The Fat We Forgot: Why Omega-3 Belongs Back on the Dutch Table

A Word About Fat Before We Begin

There was a time, not so very long ago, when my grandmother in Utrecht would set a plate of herring on the table every single Friday without fail, and nobody in the house thought to ask why. You ate the herring because it was herring day, because the fishmonger on the Oudegracht had his freshest delivery on Thursday evening, because your mother ate herring and her mother before her. Nobody spoke of “fatty acids” over the kitchen table in 1962. Nobody needed to. And yet, I have come to believe that those old women, with their sharp eyes and their steady hands and their ability to walk to the market in January without complaint, understood something essential about feeding the body that we, with all our cleverness and our little plastic containers of pills, have somehow managed to forget entirely. I write this not as a man of science, for I am nothing of the sort, but as a man who cooks, who eats, who rides his bicycle through the polder wind and feels in his knees when something is lacking.

What We Actually Mean When We Say Omega-3

The thing is this, and I will try to say it plainly because I distrust complicated language about simple matters. There exist certain fats that the human body requires for its daily work but cannot manufacture on its own, not in any amount, not even a small amount. You must eat them. They come in through the mouth, travel where they are needed, and do their quiet work in the brain, in the eyes, in the joints, in the walls of the blood vessels. The researchers, who must always name everything as though it were a new species of beetle discovered in Suriname, have called these particular fats by the designation omega-3. There are three main forms that matter for our purposes here, found in cold-water fish and in certain seeds and green leaves. The body uses them the way a carpenter uses good oil on his tools: to keep everything running smoothly, to prevent the drying out and the cracking and the slow grinding-down that comes with years of use. Without sufficient of these fats, the body simply does not function as it was built to function. This is not opinion. This is as certain as the fact that a bicycle chain without oil will seize within the week.

The Herring, the Mackerel, and the Sad State of the Modern Plate

I remember when a proper Dutch household ate fish twice in the week without thinking. Now we eat fish perhaps once in ten days, and often it is that pale, sad fillet of something from a freezer cabinet in the Albert Heijn, breaded and pressed into a shape no living creature ever possessed. Meanwhile, the young people eat their pasta with cream sauce and their bread with cheese and their evening meal of chicken from a plastic tray, and the good fats go entirely missing from the week. The herring stands there in his little cart on the street corner, but people walk past him looking at their telephones. It makes me a little angry, if I am honest. The mackerel, the sardine, the anchovy, the salmon from the northern waters, the good Dutch herring itself: these are the carriers of what we need, and we have simply stopped eating them in any meaningful quantity. The omega-3 that our grandmothers received without effort or knowledge must now be sought deliberately, planned for, remembered. And we are not a people who remember such things well when it concerns our own nourishment.

Where the Good Fat Hides: A Table for the Kitchen Wall

I have put together here, from my own years of cooking and reading and asking questions of fishmongers, a small reference that I think any household might pin above the kitchen counter. It is not exhaustive, but it covers what you will actually find in the shops here, and it gives you a sense of where to direct your attention when the weekly shopping is done.

Source of omega-3	Amount you would need roughly per week	Notes for the practical cook
Fresh herring (Hollandse nieuwe)	Two to three whole fish	Best between May and July, eat with onion and no bread if you can manage it
Mackerel, smoked or fresh	Two fillets	Cheap, widely available, excellent cold on dark bread with mustard
Sardines from the tin	One full tin, three or four times	Keep several tins in the cupboard for the days you cannot be bothered to cook
Walnuts and linseed	A small handful of walnuts daily, or ground linseed over yoghurt	The plant form is less efficiently used by the body, but it counts
Eggs from hens fed on linseed	Four to six per week	Look for the specific marking on the box at the market

You will notice I have not written “supplement” anywhere in that table, and this is deliberate. I believe, perhaps stubbornly, that the fat should come first through the teeth and the tongue and the pleasure of a proper meal. The body receives food differently than it receives a capsule swallowed with a glass of tap water while standing at the kitchen counter in your underclothes.

