Let’s quick pro/con a couple points of staying in Belgium.
Pro: Sales tax isn’t a thing, so your final price is always pretty and even on the receipt.
Con: They don’t like splitting bills here. Dividing up money can be a challenge sometimes.
Pro: Tipping isn’t a thing either. Yay money saved!
Con: Sometimes you can tell that servers don’t get tipped. Being a jerk is a worldwide phenomenon.
Pro: Everything is within walking distance! Stores, restaurants, bars, you name it; you can be there within 15 minutes at a leisurely stroll.
Con: Everything closes so stinking early! At 7:00 or 7:30, very few places are open! No 24/7 Wal-Mart runs here.
Pro (at least to me): It stays light out so much longer. Like, I can see decently at 10:00 PM. It doesn’t hurt that the street lighting is much more thorough here.
Con: Refer to previous con. It’s hard to stay inside when it’s light out until the middle of the night, but there’s nothing to do because everything is closed!
Pro: Food is fantastic. Drool on the table, eat every last crumb (which isn’t usually possible since portion sizes are unreal) delicious. Fries are a staple at every meal, even fancy steak dinners, and they’re accompanied by delicious Belgian mayo. I don’t even like mayo.
Con: Three euros con get you 6.5 sips of water. Make sure you ask for still, because sparkling water tastes super weird. At least to me. You get so much more beverage spending a euro on beer.
Pro: Europeans dress so well. Everyone always looks like they’re going on a date or a business casual day at work. Men’s shoes are fantastic.
Con: I was not aware, so I’m rocking the frumpy athletic wear fashion. Maybe Belgians could learn to like black leggings a little more.
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| That’s me with my guest pass to Puratos! |
Friday’s schedule started with the excursion in the morning to Puratos, a company that produces bread and chocolate ingredients for other food products companies who sell directly to the consumer. For example, Puratos makes a bread enhancer which they sell to an artisan bread maker or McDonald’s to use in their bread products. Therefore, Puratos may be behind many products you consume, but you’ll never see their brand on any of it. We got to tour their new research and development labs which were my inner chemist’s dream, but the real winning moment was smelling their test kitchen full of freshly baked baguettes and desserts. I’m a super sucker for carbs, and so seeing the beautifully baked loaves of bread through the glass panels to the kitchen had me drooling. It generally seems like a nice place to work, and we were all pleasantly surprised at how many women were working there.
After lunch, we had two lectures: biosurfactants and the history and science behind the beer fermentation process.
Surfactants are known as something that “lowers the surface tension between phases” which is fancy terms meaning it’s mostly used in soaps and detergents for the cleaning ability. The typical surfactants is made of petrochemical resources; however, the concept of biosurfactants is to replace the use of petrochemicals with microorganisms. It’s a very complex process which went well over my head since I don’t have a strong biochemistry background.
However, the lecture on the fermentation process of beer was fascinating and not too technical for me. The history and significance of beer is actually an integral part of the Belgian culture. Belgium has some of the world’s highest number of tastes of beer, pubs, and consumption of certain beers. Trappisten beers are a genre of specialty beers which requires that they have been be brewed in a monastery. They are exclusive, and the monasteries are comparatively few and far between. The age of Europe and their history of civilization has a unique effect on the culture compared to a young country like the US.
I’m updating this blog post while in Monday’s biotechnology lecture which I will talk about at a late date, but I had to mention a funny thing just happened. Our friend, Zack, is colorblind, and sometimes he wears color correction glasses. During our lecture, the speaker put a pie chart on the board which used different shades of blue. He just turns around to us and says, “I hate pie charts.” I had to laugh as quietly as possible before telling him which slice was which category.
Back to beer. There are almost as many ways to ferment and customize beer as there are types of beer. A small difference in temperature, container, spices and flavors, time, or enzymatic choices can make a huge difference in the final product. I think that the high consumption of beer here is related to the history of Europe where the fermentation process for beer made it more sanitary than water. Even children drank beer, and the age to drink beer now is still comparatively very young. I’m so glad I wasn’t born in the beer drinking century. I like my water.
We ended the day with our program leader Hilde showed us how her local food team operates. The food team buys local food in bulk and distributes it to members of the food team. They pay fair prices to the farmers, and when she says local, she means really local. They don’t even like getting food from too far outside of the city and definitely not outside the country. To put that in perspective, Belgium is approximately the size of Vermont. They would find it too wasteful to get food from the Netherlands. That means if they lived in Vermont, it would be too much to get food from New Hampshire. Meanwhile, it’s “local” if we get it from somewhere inside our humongous country. The difference in size of the US from European countries actually results in a lot of differences between the societies which I might go into detail about at another time, but its much more obvious in a field like sustainability.
We ended the night at a Mediterranean restaurant where the portion sizes were again huge, but I get some kalamata olives, so I was super happy. Yay olives!
Read more from Kaylee at https://letsghentlost.wordpress.com/blog/
To find out more about the U of A Faculty-Led: European
Agriculture-Food Chain Sustainability program at http://studyabroad.uark.edu/SUSTEurozone/
