mozzarella we do not start to calculate from the seed an further, for the calculation of the water foodprint of a pizza margarita it is considered that a cow lives around 7 years during which it consumes 1308 liters of water per kilo of ‘body weigth’. On top-of that it is needed to calculate the water consumed by the cow and the water needed to clean the facilities she lives in. This and the fact that only 10 percent of the milk becomes mozzarella calculates for a waterfootprint of 717 liters per kilo mozzarella. Thirsty?

I always try to save as much energy as possible, so reducing the amount of water I use is one of it. But now I know how much water it takes to eat some of the foods I eat regularly, I am not so sure that my actions contribute more than a drop in the ocean. I won’t say that I now can forget about this. Rather in the contrary. Maybe I should focus even more on the foods and their water request to make sure I make a serious contribution to water savings?

Food Tour(ism)

One of the stones in the facades of Amsterdam explaining the original function of the building

When I am telling my (new) Italian friends that I come from the Netherlands I always get the same  reaction: “How nice. It’s such a beautiful country”. Further questioning from my side always results in disappointing answers: most of them have not even visited the low lands and when they have they usually did not come any further that a weekend in Amsterdam. 

After last Sundays’ experience, where I will tell you about in a minute, I can totally agree with the beauty of this city, but I will definitely encourage them to take the opportunity to see it from another point of view and book an Old City Food Tour.

Every person has its own preferences when it concerns discovering unknown cities. The easiest way is to pack a Lonely Planet or any other printed tour guide and pick out the highlights indicated by a journalist. However, these kind of guides are suited ‘for everyone’ and might turn out not to be your kind of thing. It would be a pity if that makes your precious and maybe expensive weekend something you rather forget than remember.

Especially in the more wanted cities like Rome, Paris or Amsterdam it is quite difficult to avoid tourist traps as restaurants that offer real-food-from-that-country, which tastes horrible and is way overpriced. Luckily, there is now a bottom-up solution for this called Spotted by Locals: an online platform on which local experts get you the most up-to-date info on activities and hotspots in their city.

And these Spotted by Locals almost gets me to the topic of this blog. The beauty of Amsterdam would not exist without its history starting with the reason that exactly here a city was founded in the 13^th century: a dam in the Amstel river grow into a centre of commerce thanks to its vicinity to waterways that connected the city with the rest of the world. One of the first commercial successes of the ‘Hollanders’ was the monopoly in the import and trade of cereals. With the money made with this business, the famous VOC or United East-India Company could be founded and the so-called golden ages and there with an important capitol of the Dutch food traditions took off.

As you might have understood, food has been very important for the development of Amsterdam (and other Dutch cities). Unfortunately, during the years this has lost in importance as you can see in our ‘traditional’ dishes which generally have a history of not even 100 years old.

Also the visible part of our history is hardly considered. As a Dutch, I can confirm that I do know not much about the history of our country and the why, what and how of the Dutch cities. Like most I appreciate the beauty of the medieval city centres but at the same time I do take it for granted. Until last week thus.

Thanks to the Old Amsterdam Food Tour, organized by Amsterdam based Farming the City, I got to see Amsterdam from another point of view. It really opened my eyes and made me appreciate even more the beauty of its streets, canals and buildings. I learned that small details, which are usually overlooked, could tell you a lot about what happened long ago but what is still important today. No reason to only look forward thus: a look at the past might help you to think about the future.

Also curious about the history of your city? Then checkout the website of Farmingthe City (Amsterdam) or Food inthe Streets (Milan) and book your Old City Food Tour.