The Norwegian art of the packed lunch | Hacker News Reader

The Norwegian art of the packed lunch

bbc.com

133 pointsbauta-steen138 comments

I'm a Norwegian. This mostly isn't wrong, a lot of us do use "matpakke"s, but I object to this quote:

“In Norway, you’re not supposed to look forward to your lunch,” says Ronald Sagatun, who works in advertising and hosts a YouTube channel about Norwegian culture. “It’s kind of a strict thing. It’s easy to make, easy to carry around, easy to eat, but it should be a disappointment.”

Maybe it's "kind of a strict thing" in some parts of the country, but certainly not where I am (Oslo). While everyone did eat a "matpakke" for lunch in the first 7 years of school ("barneskolen"), ever since, the places I've been has served hot lunch in a cafeteria. This includes the second level of school ("ungdomsskolen"), our version of high school ("videregående"), university, three workplaces (which is two summer jobs and the place I'm working now).

It's not like it's uncommon for someone to bring a "matpakke" but saying it's "kind of a strict thing" that "you're not supposed to look forward to your lunch" is bullshit, at least in the general form presented in the article.

(I'm also not sure about the pronounciation "maadpukke". Maybe it follows some internationally recognized form of phonetic writing, but if it doesn't, that "d" and "u" is really strange to me. I'd just say you pronounce it straightforward like "matpakke", with the Norwegian pronounciation of "a". Judge for yourself based on how Google Translate says it: https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=no&t...)

10 year expat here. Part which I don't get is how come "warm lunches" for schools typical/natural/expected in the rest of the developed world never caught up here. Equality uber-alles?

As I wrote in my comment, warm lunch _is_ catching on, at least in my part of the country. As for why it's not as common as in some other countries (yet), there's no "equality über alles". I'd guess the reason is that Norway was until relatively recently a poor country with little good farmland, so most of our food culture comes from there.

Where are you from? There are many places where warm lunches in school are not normal. (I'm specifically thinking about Belgium and the Netherlands here, but I don't think they're common anywhere in Europe outside of the UK). It's mostly a cost thing, I think.

Wait, I'll google this...

Ah, here it goes: warm lunches: Finland, Spain, Denmark(?), Estonia, Lithuania, France, Italy, Sweden, UK, potentially others, not a complete list. [1]

p.s. Fun fact: Norwegian school lunches were supplied from Sweden during World War II, partly privately financed. Later, all public school lunches were discontinued, so most Norwegian students bring a packed lunch from home.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_meal

I heard that warm lunches used to be common in Netherland in agricultural areas. They'd work in the field all morning, then have a hot meal, then work all afternoon, and have some bread in the evening.

With everybody working/going to school outside the home, the family dinner moved to the evening and people took sandwiches with them for lunch.

Germany too.

And Portugal.

I don't think that list is really as black and white as that article makes it seem. I had conversations about this exact topic with friends from Spain and France (the things you talk about once you have children), and none of them had warm lunches at school. Of course I'm almost 40 years old, my friend are in that age bracket, so maybe it's different now, or maybe it depends on rural/urban or how well funded the schools are in other ways - but from what I understand, without it being a statistically sound survey, having full meals at primary and/or secondary school is not universal.

I have personally seen warm lunches in France in 3 out of three schools I visited. Locals treated it as something completely normal, complained about quality which seemed to me much higher then what I was used to.

I'm pretty sure that's outdated for Spain. According to various news reports (in Spanish), schools serve warm lunches, with most receiving pre-cooked food and heating it locally, while about 1/3 have full kitchens on premises.

I always had the option of warm lunch in school in Belgium (Hainaut, not really a rich part), maybe it's a regional thing.

I had warm lunch in high school (Norway, 1997). Granted, it was a private school.

Here in Albania (Europe) it's still a lifestyle thing - school is done by 1pm and lunch is taken at leisure with pleasure. It's a real joy.

Where are warm lunches for schools typical/expected? Have never seen them "properly".

In the US, it's the norm. When I was in elementary (primary in the UK) school, it was split about half between packed sandwiches (with a box of OJ and a small bag of chips or similar snack) and queuing up at the school's lunch counter for a hot meal (usually cheap, not great quality, and heavily subsidized for those students that qualified). I'm not sure when it started, but my guess would be the 1930s, in an effort to ensure every child had at least one full meal a day. And at least in my current region, the school now offers breakfast before school begins (though this is almost exclusively used by students who qualify for free lunches - I don't know any middle-class families that rely on the school breakfast).

I don't know the entire history but as a federal program it started in 1946. [1] It's long been sort of a political hot button. As you say, the impetus was (and is) that children from poor or otherwise disadvantaged home environments got at least one full meal at lunchtime.

[1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/national-school-lunch-program-...

From what I know, the food quality and cost varies widely. Here (rural Minnesota, US) the elementary school lunch is about $2.50 (HS is about $3.75) for the kids who don't qualify for financial aid or free meals. Breakfast is also available at a similar cost.

I've never eaten it, but my kids generally enjoy the food and my wife, who's volunteered at the school often and eaten lunch there, says it's OK. They also offer an optional PM snack in elementary school at additional cost. Snack milk is free for everyone.

OTOH, I've heard of other school districts around the country where the food is total crap and only the poorest children who can't afford to have breakfast at home/bring a lunch will eat it.

Ours was hit or miss. The pizza was good, if you like a greasy thin slice (I do). Simple things like Mac & cheese were good too. The meatloaf was terrible. The hamburgers weren’t great - the patties were cheap meat (possibly with lots of filler) and the buns mediocre. My fav was the thanksgiving lunch - they did a pretty good turkey, stuffing, and gravy.

