
The Norwegian art of the packed lunch - bauta-steen
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190103-the-norwegian-art-of-the-packed-lunch
======
mort96
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...](https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=no&tl=en&text=matpakke))

~~~
funtastique
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?

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

~~~
alistairSH
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).

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
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.

~~~
alistairSH
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.

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xte
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...

~~~
masklinn
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).

~~~
ehnto
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.

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wodenokoto
> “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.

~~~
henrikschroder
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.

~~~
Oreb
> 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.

~~~
tbassetto
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 :)

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imhoguy
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.

~~~
jakobegger
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.)

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dekhn
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".

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rcarmo
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.

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gazarullz
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.

~~~
zrobotics
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.

~~~
gazarullz
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.

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Aeolun
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.

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

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

~~~
Tharkun
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.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
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.

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tomcam
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?

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

~~~
adamcik
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.

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asah
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.

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crazygringo
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!

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ForrestN
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.

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uptime
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.

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elgfare
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.

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gonzus
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.

~~~
ingenieros
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.

~~~
gonzus
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_.

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MichaelMoser123
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!

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JoeAltmaier
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.

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tarjei
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.

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funtastique
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?

~~~
tallanvor
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.

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funtastique
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...](https://www.nettavisen.no/livsstil/mads-og-ronald-lagde-video-om-
matpakke-plutselig-ringte-bbc/3423576335.html)

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.

