Teun van de Keuken (born 1971) is a Dutch producer of television and radio programs who established a reputation investigating fair trade and production practices in the food industry; he founded the chocolate company Tony's Chocolonely. He debuted in 2017 as a novelist.
Van de Keuken was born to strongly left-wing parents (his father was documentary filmmaker Johan van der Keuken[1]), and referred to the environment in his parents' house as a "secular Calvinism". He became known for the program Keuringsdienst van waarde, which focused on problems in food production, including slavery and child labor.[2] Research for this show led him to focus on chocolate. He sought publicity and a verdict by the courts on slave labor by eating chocolate bars made with slave labor, and asking to be arrested as an accessory to the crime of employing child slaves.[3] In the end he created what he called "slave-free chocolate", manufactured following fair trade conventions, under the brand Tony's Chocolonely. In 2011, 51% of the company was bought by businessman Henk Jan Beltman. In a 2016 documentary about him called Tony, Van de Keuken said that it was all to no avail, that slave labor still was part of the manufacturing chain; Beltman accepted that as a challenge to continue the struggle against slavery in the cocoa trade.[4]
He made other investigative journalistic productions such as De slag om Brussel and De slag om Nederland, and in 2014 published a collection of articles on food, food production, and certification marks.[5] Since 2015 he has presented De Monitor, an investigative journalism program.
Also a columnist since the mid-2000s, he published his first novel, Goed Volk ("Good people"), in 2017. The book, partially autobiographical,[6] [7] deals with growing up in Amsterdam and attending public schools; the author's parents made a point of sending him to schools attended by lower-class children, where he felt like an outsider[8] and was used as a political statement. Johan van der Keuken is not mentioned by name, though the first-person narrator is called "Teun". Vrij Nederland called the novel "semi-autobiographical" and qualified it as a coming of age novel, in which the narrator develops from being deeply ashamed of his parents and particularly his father to appreciating him as a man with good intentions.[9]