The real problem was vegetables - they were guaranteed to be over cooked and mushy.

I grew up in the US Midwest, and I'm pretty sure it was a norm throughout the region, if not the entire country. So far as I know every school had a hot lunch, and also a hot breakfast. As I understand it, the rationale was that there were in fact kids who came to school hungry, and that it interfered with their ability to learn. At the same time, the lunch was available to everybody, and payment was handled in a way so that the kids never knew who was getting it for free. The teacher would collect lunch money in the morning. I brought a nickel every day for milk.

(This is where the idea of the school bully demanding your lunch money came from. Today, lunch money is handled through some sort of payment system, and the kids don't have to handle their own lunch money or have it stolen from them).

Of course there is no such thing as a single purpose government program. The state bought the milk from farmers, effectively subsidizing it. And so forth.

I never understood the magic of why the meal had to be hot. Usually the food was vile, and I greatly preferred to bring a sandwich from home. I wondered why the cafeteria couldn't just make a nice sandwich for everybody. Perhaps there was a time when heating institutional food was the best way of making sure everything was sanitary.

Even to this day, I bring a sandwich or leftovers from home. My daughter just left for college, so her supper portion goes in my lunch bag for the next day. ;-) My employer has a cafeteria, but maybe only 1/4 of the employees use it. The rest bring bag lunches. The cafeteria and break rooms have microwaves for us to use.

This may be a regional thing. In the Midwest, eating prepared food every day will kill you.

hot lunch was a thing when I was growing up. Same as everybody else from the US in this thread- about $1-2, cheap greasy pizza and tater tots.

The established tradition of bringing a homemade meal packed in a bag means that nobody has really been clamouring for cafeteria service -- everyone has simply accepted that schools don't provide food, and so people don't look to schools to provide a service that they don't view as being part of the school system.

Better income equality also means that everyone can afford to provide their own lunches.

Note that some Norwegian schools, especially bigger ones in the larger cities, now provide hot lunches, but the practice is fairly new and still uncommon.

(Source: Am Norwegian.)

"Maadpukke" is correct. Try reading "matpakke" in English and it will sound like "mætpæk". You need to change it to "aa" and "u" for it to sound Norwegian when reading it like English.

Norwegian here. No -- there's no "d" sound in matpakke, and neither "a" corresponds to the English "u" sound.

If I were to transliteralize it, it would be something like "maht-pahkk-eh". First ah is long, second is short. The "t" is distinct, as in "mat".

Note that in Danish (madpakke) it would be a soft "d", but all the other sounds would be quite different, despite the similar spelling.

I think the 'aa' and 'u' in their transliteration have the same role as the 'ah' in yours, but a lot of native english speakers don't read 'ah' as the open A you expect. As a non-native speaker of either language, `maadpukke` looks like the one that will get the closest-sounding result (either with D or T, try it in google translate).

No, English "u" (as in under, burn, us) is not correct here.

Both "a" sounds in "matpakke" have the same pronunciation. The closest you get to Norwegian "a" in "typical" American English is the "o" in "hot". Or indeed just "ah" (as in the exclamation; "ah" or "a-ha" or "ha"). In English, "a" (as in "hat" or "ask") is very different.

The 'u' in this configuration is voiced somewhere in between the 'ʌ' and 'ə' phonetic sounds. 'Pah-keh' will be read as 'paki' very often. I guess asking some native english speakers around you to read both will resolve the matter :)

"Eh" is pseudo-phonetic for the e in "lend" (IPA ɛ), not as in "he" (i). It's also worth nothing that in Norwegian, a double consonant indicates a short preceding vowel.

FWIW, my comments were vetted by my American girlfriend, who's sitting next to me. :-)

> as in under, burn, us

No, think "duck". That would be "dack" in Norwegian.

What dialect of English do you speak? American English "duck" is IPA /dʌck/, same vowel as "us" /ʌs/, for example. The "a" sound is IPA /a/, as in "far".

The "u" in "duck" sounds the same as our letter "ø", and nowhere near our "a". The english "duck" would be "døck" (or "døkk", since we usually don't use "ck") in norwegian, not "dack".

For "burn" it would be "børn" but the pronunciation of "u" in "duck" is different.

As long as there's no lutefisk on crispbread. ;P

I lived with some Norwegians and hung out with YSC in the Bay Area. I'm not more than 10% Scandinavian, if that.

Packing a lunch can be wise, if it's worth your or someone else's time. I spent over $25k/yr dining out for lunch and dinner in my year of maximum unfrugality. :'( Don't do as I did, save money where it balances pennywise (not wasting time saving pennies) and poundwise (not wasting tons of money). At least prepared food from a grocery store rather than a restaurant, meal kit service or restaurant meal delivery service. Take advantage of healthy free or low/er cost food nearby when available. If you're a VC or CEO and raking in coin, pay (almost) any amount to automate everything. If you're broke, automate gradually as you get less broke.

Back to article topic: When I was a kid, every day was a sizable packed lunch from home at school. Had to get to 2 m and 80 kg somehow, as I was two-dimensional until university.

“It’s kind of a strict thing. It’s easy to make, easy to carry around, easy to eat, but it should be a disappointment“

I am a non Norwegian living in Norway. I can confirm that it is almost all the time disappointing. Also it is a strange practice to have short lunch breaks. When I was in Germany 1 hour lunch break was common. But in Norway 30 minutes is more common. It is too short even with a matpakke. It’s too rushed when it is an organized lunch say for a workshop or a conference.