The Matter of the Body Receiving What You Give It

Now, here is a thing that nobody tells you when they say “eat more fish” or “take your omega-3.” The eating is only half the matter. The other half is what happens afterwards, in the belly, in the long winding corridor of the gut where the food must be broken apart and sorted and sent onward to where it is needed. I have spoken with many people, friends and neighbours, who eat perfectly well and yet feel heavy afterwards, bloated, as though the meal sits like a stone in the middle of them for hours. The fat sits there undigested, the good things pass through without being properly taken up, and all the careful eating counts for less than it should. This is where I must mention something that has helped in my own household and in the households of several people I know well. It is called Enzimlex, and it is a preparation meant to support the natural breaking-down of food in the stomach and the intestines, to help the body do what it is meant to do with what you have eaten. I will not pretend it performs miracles. But I have noticed, and others have noticed, that the heaviness lifts, that the meal settles more kindly, that one feels less as though one has swallowed a bag of wet sand at half past six in the evening. The important thing, and I say this clearly so there is no confusion, is that Enzimlex can only be obtained through the official website, which is enzimlex.biz and not through the usual shops or the large internet marketplaces where everything is sold by everyone and nothing is guaranteed. I prefer it this way, actually. It means you know what you are receiving.

A Small List of Things I Have Changed in My Own Kitchen

Because I am asked often by readers what one actually does, in practice, on a Tuesday evening in November when it is dark at four o’clock and the rain comes sideways, I will set down here the changes I made. They are not dramatic. They do not require a new kitchen or a second income.

• On Wednesday, I eat sardines from the tin on toasted dark bread with a squeeze of lemon and black pepper, standing at the counter, and I consider this a proper meal and not a snack.
• I keep a jar of ground linseed in the refrigerator and put a spoonful over my morning yoghurt or through the batter when I make pancakes for the children on Sunday.
• Once a fortnight, I buy a whole mackerel from the fishmonger on the Saturday market and roast it simply with salt and a little butter, and I eat it with boiled potatoes and beetroot, and it costs me less than three euros.
• I stopped buying the breaded fish sticks for the children and instead make small fish cakes from canned salmon, which they eat without complaint if I call them “fish biscuits” and serve them with a sharp sauce.

These are not sacrifices. They are small returns to what was always there before we decided that cooking was an inconvenience and that the freezer cabinet knew better than the fishmonger.

Why the Winter Makes This More Urgent and Not Less

There is a particular Dutch sadness to February, when the light goes at half past four and the wind comes off the North Sea and you feel in your joints that you are forty-seven years old and have been cycling into that wind for thirty years. I notice, and I am not alone in noticing, that the body asks more of you in those months. The mind is slower, the skin dries, the knees complain on the stairs. And it is precisely in those months that we eat the least fish, because the thought of a cold herring in January is not a cheerful thought, and the fresh fish at the market seems an extravagance when the budget is tight after the holidays. But the body does not care about the budget. The body wants its fat, its good oil, its omega-3, in February as much as in July. Perhaps more. And so I have learned to keep the tinned fish close, to make the warm fish soup with mackerel and potato and a bay leaf, to find the small pleasures in it. The omega-3 does not care whether it arrives on a porcelain plate or from a tin with a pull-ring. It simply arrives, and does its quiet work, and asks nothing in return except that you remember it is there.

The Children and the Question of Taste

My neighbour Saskia told me last autumn that her two children will not eat fish, will not touch it, will sit at the table with their arms crossed and their mouths shut like little fortresses. And I said to her, what I say to everyone: do not fight them. Do not make the fish into a battleground. Put the ground linseed in the pancake batter. Stir a spoonful of good fish oil, the kind that tastes of nothing much, into the smoothie. Make the fish cakes small and round and call them something else. The omega-3 will enter the child whether the child knows it or not, and in ten years they will eat the herring at the market stall with onion and mustard and wonder why they ever made such a fuss. Children’s tongues change. They are not fixed like stone. Give it time. Give it patience. Give it the good fat in whatever form they will accept, and trust that the body knows what to do with it once it arrives.

A Final Word From the Kitchen Table

I will say this and then I will go and make my tea. We are a small country, flat and wet and windswept, and we have always eaten from the sea and from the soil in equal measure. The omega-3 is not a foreign thing, not a novelty, not something invented in a laboratory for people who read too many magazines. It is the herring. It is the mackerel. It is the walnut cracked open on a winter evening while the radio plays. It is what we already knew, before we knew the name for it. My grandmother did not need the name. She needed the Friday, and the fishmonger, and the plate on the table, and the family gathered round. I think we should try to find our way back to that. Not perfectly, not every day, but often enough that the body receives what it is owed. The rest, the names and the numbers and the small print, can stay in the laboratories where it belongs. We have a table to set. We have a fish to eat. And the wind outside will be there tomorrow, and the day after, and we will need our strength for it.