‘I think about sprouts every day’: Inside the Dutch factory growing your Christmas vegetables
In the world of Christmas vegetables, nothing is more divisive than a Brussels sprout.
And here, as I look out over a factory in the Netherlands, they are everywhere.
It is like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but recast in sprout form.
They roll along conveyor belts, get poured into huge machinery and tumble into chutes.
They’re photographed and lifted, sized and sorted, packed and chilled.
It is relentless, like watching a green magma flow. As more and more sprouts are delivered from farms, so they are fed into the machinery, and so the slow march goes on and on.
If you like sprouts (spoiler alert: I do) then this is a mesmerising sight.
Sprouts of all sizes are whizzing around us, being divided into huge wheeled tubs that fill up in minutes. The Dutch like the small ones. The biggest are off to Germany.
And there, in the middle, are the containers for the British. We like smaller Brussels sprouts with a crisp taste.
The fine sprouts, as they are described to me.
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The world centre of sprout-growing
Peter van’t Woudt is the site manager at the Primeale factory in the Netherlands – the world centre of sprout-growing.
As the sprouts roll in, he studies them constantly, running his hand through the vat as it fills up.
This is a crucial time of the year in the Brussels sprout world.
“We are running for 24 hours per day,” he said, looking round his factory.
“This is the time of the year when we all have to work hard because everyone wants the sprouts. But here, we are a team.”
On a good day, it can take 34 hours for the sprouts to go from entering this factory to the shelves of a British supermarket, and being snapped up soon after.
It’s reckoned that British shoppers buy something like 750 million sprouts over the Christmas period, but that only around half of them will actually be eaten.
It is the vegetable that you either love or hate and, yes, even within the sprout factory I met some people who love them, despite spending the whole day staring at sprouts, and others who couldn’t bear the taste.
How do you even harvest a sprout in winter?
Then there is Jack’s Gravemade, whose job is to use infrared cameras to weed out the bad sprouts.
He said he used to hate them as a child, but has now become a devout fan.
This has been a tough year for them, he said, with the long hot summer affecting sprouts.
Last year, only about 8% of sprouts were deemed unacceptable: now it’s double that.
That’s tough for the farmers. Half an hour away, we are standing in a muddy field, talking to Frederique Sonneveld, Primeale’s product manager with oversight of Brussels sprouts, and she is worried.
Her parents worked in sprouts, and so did their parents before.
There is nothing she doesn’t know about these things, which is handy because really all I know is how to cook and eat them.
Sprouts grow out of the ground – they really do sprout up – on all sides of a thick stalk.
To harvest them, a slow-moving vehicle runs along the line of vegetables, with four people sitting in the front.
Huge cutters trim the stalk at ground level, then it gets lifted by hand and fed into a hole where a hidden machine strips the sprouts from the stalk.
The problem is that you can’t do any of this if the ground is frozen. And right now, the weather is cold, which is why Ms Sonneveld is worried.
“I’m nervous because this is such an important time of the year, but we can’t do anything if it’s too cold. We need to harvest as much as we can but…”, she shrugs and smiles a slightly anxious smile.
“They need our care and our love.”
Brussels sprouts being harvested in the Netherlands
‘I think about sprouts every day’
There is, of course, nothing you can do about the vagaries of nature.
The summer was difficult, she explained, but it wasn’t the only problem.
The spiralling price of energy has made farming more expensive, and so has inflation in the labour market. Sprouting sprouts is an expensive business these days.
Ms Sonneveld is an avowed fan of the taste of the sprout, although she does look bewildered when I ask if she eats them every day.
Frederique Sonneveld is an avowed fan of the taste of the sprout
“I think about them every day, but I don’t always eat them,” she replied. Probably very wise.
She presents me with what she considers to be the most beautiful example she can find – perfect size, no flaky leaves and a glistening sheen.
“Bling, bling,” she said, handing it over. Not, if I’m honest, an expression I’ve ever associated with a Brussels sprout before.
But it is unarguably a nice looking sprout. It’s the one I’m holding in our television report, and which I’m going to eat shortly.
The perfect Brussels sprout
The fact is that a huge amount of time, effort, money, passion and planning goes into delivering the humble sprout to your table. They are cherished and loved, coaxed to grow, and then sped to your table.
And all that for something that half of you won’t want. It’s a cruel life, being a Brussels sprout.
Can it be a coincidence that US planes attacked Syria around the very time the Epstein files were released?
It would be cynical – but then again, it would be how politics works.
The deadline-day release of the Epstein files had White House media management written all over it, unredacted.
Initial searches for Trump’s name within the Department of Justice search function returned nothing, while the presence of former president Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was everywhere.
It is PR strategy 101 – front-load the release of documents with the Democrat stuff and save any possible Trump content for a soft landing sometime between Christmas and New Year.
Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Pic: NBC
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By that time, the public will have softened its focus on the story – it’s what the festive season does.
The presence of celebrity in the latest release might also feather Trump’s bed.
It’s clear that iconic superstars like Mick Jagger and Diana Ross were courted by Epstein as innocents, ignorant of his criminality. To see them in the files cements a narrative of a monster who lured the unsuspecting into his orbit.
We support Jagger and Ross as treasured icons, so we remind ourselves that simply being included in the files doesn’t equate to wrongdoing or knowledge of it. In turn, it shapes an empathy around the predicament that will extend to Trump and, perhaps, the benefit of any doubt.
Of course, not everyone will see it that way – the people who see a cynical exercise in delay and obfuscation, constituting a gross insult to the Epstein survivors at the heart of the story.
Jeffrey Epstein and Michael Jackson. Pic: US DoJ
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For all the talk (by the Trump administration) of a tight time scale and a willingness to act transparently, survivors and their supporters point out that Donald Trump could have published all the Epstein files long ago, never mind drip feed them with wide-ranging redactions.