Italian here. We have 1-hour lunch breaks between 13:00 and 14:00, which is usually long enough to eat our meals, have a cup of coffee and mess around a little with colleagues.

Sometimes (but very rarely) my colleagues from my team and me go have lunch at some fancier place and completely miss the 1-hour time limit (by a lot).

This is kinda tolerated because it happens very rarely, but I can assure that this is awesome for team building. Nothing gets people closer than "we took a 2.5h lunch break and we're all equally responsible for it".

GDP per capita from the IMF, 2017:

Norway: $70,590

Italy: $37,970

I doubt the difference is much from longer Italian lunches, but the same cultural differences may well be responsible for both longer lunches and lower productivity.

Norwegian oil has a lot to do with this too.

And possibly IQ too . There is a high correlation between national IQ and GDP per capita.

The average IQ of Italy and Norway is practically the same.

High correlation is not the same as perfect correlation https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IQatWoN_GDP_IQ.png

Isn't it pretty widely accepted that your IQ, at least as measured by IQ tests, aren't a perfect measure of your "intrinsic" intelligence; that environmental factors contribute to IQ test results?

If environmental factors do indeed contribute to IQ scores, doesn't it seem pretty plausible that lower GDP per capita, which results in changes to environmental factors such as education, might result in lower IQ scores, rather than the other way around?

It'd be interesting to read studies which investigate whether there's a causal link between IQ and GDP per capita, and if there is one, which one causes the other.

Maybe high IQ people move to areas with a lot of oil?

how about South Korea

Sweden would be a better comparison, with a GDP per capita of $53,442, which is about 50% higher than Italy's. Sweden is culturally very similar to Norway.

I have no doubt that certain cultural aspects of Southern Europe have a huge impact on their countries' GDP, long lunches and a more relaxed attitude towards labor (not to mention taxes and corruption!) among them. In Scandinavia, the Protestant work ethic is still deeply ingrained in the culture, and this shows.

Corruption too. And off the books businesses. (Which perhaps underpform, and definitely are undermeasured)

Do you think the Protestant work ethic can be beneficial to an individual ? Or does it work only on a larger scale ?

Ah, sorry for the late reply here. This actually touches on something I've been thinking about recently. It's probably got its advantages and disadvantages on an individual level. You'd most likely be regarded as an attractive worker, but would at the same time have to be careful not to get taken advantage of. I think many who have this work ethic fall into the trap of the latter point, and that this is systematically abused some places. E.g. Scandinavia, where people pay _massive_ amounts of tax and at the same time voluntarily work unpaid overtime for low-pay public-sector jobs such as nursing, in a misunderstood loyalty to their patients.

And it necessarily leaves less time and space for non-work-related activities. So it meshes poorly with hedonism. But happiness can certainly come from fitting in with a role and excelling at something.

I wonder what would be Norway economically today without it’s oil. More like Iceland may be.

Iceland is a tough comparison due to a disproportionately large financial sector relative to population. Perhaps Sweden or Denmark would be closer?

I’ve never been to Scandinavia. All this talk makes me want to visit.

I deliberately didn’t compare to Sweden and Denmark because historically they are more technologically advanced they have achieved similar quality of living without oil (no offense to Norway). Norway on the other hand was a country of farmers and fishermen. Not much technological or industrial progress before the oil boom. Which is why I compared it to Iceland.

Life expectancy from the World Bank, 2016:

Norway: 82.51

Italy: 82.54

I doubt the difference is much from longer Italian lunches, but the same cultural differences may well be responsible for both longer lunches and higher life expectancy.

I understand that teachers in France used to be able to order a pitcher of wine at the cafeteria as well.

You remind me of a business trip to Italy some 25 years ago, when I visited a factory outside Florence and was shocked to see small bottles of wine served in the employee lunchroom for the mid-day meal. I don't know if this practice is still common in Italy or other parts of Europe, but the thing that amazed me was that the plant was industrial, and most of the employees left the lunchroom and went back to operating moving machinery.

It used to be much more commonplace in the US to have alcohol at business lunches than it now is. But, even at that time, the company I was working for at the time had very strict rules prohibiting alcohol in an industrial setting--and, indeed, on company property more broadly.

The cafeteria of the place where I went to grad school in Paris still serves wine. I also know of at least one research institution in the US that serves wine at the cafeteria.

Why is it disappointing? Didn't you pack it yourself? Norwegians make the matpakke they want to eat. (Source: Am Norwegian.)

Lets start with variety-pricing that EU gets and get it into NOR food stores, then we will talk rest.

Grabbing a dish of leftovers from the fridge that needs to be re-heated and then cleaning the dish seems like it will rob 10-20% of the limited time.

Would colleagues be offended in any way if your dish was particularly aromatic once reheated?

No. Norwegian love Indian food, for example, and there are several popular Scandinavian foods that are a bit smelly.

Most people don't bring leftovers, though. They typically pack open sandwiches that they make themselves.

A lot of companies have kitchen areas that they keep stocked. People typically make sandwiches (open, again!) and salads. I've never seen anyone hear anything in a microwave.

At least the office I work in, nobody would care if you took an hour for lunch as long as you're getting your work done. And nobody is watching to see if you're putting in more or less than your 37.5 hours/week unless they think you're not doing your share of the work.

The quotes by Ronald Sagatun read like self-deprecating satire. It seems that the BBC are either clueless or in on it. In any case this should not be taken too literally.

High school Norwegian here, I try to bring "matpakke" every day to school, and often I don't have the time - though really I just don't take the time - or ingredients to put together a very good meal, but of course, it'd be much better to have a great lunch!

