The Dutch became the tallest nation on the planet, overtaking Americans
Heading west from Rotterdam, I walked along a red brick road past hunched townhouses and clear canals, past appetizingly smelling Surinamese restaurants and suburban supermarkets – until I reached the port. That's when I saw them: cows, a whole herd, chewing their cud on a floating farm, right in the sea.
Moored in a small bay, the coastal farm looked like a floating cowshed. It had a curved roof resembling a wave and a gangway for the cows to go ashore if they suddenly became interested in that unattractive strip of grass on the dock.
The sea breeze carried the smell of manure to my nostrils. In the distance, port cranes loaded containers onto ships, barges with petroleum products floated by. A herd of cows against such a backdrop looked somewhat out of place, hard to reconcile with the industrial landscape.
As BBC notes, the Rotterdam floating farm has become a life raft for the dairy industry in a rapidly changing world. Such a farm is adapted to tides and rising sea levels and is designed to reduce the significant greenhouse gas emissions for which cows are notorious. It has solar panels on its roof. In addition, the roof collects rainwater, which the cows then drink.
The herd itself has also been turned into an organic waste processing mechanism: the cows feed on grass cut in parks, lawns, and golf courses in Rotterdam, as well as potato peelings, of which there are many in this city: the Dutch love chips, they are ready to eat them almost any time of day, especially generously smothered in mayonnaise. “Our cows eat urban waste biomass and turn it into fresh and healthy milk,” explains Minke van Wingerden, one of the project partners.
The Dutch hold back the ocean with a complex system of
windmills, canals, dikes, and dunes
The floating farm opened last year and immediately attracted attention, becoming a Rotterdam landmark. It is considered the first in the world and supports two Dutch traditions at once: the fight against the advancing ocean and dairy farming. Both of these traditions not only helped create the present-day Netherlands, reclaiming significant territory from the sea, but also made the Dutch what they are – with a remarkable appetite for dairy products.
The Netherlands is a country of giants, the tallest nation on the planet. The average height of a Dutch man is 182.5 cm, and a Dutch woman is 168.7 cm. For comparison: the average height of an American man is 177.1 cm, and an American woman is 163.5 cm.
But it was not always so. Documents from the Dutch army, as revealed during a study by the Royal Society of London (the leading scientific society of Great Britain), show that in the mid-1800s, men in the Netherlands were among the shortest in Europe.
“In 1860, Dutch soldiers were about 165 cm tall,” says Professor Louise Barrett of the University of Lethbridge (Canada), who participated in the study. “In those same years, men in the USA were about 5 cm taller.” Then, Barrett adds, Americans were the tallest nation in the world. Since then, however, the roles have reversed: in just 160 years, Dutch men have grown by 20 cm, overtaking Americans, who have grown by only 6 cm.
“It happened too quickly to be explained by genetics alone,” Barrett believes, although natural selection, in her opinion, also played a role.
Indeed, as her research shows, the most fertile couples in the Netherlands (those with more children) are tall men and average-height women. And what about Americans? Their such couples consist of short women and average-height men.
There are other factors that influenced the rapid growth of the Dutch nation, Barrett adds: one of the best healthcare systems in the world, low income inequality, and an excellent social security system. “In the Netherlands, everything is aimed at ensuring the birth of healthy children, whose growth is then not negatively affected by anything,” she says. “Every time your immune system responds to an illness, it costs your body energy that it could have used for growth.”
The cheese capital of the world is in the Netherlands
Add to this nutrition: the inhabitants of the Netherlands have an insatiable appetite for dairy products, and studies show that this has also influenced the increase in the nation's height. “Calcium is important for bone tissue, and a person's height depends on how much calcium the body receives,” Barrett explains.
According to Ben Coates, author of the book “Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands,” the Dutch love of dairy products is a result of the country's man-made geography. Built on marshy lowlands, so-called marshes, constantly flooded with water, Coates says, the Netherlands has been fighting the sea for centuries, using windmills and canals to pump and drain water, building dikes. And on the reclaimed land, they built their state. A popular (if not very modest) saying here goes: “God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.”
The largest land reclamation was the mind-boggling Zuiderzee Works – a system of man-made dikes and land drainage and reclamation works, the largest engineering project of the Netherlands in the 20th century, during which another 1,620 square kilometers of land were obtained in the very center of the country. Work on this vast network of dikes and embankments began in 1920, and many Dutch did not live to see the project's completion (in 1997).
According to Mevis Hettinga, a cheese specialist from the town of Woerden, located in the so-called Cheese Valley 40 km northeast of Rotterdam, the clay soil of the lands reclaimed from the sea is too acidic for growing vegetables or grains. "But for grass, it's just right," he says. As a result, as the sea receded, Dutch farmers turned to raising cows, which happily grazed where the seabed had recently been.
Retiree Hettinga, who conducts cheese-making seminars in Woerden and, by his own admission, loves to talk about cheese, emphasizes that the pastures in the northern province of Friesland, the homeland of the famous Friesian (Dutch) dairy cattle breed now widespread in Britain and Ireland, are particularly fertile. According to Coates, representatives of this breed have even left their hoofprints on the White House lawn: U.S. President William Howard Taft had a Friesian cow named Pauline.
On the reclaimed lands, the country's dairy industry boomed, milk consumption grew rapidly, and the Dutch themselves grew taller. And they remain the world's biggest milk consumers.
And what the Dutch didn't drink, says Coates, they turned into cheeses—such as Gouda and Edam, sold as huge wax-coated wheels and named after the cities where they were invented and produced. These cities, which gave their names to the cheeses, along with Woerden and Alkmaar, are the best places to see and feel the Dutch's most passionate love for dairy products.
Here you will find the most famous cheese markets in the Netherlands, where farmers and traders indulge in the pleasure of bargaining heartily over wheels of cheese. The agreement on price is finally sealed with a handshake.
Clogs (wooden shoes) have been worn by farmers in the Netherlands for centuries—
this is an important part of the country's historical heritage
In Woerden, farmers bring their products to market on old, antiquated-looking tractors and walk around the market square in their thick-soled wooden clogs, which make them even taller (though, it seems, where else could they be!).
I could really use such shoes: at 176 cm (just below the average American), I look like a shorty among the Dutch. No wonder, oh no wonder, on the floating farm Minke van Wingerden gave me a bottle of milk milked there. There was clearly a hint in that gesture.
I admit, it's too late for me to resort to milk to grow taller. But I graciously accepted the bottle and emptied it in one go, in a single gulp.