Not to have done so is an affront to them and an attempt to evade accountability.
For all the talk about the release of the files, their significance is undermined by the lack of context. We are shown pictures and documents that reflect the life of a thoroughly unpleasant individual who inflicted suffering on an industrial scale. But with redactions, and without explanations, we are left having to join the dots in an effort to establish criminal behaviour and blame.
It is a level of uncertainty surrounding the Epstein files and a source of dissatisfaction to survivors, for whom justice further delayed is justice further denied.
Ukraine has struck a Russian tanker in the Mediterranean Sea for the first time, a Kyiv intelligence source has said.
The ship, called the Qendil, suffered “critical damage” in the attack, according to a member of the SBU, Ukraine’s internal security agency.
The tanker is said to be part of Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” – a group of ageing vessels that Kyiv alleges helps Moscow exports large quantities of crude oil despite Western sanctions.
The SBU source said Ukrainian drones hit the ship in neutral waters more than 2,000 kilometres (1,243 miles) from Ukraine.
They said: “Russia used this tanker to circumvent sanctions and earn money that went to the war against Ukraine.
“Therefore, from the point of view of international law and the laws and customs of war, this is an absolutely legitimate target for the SBU.
“The enemy must understand that Ukraine will not stop and will strike it anywhere in the world, wherever it may be.”
The vessel was empty at the time of the attack, the Ukrainian source added.
Speaking during a live TV event, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, claimed the attack would not disrupt supplies, but vowed that Russia would retaliate nonetheless.
He added that Russia regularly responded with “much stronger strikes” against Ukraine.
Putin also warned against any threat to blockade Russia’s coastal exclave Kaliningrad, which he said would “just lead to unseen escalation of the conflict” and could trigger a “large-scale international conflict”.
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Sky military analyst Michael Clarke said Ukraine’s claim about causing significant damage to the ship was “probably true”.
He added: “The Ukrainians obviously feel that they can legitimise this sort of operation.”
The Qendil, pictured near Istanbul last month. Pic: Reuters
The attack comes after the European Union announced it would provide a €90bn (£79bn) interest-free loan to Ukraine.
Oleksandr Merezhko, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Ukrainian parliament, told Sky News that the money would “tremendously enhance” Kyiv’s defensive capabilities.
However, he said the International Monetary Fund estimated that Ukraine needed $137bn to “keep running”.
“The aggressor should be punished”, Mr Merezhko added, as he argued that frozen Russian assets in Europe should be used to help fund his country’s defence.
He vowed that Ukraine would “continue to fight” for the move, adding that it was “a matter of justice”.
Protesters have stormed the headquarters of two major newspapers in Bangladesh, amid widespread unrest following the death of a political activist.
A mob set fire to the offices of the Bengali-language Prothom Alo daily newspaper and the English-language Daily Star in the capital Dhaka, leaving journalists and other staff stuck inside.
The Bengali-language Prothom Alo daily was one of the two newspapers that were targeted. Pic: AP.
One of the Daily Star’s journalists, Zyma Islam, wrote on Facebook: “I can’t breathe anymore. There’s too much smoke.”
Both dailies stopped updating their online editions after the attacks and did not publish broadsheets on Friday.
Troops were deployed to the Star building and firefighters had to rescue the journalists trapped inside. The blaze was brought under control early on Friday.
The latest protests erupted a year after the July Revolution ousted PM Sheikh Hasina. Pic: PA.
Political activist Sharif Osman Hadi died in hospital late on Thursday, six days after the youth leader was shot while riding on a rickshaw in Dhaka.
Bangladesh’s interim government urged people on Friday to resist violence as police and paramilitary troops fanned out
across the capital and other cities following the protests overnight. They have sparked concerns of fresh unrest ahead of national elections, which Mr Hadi had been due to stand in.
He was a prominent activist in the political uprising last year that forced the then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee the country. Mr Hadi spent six days on life support in a hospital in Singapore before he succumbed to his injuries.
Mr Hadi died a week after he was shot by a man on a motorbike. Pic: PA.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets following news of Mr Hadi’s death on Thursday night, where they rallied at Shahbagh Square near the Dhaka University campus, according to media reports.
A group of demonstrators gathered outside the head office of the Muslim-majority country’s leading Bengali-language Prothom Alo daily, before vandalising the building and setting it on fire.
A few hundred yards away, another group of protesters pushed into the Daily Star offices and set fire to the building. The protesters are believed to have targeted the papers for their alleged links with India and closeness to Bangladesh‘s interim leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus.
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Although calm had returned to much of the country on Friday morning, protesters carrying national flags and placards
continued demonstrating at Shahbagh Square in Dhaka, chanting slogans and vowing not to return until justice was served.
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Last year’s mass uprising erupted from student protests against a quota system that awarded 30% of government jobs to relatives of veterans.
The July 2024 protest, which resulted in as many as 1,400 deaths according to the United Nations, was dubbed the first “Gen Z” revolution.
Bangladesh’s former prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed was forced to resign in August 2024 and fled to India. She was later sentenced to death in absentia.
Sheikh Hasina was sentenced to death in absentia. Pic: AP
Dr Yunus was then sworn in as interim leader.
The country’s Islamists and other opponents of Ms Hasida have accused her government for being subservient to India.
Mr Hadi was a fierce critic of Ms Hasina and neighbouring India.
He had planned to run as an independent candidate in a constituency in Dhaka at the next national elections due to be held in February.
Authorities said they had identified the suspects in Mr Hadi’s shooting, and the assassin was also likely to have fled to India. Two men on a motorbike followed Hadi and one opened fire before they fled the scene.
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