We began Day 4 with our long-awaited tour of the Henri Willig cheese manufacturer. If you have ever walked around Amsterdam, you have likely noticed Henri Willig stores on almost every block. It was fun to learn about the cheese-making process behind this iconic Dutch company and to sample some of their delicious flavors. Henri Willig has been making cheese for 50 years, and has seemingly perfected the process for both mature cheese and young cheese. As a company, they place a strong emphasis on sustainability. Their main factories are powered primarily by solar panels installed on the roofs. They also experiment with ethical dairy farming practices, like allowing cows to calve every two years instead of annually, which allows the cows to live longer, stay less physically vulnerable, and produce better milk. Overall, they are an excellent example of sustainable principles implemented on a large scale.

After visiting Henri Willig, we took a bus to the Zuiderzeemuseum. This maritime museum is a large village that has both replicas and real preserved versions of different houses and town buildings from various fishing villages that were displaced when the Zuiderzee had dams and polders built into it. When the dams were built between the North Sea and the Zuiderzee, the Zuiderzee was transformed from a saltwater bay to a freshwater lake, which altered the fish species available for farming. Additionally, at the time the Dutch needed more land for houses and farming, so parts of the Zuiderzee were reclaimed by the installation of dykes which created polder land. Both of these changes displaced the maritime villages that once surrounded the previous North Sea outlet. The Zuiderzeemuseum was an immersive way of capturing what life was like in these villages. Our tour stopped at the steam-powered laundry building, the church, the school buildings, and the fish drying building. We also saw actors wearing authentic village clothes and portraying real historic villagers. The museum was very informative and our tour granted a new perspective I had not considered before on the effects of land reclamation on livelihood and culture.