Tessa Vaendel,
Noor Debets
Café de Knip - Den Hoorn
This is a café where they enjoy presenting the local products to their visitors. Just like many restaurants, cafés and other businesses in the food serving sector, they buy their products locally, among other things the lambs meat from Texel. In this way there is very little distance between the producer and the consumer. The owner of this restaurant gets a lot of food from the Novalis Farm as well.
Many small time local food producers who up with their produce, and this particular owner has asked to be informed if these producers happen to end up with a larger quantity of food they can buy in bulk. As an example, every morning they get a phone call asking them if they need lettuce today. As they do need this every day, the owner of the lettuce shows up at 8 o'clock to provide them with this produce for the day. While preparing this food is more work, it can absolutely be noticed in the taste of teh food.
While as a business they make sure to buy as many local products as possible, as a private household they often don't. Local foods are simply often too expensive to be able to afford it, a problem that also plagues the rest of the island. However the quality of the locally produced food is so high that when people can afford it, there are customers who travel here from the mainland in order to buy part of their groceries here.
As many of these local businesses are so small, they have to consistently keep the quality of their goods high, or they're finished. This is the reason that many food related businesses stock up on these goods.
Overall Texelaars are very conscious of what they eat every day, possible due to a certain self-sufficiency. They have to do everything for themselves, as they can't always rely on support from the mainland.
If they don't have any particular food themselves, there is an active and lively trade system going on. Many Texelaars have their own small garden, where they grow a few species of produce. They trade this amongst each other, so everyone ends up with a varied selection of food.
The tightly-knit community of Texel is also a great advantage here. They know each other, and they are always willing to help each other out, and send business each other's way. Texelaars look out for each other.
[Image] photo shows menu of Café the Knip, explaining their focus on using locally produced foods