- "... it should be a disappointment." No ... it shouldn't.

- "First, the base must consist of boring brown bread; custom dictates that only the highly processed supermarket kind will do," What? I'm shocked, while it's true that it's very common to use supermarket bread, it's an absolutely ridiculous statement to say that it must do so... I mean, why?

- "It’s also taboo to add salad or slices of delectable cured meat," Nope.

- etc.

Absolutely agree the article contains some bullshit.

It's particularly ridiculous to talk about "highly processed supermarket kind" in a BBC article. I'm Norwegian. I live in the UK. Hardly a week goes by when I don't miss Norwegian supermarket bread - to get bread of that quality in the UK you mostly need to take time to go to a proper baker, and finding decent bakers (no, to anyone from the UK, Greggs is not a baker by any reasonable standard) in the UK is hard many places.

It's common to use supermarket bread in Norway because supermarket bread in Norway is nowhere like the "highly processed supermarket kind" you can typically expect in the UK.

And, frankly, what is generally a disappointment to me is when I for whatever reason doesn't have any alternative but the ubiquitous pre-made sandwich packs from UK supermarkets, that people here seems to accept as decent sandwiches. The bread is usually bland and awful, and they manage to make all kinds of combinations of nice ingredients into a stereotype of why British cuisine has a poor reputation.

I can think of less than 5 people I've known in my office over the past 10 years who have brought food from home. Those that have did so due to specific diets or dietary requirements, or to save money (although our lunch deduction is less than $100/month, and it's pretty hard to eat lunch more cheaply than that in Norway).

I've also never seen anyone open a matpakke on public transport here in Norway.

In fact in Norwegian companies over a certain size (forget the number of employees), it is a legal requirement for there to be a cafeteria provided by the employer.

Hem, I't common in any country of the world, perhaps with different names, different food, different packing but the same principles.

In Italy is called "schiscetta" (read in English Skishetta), in Japan is called "bento" etc...

In few countries however such kind of "productivity" is considered a kind of (self) slavery and it's not really accepted. For instance in Swiss it not common at all eat in your workplace no matter the provenance of food because we do not live for work but the contrary. In French is common only for low-paid labors, mostly young at career start etc.

Have seen the different idea of productivity in few countries and their relevant economic level I think there is no real correlation...

>In few countries however such kind of "productivity" is considered a kind of (self) slavery and it's not really accepted. For instance in Swiss it not common at all eat in your workplace no matter the provenance of food because we do not live for work but the contrary. In French is common only for low-paid labors, mostly young at career start etc.

This is fascinating and very interesting from a radical point of view. A while ago there was a thread on HN about if it would be bad for a workplace to have bunks and a kitchen such that employees can sleep there. To me the whole idea felt incredibly dystopian. In the end, though, some authors have observed a kind of cultural shift, in which we are no longer told what to do at work, but rather the workplace tries to align our desire to theirs, the analogy Frédéric Lordon[0] uses is that desires can be expressed as vectors, and the modern workplace, lacking the old methods to make us work (because they are culturally inappropriate, or illegal) must use such a method which seems a whole lot less pernicious at face value.

It's not only the time to make the lunch which counts as unpaid labour, it's also the time and expense to travel to work (and according to some stories on HN this can get to absurd levels) and due to the phenomena I mentioned a lot of time spent around work doing non-work activities (though this is more common if there is a "workplace culture").

[0] "Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire"

Take it with veeery long fireplace tongs but IMO any living being, not only human try to have the most he/she want at the least "cost" so we humans during our evolution we do various kind of effort with various kind of success to have more working less.

Nowadays we struggle a lot less to accomplish many tasks we need, for instance we can cut wood with machines so quickly and with very little fatigue, we can dig ground with an excavator in minutes instead of hours and hours of manual work with shovel and pickaxe etc.

Naturally for us it's still "fatigue" so we want do automate more, work less. That's natural nor positive nor negative (we may say that avoid struggling and have much free time is positive and counterarguments that we discover obesity, diabetes and many other disease due to that) but trying to bend it to have people work is a subtle form of slavery.

For instance Google classic "game-fill workplace" to me is more a way to "capture" workforce than a nice way of work...

Of course I'd like to work in my favorite field so work seems more pleasure than work but with some limits: work is work, play is play. Even if they seems to blend work have expiring dates, require a certain kind of attention and do not require other kind of attention. Play have normally no expiring dates, no guarantees etc.

Long story short my own personal "best compromise" way is being responsible adults that try to play together for our own sake. The modern idea of reject individual responsibilities and so being directed like sheep in the flock happily ignorant is not really different than ancient slavery and it certainly not a thing I like.

You shouldn’t have been downvoted. This is an interesting perspective that’s relevant to the article.

Perhaps that's due to my terrible English... However I see few "downvote trends" not against me but against certain "families of arguments", normally without zero accompany comments to explain why, counterargument etc

Perhaps it can be a nice analysis to made on whole HN comments to "track" the trend and discover why...

In Portugal is called "marmita". Despite having been laundered a bit (healthier food than restaurants) during last years, it is still mostly correlated with low-paid labour. You will hardly ever see a well paid worker taking lunch from home.

In Brazil its called that as well, but these days its more associated with fitness people and meal prepping in my mind.

Here its mostly buffet restaurants (huge restaurants many times) where you "make your plate and pay per kg", and there is always dessert and fried food.

In Lisbon I saw mostly restaurants where you pay for a "menu" (a "special plate" for the day) which made it easier for me to control my intake, easier for the smallish restaurants to prepare, etc.

