Roggebrood
To everyone enjoying their Gouda abroad, the milk industry has a huge role in the land subsidence and peat oxidation in the western and northern Netherlands.
It isn’t specifically about flooding. Flooding is a fairly manageable risk in the western Netherlands. As strange as it may sound for an area that is below sea level. The true problem for Gouda is its subsoil. The city is built on a thick peat layer, which is subsiding. Gouda is by far the most vulnerable historic city in that regard.
As you can see on the photo in the article, the water level in some canals is like 10 or 20 cm below the street level. Water so shallow will start creeping upward in your walls. The streets and to a lesser extent buildings are slowly subsiding. So why not just lower the water level? Well, this accelerates the oxidation and compression of peat, causing faster subsiding. You could heighten the street, but the extra weight will cause more subsidence. This is the conundrum Gouda is in.
Nah, went off on the “bigger and uglier”.
And surely the Chinese did it fine, but Yugoslav Brutalism is just something else ;)
TIL my aesthetic is brutalism
Oh wow, feeling very conscious about my simple lunch meal prepping now haha. How well does a farinata keep during the week?
Thanks, I’ve been trying to get more into it as well lately. There’s quite the abundance of Indonesian food and ingredients here in the Netherlands because of, well, the past… But most people wouldn’t be able to name any dishes other than a handful like nasi goreng, gado gado, satay or rendang (which is always meat here).
Is this still a boring dystopia? This is pretty neat. Dystopian, yes, but neat.