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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

> “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.

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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

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 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.

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