(I rather liked eating a quick lunch at my last job - heated in the microwave - since I could I can leave at 16h15 instead of 17 and beat the traffic...)

There is a cultural factor too in addition to economic one. E.g. in India, packed lunches are very common and even movie stars get their, admittedly elaborate, lunches packed from home. It is getting somewhat less common for double-income-no-kids type families but still quite prevalent in general. The dabba[0] system used to deliver home-made packed-lunches from home to the office desk gained international fame.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala

Japan's bento seem way more on the crafted and enjoyable side of things though. I'm certain there's a lot of variations, but I've seen folks wax poetic about bento and ekiben (train station bentos).

I am Australian, but when I worked in the city one of the most reasonably priced and healthy options was a Japanese restaurant's bento boxes. Quick and easy but also filling. You can also get cheap and hearty meals from the china town food courts. Packing lunches makes total financiak sense but I guess I have a hard time spending my only free hour during the day time at the same place I will be at for 8 hours. A walk and some time lost amongst the hustle and bustle clears my mind.

Agreeable.

No way that in Italy is called schiscetta, I never heard it, maybe it is some dialectal word, for sure it’s not Italian. And I never ever saw everyone bringing always packed lunch at work in Italy.

It's Milan's dialect but commonly used in all north Italy and maybe in many part of the center (I'm Italian)...

Of course not everyone bring food from home, especially in big towns where "worker's launch" cost around 9/10 euros, but that's the name I always hear. And it has on many journals recently (so, not only in north Italy) due to a series of litigation between schools and parent that do not want their child to eat school-provided food coming from obscure cooperative society often at the center of many scandal for low quality food and hygiene. Few examples:

- https://www.luinonotizie.it/2018/11/07/luino-schiscetta-a-sc...

- http://www.oggiscuola.com/web/2017/01/29/la-schiscetta-class...

- https://www.tgcom24.mediaset.it/perlei/articoli/1098601/le-r...

- https://www.wired.it/lifestyle/food/2016/09/27/schiscetta-sc...

- https://d.repubblica.it/attualita/2016/09/16/news/mense_scol...

- https://www.ilmattino.it/primopiano/cronaca/schiscetta_scuol...

This last one is a Naple's journal.

This just testifies the amazing bad state of Italian journalism, it doesn’t make “schiscetta” an Italian word. I am also Italian and I never heard it before today and you can’t find it in Italian dictionaries.

Italy is a relative young union of many states that does not exactly speak Italian. How many word you know that coming from some dialect being "Italianized" and even in few dictionary BUT they are only know in few part of Italy?

Just an example:

- waste. Official italian's worlds for that are "spazzatura" or "rifiuti" however in north Italy we commonly use "rumenta" from Genoas/Ancient Republic dialect. In the center-south and south "monnezza" is the most used term.

- posacenere is the most used word for ashtray (ancient portacenere) while in the south nearly anybody use "ceneriera" that coming from spanish "cenicero".

- in Tuscany Melone is not the melon like any other region of Italy, is actually mortadella the famous salami and the melon is "popone". And that's Italian, not dialect.

- again in tuscany "mesticheria" is what the rest of Italy call drogheria (grocery store)

- edicola is the most common word for the place you go to buy newspapers, while in the south is "giornalaio" and sometimes it's used in the center and few north area. In the south edicola is a religious image often sculpted in few ancient houses corners or in church.

- the school bag is normally named "zaino" but sometimes also cartella, while in Lombardy and few part of Piedmont is often named mappetta. All of them are Italian world.

I can continue for long. Language evolve and sometime a language specked by different people from different origins changes. For instance in Swiss, in Italian cantons "fare i fari" or "lapeggiare" (flashing with car headlights) is "bilux" or "biluxare", order something instead of ordinare/fare un ordine is comandare/fare una comanda, mobile phones instead of "cellulare" are named "natel" (that's even do not sound Italian at all). Etc. The same for French in metropolitan French vs Swiss vs Quebec etc.

To really know a language you need to speak it daily with native speaker otherwise you always encounter terms you do not know and even can't find on dictionary or without apparent meaning. Think about English "being at cloud nine", translate it in Italian. It's meaningless. Italian version is "being at seventh sky" that's also meaningless for an English speaker in turn.

Two more school-related examples from Tuscany.

The Latin lapis for pencil instead of matita.

What do you erase the blackboard with? The correct Italian term is cimosa, but you'd hardly hear it outside Tuscany.

I'm also reminded of a discussion I once had with my grandma (a retired Latin teacher from Milan), when she heard someone say a word she claimed was dialect. As it turns out the word coccia comes from the Latin cochlea, which is a snail shell. Even after having taught Latin for 40 years, she didn't know the word...

Also seventh sky might not work in English, but seventh heaven works.

Oh, thanks personally I here "lapis" when I was a child by my grandparents, mostly referred to nearly finished (short) pencils, but I never hear "cimosa" always say "cancellino" or sometimes "cancelletto" instead :-)

Never hear "coccia" before you normally I used "guscio" or "conchiglia" or "valva/e" depending on the context... On Tuscany I remember from an ex girlfriend from Livorno that "vetro" (glass) is where you drink (well... a glass of ...) but also for coffee cups because tazza or tazzina (cup, small cup) is WC ceramic but, not a thing used to drink :D

It's Milanese. The problem with generalizing Italian culture is that there's roughly 20 of them in Italy, as many are unaware we're essentially 20 countries squished together hastily 150ish years ago and still working on becoming one.

