Who I Am

I am Pascal Becker Hoff
The voice and soul behind The Gluten Project.

I am not here to fit in. I am here to remember what doesn’t bend.

Born in Zoetermeer, Netherlands, I grew up with a sense of dissonance, one I couldn’t name until I left. At 27, I crossed the world: living and working in New Zealand and Australia, meeting my wife in Melbourne, and later baking bread under the Chilean sun. Those years unlocked me, away from the tightening grip of the Dutch system, into a life that breathed.

I returned different. And I refused to become the same again.

I observe. I question. I write.
Beyond obedience. Beyond identity. Beyond grief.

I am not here to please. I’m here to say what must be said, before silence swallows it.

In exile

I’m still a Dutch citizen. I am legally allowed to return to the Netherlands at any time. In practice it is impossible.

The country faces a severe housing crisis: there is an extreme shortage of homes, prices have exploded, and even a normal family cannot find anything affordable. Returning would mean living in a box or on endless waiting lists for social housing, which will often lead to a “Soviet-style” apartment in one of the many problem and socially poor districts that the Dutch never speak of.

At the same time, Dutch law forces my non-EU wife through the full discriminatory and mandatory “inburgering” process: compulsory Dutch language courses, official exams on Dutch society (so you will know who the king is and that we walk naked on the beach), high costs, and participation requirements. There is no option to simply live together as a normal family.

The system offers only one path: forced assimilation.

On top of that, the level of criticism I express is socially unacceptable in the Netherlands. It would lead to exclusion and economic starvation.

I wanted to return. The system did not allow it.

That is why I live in exile.

Although I remain a full Dutch citizen with the legal right to return at any time, the system has made that return practically impossible in a fully legal way. There is no court order, no expulsion notice and no formal prohibition. Instead, fifteen years of housing policy, the mandatory and discriminatory inburgering requirements for my non-EU wife, and the social and economic consequences of openly criticising the system have created a wall that no human rights organisation, no judge and no international body can call illegal, because every single rule was democratically approved and publicly available. This is not a conspiracy against me personally; it is the everyday functioning of the very mechanism I describe in this corpus: a legal architecture that never says “you are forbidden”, but simply makes living here impossible for those who do not fit the desired profile.

The Netherlands is thereby abandoning one, and many people more, of its own life-long tax-paying citizens and their families.