“I’ve got everything here,” Rutger Bregman calls out. He holds up each item in turn. “Butter! Most important ingredient: peanut butter. Cheese — biological. Bread from Michel, the ‘real baker’ in the old village of Houten.” He sniffs it: “Smells good.”
The image screams Dutch sobriety. Bregman, 32, with thinning, unkempt Covid-era hair, sits in T-shirt and fleece in the modest house where he lives with his wife in Houten, a small town south of Utrecht. You wouldn’t peg him as a global public intellectual who spreads progressive ideas through bestselling books and viral videos. From Paris, I wave my baguette céréale and Dutch Gouda cheese.
We have agreed to a simple sandwich video lunch, partly because of the lockdown and partly in homage to the austere Dutch lunching tradition in which we both grew up, eight miles apart. Bregman, a Protestant minister’s son from Zoetermeer, has stuck with it: “I always eat bread and almost always peanut butter and apple syrup, sometimes cheese. I hardly ever ate out as a child. When I did it more as a student, it felt strange to be served.”