That's a curious and a bit off topic phenomenon: in some countries dominant class have tried to form people to create a real country, that's Russian Tsar Peter the Great for instance that create a sort of "Intelligentsia" to create a united country and that's result in Russian October revolution (that's was led in fact by Peter's Intelligentsia not by "proletarians") in Italy we do the opposite and the country is still not really united. In Germany even if there were far less language differences and even if Germany was united "before" people coming from ex-DDR zone still act "as strangers" in the ex-"west Germany" zones.

I never really study history in that sense but decoupling parochialism and substantial differences between people's in a country may be an interesting exercise :-)

Not true for the Swiss, it is quite common for people to bring a lunch, only for the offices in central districs is it more common to go somewhere else to eat.

My experience of Swiss is really limited and "in central district" but... The first time I bring my meal I was told like a father to a child "no, here you work, there you eat, we are humans not slave nor machine" and it wasn't a "left-wing extremist"...

Yes, you won't eat at your desk, usually a few people will go to a kitchen area or meeting room and eat together. It definitely isn't the American style of eat-while-you-work.

> “That’s the Norwegian way and it’s most peculiar, because it’s not the same in Sweden or Denmark, Iceland or Finland. It’s a very Norwegian tradition”

Bullshit. Madpakke, consisting of open sandwiches on rye is still very common in Denmark, and was the bane of my childhood school years, though thankfully most office places has moved on to provide workers with a decent cantina, and more and more school children are handed money to buy their lunch.

As the article states in the beginning, these stale packed lunches are not much to look forward too.

It’s definitely not the same in Sweden; the husmanskost lunch is a nightmare for office workers having been designed to give you a big load of calories (mostly in the form of melted butter) in the middle of the day to keep you ploughing / sawing / mining all afternoon. It’s pretty difficult to find a sandwich or light lunch here as most of the dagens menus assume hot food and a side dish of salad and a slice of bread (plus obligatory coffee).

Back when I was working in Stockholm, we usually went to a certain place on Fridays to grab a greasy lunch and a pint of beer, and when everyone came back to the office, absolutely no work got done, it was glorious! :-D

I never saw anyone bring lunch to work when I worked in Copenhagen over a decade ago, but the at work cantinas were a lot more common than they were in Sweden.

Whereas in Sweden, the work cantinas were phased out in the 80's and the norm if you have an office job is that everyone leaves the office for lunch, and you go to a lunch restaurant, sit down, and eat your lunch. I really tried finding something similar to Swedish lunch restaurants in Copenhagen, but I could never find any. There's only "real" restaurants, which are too slow and upscale and expensive for lunch every day, or they're too fast-food-y or only really do take-away, that you're supposed to take back to the office and sit there and eat. Drove me nuts.

I have a bunch of Swedish friends who all came back from work trips to Norway, cursing, because the &¤#&#"&"# Norwegians would schedule meetings over lunch, and then everyone else would just pull up their /¤#&"&!"#&#" matpakke in the middle of the meeting, while my friends were stuck with nothing to eat, because they were used to taking a break, going out, sitting down, eating lunch, and then going back to the office. Instead, they had to sit and starve in meetings.

Haha, classic. Didn't pack your lunch? Your problem. We forgot to tell you to pack your lunch ("cause that's how we roll here in Norway") ? Your problem.

> I have a bunch of Swedish friends who all came back from work trips to Norway, cursing, because the &¤#&#"&"# Norwegians would schedule meetings over lunch, and then everyone else would just pull up their /¤#&"&!"#&#" matpakke in the middle of the meeting, while my friends were stuck with nothing to eat, because they were used to taking a break, going out, sitting down, eating lunch, and then going back to the office. Instead, they had to sit and starve in meetings.

That sounds extremely odd.

I'm 44 years old, and I've lived and worked in Norway for most of my professional career and have had numerous jobs, but I've never experienced anything like what you describe. On the rare locations when a long meeting or workshop extends through lunch ours, there is either a lunch break where we all go out somewhere to eat, or we get lunch delivered to to everyone in the meeting room.

The packed lunch seems to me to be almost exclusively a school thing. At workplaces, only a few people near retirement age or people with very strict dietary requirements bring their own lunches.

Let me counter your anecdata with mine: my wife works at a big Norwegian public company and she often has meetings from 10 am to 3 pm. No time to grab lunch, they have to bring their matpakke or starve!

Where I work (Cisco Norway) we would have food delivered to the meeting room, or most likely we would just take a break. But even if we have a nice cantina, some Norwegian colleagues are bringing their homemade matpakke every day! It’s not just a school thing :)

Short, but efficient days at work:) That’s probably why the GDP per capita is a lot higher than in Sweden:p

I second this. Leverpostej is gross when it's sat in a schoolbag for half a day.

I think this is one of those "ooh, look at this other culture" articles that overdoes the novelty of what it's looking at. Like "Finland does UBI" or just about anything with Japan.

Related to the last photo: try to not eat anything in front of computer at work. It creates bad habit and links computer work (stressor) with eating (rewarding stimulus) which will probably lead to obesity. Always take a break.

I lost a few kilos by eating a packed lunch at my desk instead of going out for lunch.

(With a packed lunch I decide on what to eat before I'm hungry, which tends to be way more reasonable. When I'm hungry all I want is a big burger with fries! By deciding ahead of time I avoid eating that.)

I'm from the US but visited Norway as a kid. The open face sandwich is one of my biggest memories. "But how do you store it without making a mess?" "Wax paper". "But why not just add a second piece of bread?" "We don't do that here".

I’m Portuguese and (even having worked in London and Amsterdam) find this line of thought profoundly alien.

