Today in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to better acclimate to the city I am going to spend the next week in and begin to understand what exactly the way Amsterdam operates and what educational value this offers. I am starting to see how integrated sustainability is into the way of life in Amsterdam while still maintaining the important and distinct Dutch culture. I also can see how company and cultural visits offer me the opportunity to see the classroom content about sustainability that I am familiar with put into practice and why this is essential to my experiential and intellectual growth.
After a quick ride on the metro (which continues to impress me with its ability to be clean, quick, and efficient), we arrived in the center of Amsterdam where I, along with half of our group, went into Cacao and Spice, a local chocolate shop owned and operated on the basis of sustainable, ethical sourcing, production, and distribution of chocolate. The visit was described as a “chocolate tasting”, but the expertise and background beyond the chocolate we were eating made it feel like a comprehensive educational experience on chocolate production. We learned about how chocolate production is a painstaking, difficult process given the fragility and low yield of the cacao plant, leading large corporations to resort to child labor and monocultural farming, destroying both the land and the people on it. Naturally, I found this reality (which shockingly still uses child labor) horrifying, making it even more commendable that the store only sold products sourced from ethical distributors who planted in bio-diverse environments and paid cacao farmers several times the “fair rate” given by the government. This made me consider how sustainability ties into production of goods and how our privilege as a well-off country allows the general populace to ignore the rampant violations of human-rights committed by the companies that produce our products. The chocolate I buy from now on will not be from companies that condone the terrible practices we learned about in the presentation, in part because of the moral portion of this and because the ethically sourced chocolate we ate tasted so good! Everything we tasted was excellent, but my favorite parts were the cacao juice (shown in the attached picture) and the Carolina reaper chocolate, both of which were unlike anything I have ever eaten.
The walking tour we did immediately after this complemented it excellently, as the chocolate tasting gave a production-side view on Dutch culture while the walking tour gave more “on the street” insight into everything around us. I was thoroughly impressed upon learning how the city of Amsterdam has taken considerable effort to turn its problems around, from turning an area previously known for prostitution into a large swathe of woman-owned businesses and working to fix its opioid issue with a more holistic approach to drug enforcement. I believe this is the correct approach to solving broader societal issues, as the people these issues affect respond better to positive reinforcement and long-term investment than immediate punishment. Although these solutions are not without their own downsides, I hope that leadership in the US can work to address the problems our own cities face with similar human-centric fixes. Further, I was impressed to learn about the architecture and statues we had the chance to see, from the buildings tilted on their side to save money (with varying levels of success) and a bull statue whose horns had been worn down from various passerby grabbing “by the horns”. One thing I was disappointed by was the amount of trash in the canal due to the abuse of a recycling program instituted by the city, but I suppose this is a necessary byproduct of the ongoing process that is moving to sustainable societies.
Today was a great opportunity to learn about Dutch culture and society, from newfound developments such as a sidewalk made of shells to a building’s crest that was hundreds of years old. I am definitely impressed by how hard this city fights to live up to its progressive ideals and seeing how a single company can make such a big difference and how the entire city generally seems committed to the same goals gave me hope for the future. The boat tour we took later in the day gave me a chance to see the city from a new perspective, and I was happy to see how beautiful the surroundings are from the water. One thing I look forward to in the coming days is learning how people in the canal live from boats, as this way of life is both extremely foreign to me and very intriguing. Today was a day of progress for me, and I can’t wait to see what the rest of the trip has in store!
