Someone recently told me that not a month goes by in the Netherlands without a food scandal and had collected a list of articles specifically about meat scandals over a period of two years: horse meat passed off as beef, bad fish, sick fattened chickens, and so on. And then there’s the fact that most good reasons to come to the Netherlands have absolutely nothing to do with food, which makes you wonder why the relationship with food here is not a happy marriage.

At an agri-food event like the World Expo Milan 2015 that showcases food from around the world and attracts a huge amount of visitors in its five month stint, you would want your country to put its best food forward. The Dutch pavilion at the expo was fined 3,000 euro by the Italians for serving rotten food that was improperly stored, which included dozens of kilos of rotten meat and bread that was stored in bin bags. That was someone’s idea of street food, which is a shame because the Netherlands has some decent street food at events.

Meat in bin bags, people.

(Link: nu.nl)