It's probably thrilling, but all I can think is that the Netherlands must be a warm hospitable environment for people with extremely narrow fields of interest. An Italian woman scientist residing in the Netherlands wrote a book about researching spit, which my apartment mate is presently reading. Apparently it's utterly fascinating. So I got to hear about it over her first cup of coffee. One of the things the lady mentions is that the Dutch are excessively fond of custard; supermarkets in Holland have entire aisles filled with custard. In our defense I must stress that dessert is the most important meal of the day. But we also love hot snert, and I am surprised that the author has not said anything about snert pizza yet.
Snert is thick split pea soup with smoked meats.
The dikes were built on snert.
Rembrandt painted it.
My apartment mate has Aspergers more than I do. So I absorbed stuff about spit for half an hour. There's also a researcher in the Netherlands studying the act of chewing -- not strictly necessary if your main food source is custard -- who is sad that when he dies the project will probably not continue. There was also data about the nutritional value of meat on the cusp of going bad (dogfood and Icelandic cooking), as well as enzymes for breaking down grime (spit again). All of which reminded me of Anne Elk and her theories about the brontosaurus.
Whipped custard is good stuff.
We know it as 'vla'. Which unfortunately sounds exactly like 'blah', thus showing a regrettable characteristic of English, that being the negative hue many words have, unfairly darkening the emotional impact of names and terms which to other cultures represent sweetness and light (good examples being 'weltschmerz', 'existenzangst', 'identitätskrise', 'gicht', 'zweifelhaft', and 'gänseblümchen', those being terms which resonate warmly for many German-speakers), or 'vla', 'snert', 'spuugsel', and 'frikandel' for the Dutch. That last is a surpassingly delicious fried comestible for which Dutch speakers in Thailand, Vietnam, and Ceylon passionately long.
And they will rip apart society in their single-minded search for it.
It's not just vla, snert, and frikandel.
There's also herring.
Dutch food could fill a book.
It's better than spit.
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