While it is true that there is a trend towards longer lunchtimes here, packing your lunch, eating in and not taking the time to leave the office and have lunch at different places nearby (and socialize while doing so) has a bunch of negative connotations...

For me, at least, the dietary implications alone make this (and the typical British work lunch) a major put-off.

I am living in Denmark working for a famous toy company. I moved from Southern Europe to Denmark a few years ago and the thing that struck me the most was the 20 minutes lunch break (since the schedule is 7.40 hours and 20 minutes of lunch break). I feel it was too rushed and my stomach had hard times adapt to those time frames.

A tip from my blue collar days, when I also only had a 20 minute lunch: eat a decent breakfast, and pack something like an apple/granola bar that you can quickly snack on at ~2-3 pm. If i try to wolf down food that quickly I just feel ill & sluggish, but eating a smaller lunch & a mid-afternoon snack actually left me feeling better. I continue to do this, it helps avoud afternoon sluggishness.

Although I would miss the rest of break time, I'd much rather work 0.5 hr later in the day and have a brief moment of respite.

That is what I ended up doing as-well, extending my lunch break for about 15-20 minutes. But that in retrospective puts me in the situation where I am left sitting alone in the canteen due to colleagues finishing long before me.

We have a more or less similar practice in the Netherlands and Japan (bringing a homemade lunch, not necessarily bland), but I find that I really enjoy going out and trying different places to lunch.

I guess I could save a ton of money if I didn’t, but it’s worth it to me. Lunch is indeed something I look forward to.

I feel the same. Sadly it's quite hard to find a healthy lunch near my office, and this is why I'm overweight.

Your inability to find healthy lunch near your office isn't why you are overweight.

Well, given the fact that they lunch out regardless, the proximate cause is likely that all the food around is covered in fat.

Of course not, I wasn't being entirely serious, but it's certainly a contributing factor. I enjoy the social aspect of going out for lunch (and the flavour aspect, of course). It's difficult to eat out and eat something healthy, even salads are soaked in high-calory dressings.

Perhaps this Norwegian "art" of eating a bland lunch that "should be a disappointment" is someone's twisted idea of a good time. But it's not mine.

To be fair: I'm American and live in Norway and have for a bit over 5 years now. I have found lunches to be a bit different. While you can sit by yourself and read, you can also be part of a group really easily.

In language and civics classes, we were encouraged to sit down and talk to others at lunches and breaks - especially if we were working somewhere with a common lunch time. I don't find social pressure to bring what everyone else brings and others are usually a bit jealous when someone brings in something yummy. In context, the lunches are about like a peanut butter or baloney sandwich or something. Not really... bland, per se, but non-offensive. You can also pass some of the options off as healthy, which helps. In any case, you still get some of those social aspects even if you don't get the change of scenery that usually goes along with them.

Having easy access to decent food is by far the easiest way to maintain your weight. That is literally the first thing you should try to achieve if you want to lose or maintain weight. I don't even know what your point is if any at all.

Why don't you... make your own lunch?

This is not about bringing homemade lunch though. In what countries do you not bring homemade lunch?

My experience in the US is that office workers don't routinely bring lunch if there's a cafeteria or other convenient lunch places. (Some do, of course.)

In the US, I've worked at several places where I've gotten strange looks for bringing in lunch. Don't know why exactly, I can take ~15 minutes in the morning and pack something better than most lunch places serve. I would understand if I was bringing in garlicky curry or something similar that causes the break room to smell, but I normally bring in a sandwich.

I think part of this might be that it looks 'cheap'.

I have found a similar approach extremely effective for productivity. I have to admit, however, that when I worked at places like Microsoft and QSC I enjoyed lunches with my colleagues immensely because they were all so damn smart and interesting.

However...

> Another hallmark of the matpakke is the addition of small, bread-sized squares of mellomleggspapir – between-layer paper – between each slice of bread; these can be peeled off as you eat your way through the layers.

Could one of you Vikings give me a better explanation of this practice?

That paragraph makes it sound exotic but I believe it is simply the equivalent of parchment paper we have between slices of presliced cheese.

Correct, it's basically pre-cut parchment paper.

The thing to watch out for though is that the parchment paper is not suited for baking (mainly thinner and cheaper), we once baked a pizza on the matpakke type and it was a pain to get the paper off the crust.

Yes, basically it is avoid the toppings on each bread sticking to the next bread.

This is how a rye bread "sandwich" typically looks in Denmark: https://www.madling.dk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Hjemmelave...

Sandwiches in Scandinavia default to open-faced. Unlike the US, there's no second piece of bread on top, so you need something to stop them from getting smashed together.

Thank you, that was the key to my puzzlement. The article implied, to me anyway, that a single sandwich might have three or four layers. Now I see that it is actually multiple open-face sandwiches, which is awesome to me.

Very simple. It is dividers, usually made of a strong paper material, but plastic or aluminium foil works too. It must be stronger than cellophane, that won't work.

Just think about it, if you make a nice slice of bread with strawberry jam, without mellomleggspapir and it would hit right into the slice above and mix with the ham and cheese.

love the sandwiches, but "Norway is a rich country with one of the world’s highest rates of GDP per capita. This is partly due to oil reserves in the North Sea, but it’s also to do with the nation’s productivity."

hahahahahahaha "partly" - understatement of the year.

Norway without oil is like Alaska without oil.

That said, Norway has managed their endowment brilliantly and at scale, to such an amazing degree that it gives me hope for the human race.

