Eat your ready-made greens

DutchNews.nl, Wednesday 05 June 2013

Annemarie van Gaal tells how a fruit & veg entrepreneur is providing some green shoots for the economy.

Last month I came across two great examples of entrepreneurship, proof that Dutch entrepreneurs are getting more creative. They are moving the goal posts and exploring new markets.

First up, Johan van Marle. Twelve years ago he took over his father’s fruit and veg shop in Kampen and opened another shop in Nunspeet. This type of shop is usually static in nature: people buy their fruit and veg and off they go. Van Marle decided to turn his shop into an experience.

Ease

He fitted his shop with a state-of-the art kitchen and hired a professional chef who produced delicious meals using Van Marle’s vegetables. Customers spent more time in the shop, to watch the chef in action and to purchase the result. People came from far and wide to buy the freshly made meals or simply for inspiration. ‘People like ease,’ van Marle says. He moved the goal posts even further and decided to make fresh daily meals for pensioners delivered by his own delivery service.

At the moment he is delivering three fresh ready-made meals a week to over a thousand pensioners in Kampen. His catering services also include parties and events. The turnover from both activities is three times higher than that of the shop. But if every greengrocer were to become a caterer, catering companies would quickly go out of business. Which brings me to my second example.

Bob Hutten, of Hutten catering in Veghel, has broadened his scope by moving into the care market. He employed specialised diet chefs who can cater for every illness. Hutten knows exactly which ingredients will help a speedier recovery. He works with the care institutions and is able to deliver – far more cheaply and efficiently than the institutions can – meals with exactly the right nutrient composition.

His company delivers hundreds of meals a day to care institutions and hospitals. Patients who are too weak to be operated on used to be admitted to hospital for a couple of days to gain strength. Now they stay at home and eat Hutten’s specially prepared meals. After treatment, patients can leave the hospital sooner, courtesy of a deal between the hospital and Hutten to deliver the appropriate meals to their homes. 

Cheaper

This benefits the patients and makes healthcare more efficient and cheaper. The stories of how a greengrocer became a caterer and how a caterer made healthcare more affordable gladden my heart. These are imaginative and creative entrepreneurs, exactly the sort of people who will pull the country out of recession.

Annemarie van Gaal is an entrepreneur. She is the head of AM Media and is also a writer and television personality.

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Kryon Q&A

(39) Question: Dear Kryon: I've noticed how many children are developing severe allergies to foods (my daughter included). When I've researched this, it seems that most of the allergies are essentially to seeds, grains, legumes, eggs, and dairy. I've noticed that these foods all hold the potential for life, or in the case of dairy, are essentially used to sustain the first stages of life in an animal's baby. My feeling is that because we're not releasing the life force within these foods (that is, sprouting, etc.), they're becoming harmful to us. I would like your impressions of this.

Answer: For thousands of years, these foods have worked for humanity. In these cases you speak about, the main culprit continues to be the way in which these foods are collected and processed. You won't find these allergies in third-world countries, and you won't find them within the children who work on farms, where they eat the foods directly. There will eventually have to come a day when you relax some of your efficiency attributes and go back to the way food was meant to be collected and eaten. And yes... there are effects from how the dairy animals are treated, too. Going back to some basics will help, and so will eliminating some of the procedures that supposedly create a "safer food." These procedures have instead made them begin to look like foreign food to the Human body.


(15) Question: Dear Kryon, please help us understand the increase of allergies. What can we do to heal this phenomenon?

Answer: Reduce the steps in your food chain, which are adding chemistry to fresh food.

(13) Question: Dear Kryon, I’m very concerned about the obesity epidemic, particularly in the U.S. Around me I see people getting bigger and more unhealthy, all for the sake of convenience and saving time. You mentioned at one point a famine, and I suspect the famine won’t be from a lack of food, but from an abundance of food that has no nutritional value.

I wonder how we can honor the Earth by eating nothing that comes straight from it? Of course this involves caring for the lands and oceans as part of a bigger issue and making that connection, too. Is this what it will finally take for people to switch to a healthier way of living?

Its amazing how detached people are from the food they eat. We don’t even honor our digestive processes, the way we combine foods. Whatever happened to nutrition? Atkins is no solution; there is no balance in it. Gastric bypass is all about quantity reduction, not quality increase. When will people make the direct connection between what/how they eat and their health? Is a change in diet and lifestyle part of the upcoming shift?

Answer: The shift has little to do with it. It’s a culture-specific problem and has to do with consciousness of health. Go study the cultures on your planet that have very few overweight Humans. Start with the Japanese. They have some of the same western work ethics and live in very sophisticated industrial-based environments. Yet they aren’t overweight. It’s about the core food groups and the combination of them.