Wow. Kind of nice to hear the US isn't the only place with a traditional hurried low-nutritional-value lunch, and that at least one other country has made the same kind of mistake we have.

But also that comments here indicate nutritionally healthy hot lunches are now a thing in Norway, same as they're now common at least in tech worker cafeterias.

May we all eventually move away from cheap processed meats and old preserved pates, to meals with fresh healthy protein and fresh healthy vegetables!

Am I missing something? This seems to be an overview of Norwegian lunch culture plus a summary of the benefits of having a routine, which the author thinks can be accomplished just by having lunch? Do they not routinely eat meals at roughly the same time where the author lives? Can confirm the art of American lunch includes sometimes bringing easy to make, cheap, boring food to work, and that most Americans eat lunch on a routine basis.

I find the matpakke thing to be agreeable, at least he way my Norwegian friends do it. Pack what you like!

In the US anyway, lunch can be expensive and time consuming if done at restaurants.

Portions can be large and that makes me sluggish. My biggest problem with it is the concept of choice - that eats up my time allotment more than the eating! And for social time I would rather talk with coffee than over mouthfuls of food.

Norwegian here. I pack a lunch like this about every other day. I enjoy eating it much more than you would think from reading this.

I find it very hard to believe you would get "stern looks from colleagues" simply because you made yourself a different sandwich... It this for real?

If I had to bring a sandwich to work, I would certainly make it with something I do enjoy eating, colleagues be damned.

Stern looks is probably exaggerated, but I unusual sandwiches or toppings are likely to draw a comment or two.

However, this is mostly in the context of being a conversation starter, though - at least in my experience.

"Roast beef, huh? Celebrate something this weekend, did you?"

I do think the Norwegian interviewed is exaggerating a bit for effect, though - several of his statement are not what I - being Norwegian - would consider normal or expected by your coworkers.

As an irrelevant aside, the town in the illustration is Ålesund. I can see my old house in the photo!

While true, its the never-ending sarcasm that permeates through these idiotic questions that gets me.

To norwegians: Why should anybody care what I packed for lunch, mind personal business and stop looking into neighbors sandwich. While at it find better topics as conversation starter.

p.s. still while at it, the sarcasm, that most norwegians call 'humor', would be much more interesting cultural feat to explore in an article or 2.

Read up on "janteloven" or Jante law and this will give you some background as to why in nordic countries standing out by doing things differently is frowned upon.

Fascinating. This attitude also permeates Appalachia, in the US. The people of which are mostly of Scottish and Germanic descent.

I live in the Netherlands, where we have the (I think) famous "doe normaal": act normal, don't stand out. Still, bringing a roast beef sandwich for lunch seems to me far from not acting normal... Oh well, vive la différence.

For several months i am taking my lunch to work for that reason - lunch break takes less time (also the food in those restaurants is so expensive and worst of all doesn't taste that good) Now I know that I am following progressive Norwegian best practices!

The horror. We get something like 29000 lunches in our lifetime, and 16000 are at work. To piss this away with boring bad sandwiches is an abomination.

A good meal is one of the major pleasures of life. A whole culture that fumbles this in so fundamental a way is a tragedy.

I think the discussion here is missing a vital point in the article: Work when your at work, then go home.

This is key to getting a better work life balance and also to make it easier for people to combine careers with kids and family.

Oh boy, I would call it an "art of 'meaningless journalism'".

There are a numerous reasons, for the bland "bag lunch" (literally "the food pack" (matpakke)) - where do i start?

- the sandwich price in the shop is 4-8 quid, make the math, cook at home

- sky high prices in the cafes, etc

- weak selection of meats /cheeses in local shops (agricultural-protectionism/limited EU import)

- high prices on meats /cheeses in local shops + 4x of the EU average (agricultural-protectionism/limited EU import)

- the poor past + jante thing

- the stubbornness of general local population - "(grand)parents always did it like that"

- strong creeping low-profile nationalism - "norwegian way", "buy norwegian", "eat norwegian, etc"

- everybody is making "foodpack" why should i stick out

- 30 mins - not enough time for anything(cafe, etc)

- sparse cafes and cantinas etc.

- most cantinas serve just this specific company or this specific office building. More often than not, you are not expected to go into the other company's cantina.

- some work places are way too far from any cafe, etc.(say you are a tree logger)

- automatic thing, don't have to think much - going out (work, hiking, skiing, whatever) - take a foodpack. You dont know when/where you next meal will be "thinking" as most of Norway is non-urban.

Army rations taste probably like 10x better than the typical bland norwegian foodpack.

But you can continue to gourge on the "Norwegian" propaganda on bbc and elsewhere.

p.s. Downvote all you want, reality hurts, huh?

A lot of the reasons you specify are pretty much true, it's the way you word it (and posting more than once when not responding to anyone) that is hurting your comment the most.

Here goes Norwegian propaganda:

"BBC noticed us and our "SPECIAL NORWEGIAN WAY" of making sandwiches, oh my!"

https://www.nettavisen.no/livsstil/mads-og-ronald-lagde-vide...

p.s.And this sort of food is definitely not healthy.

p.p.s. "hot food" - It is not a big thing, until you consider the notion that sandwiches of any kind are one step away from cancer/ gastric ulcer inducing ramen packs and 'snickers' snack. Then you kinda start thinking how good are any sandwiches for you during the lunch time. Same goes for kids. This is why warm soup is anyday better than "fast-track unbalanced(no veggies) sandwich"(R) as described here/in the article.

Of course 'hot food' type makes a difference - balanced potatos, salad, meat/fish combo or a soup is 100 light years away from say 'hot pockets' fake food.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com