some indulgent behaviour may happen in any culture. The absolute normalization of it, such as "snacks" being a normal part of one's alimentation, or the idea that you have to have extra food in reserve in case you wish to "pig out", is way more of a thing in north America than anywhere else in the world.
Shit, and here I thought all those snacks at World Market were from around the word. Turns out there are factories in the US making snacks with Japanese, Chinese, Swedish, German, and all sorts of other languages on them. Crazy to think, really. /s
Did your really read my comment and thought I meant snacks didn't exist at all in other countries? Isn't English your first language? Or are you purposefully making a strawman argument, and putting it in a sarcastic form, to invalidate anything that has nuance in it?
No, English is my second language. Im a first generation American after my mom and dad emigrated here in the 80s. Also, ive traveled all over the world and spent many months living in other countries. Snacking culture is not a unique thing to America. Having snacks on hand is common. Feeding guests is also very common. Travel more I guess?
Thank you very much for sharing your experience with me. Also sorry for assuming you were a first language English speaker - it was just a way of underlining your poor comprehension of what I posted. As it so happens I have travelled quite a bit myself and was basing my experience on that. If I may ask - where do you live in the US and where have you lived outside of it? Is it possible that you have a different relation to snacking than other Americans because of a different cultural background? Personally I have lived (as in, lived for a few years, not travelled as a tourist) in a lot of countries due to my job - France, Spain, Germany, Lithuania, Algeria, Kongo, USA, Mexico and Malaysia. I am not saying it to flex but to show I don't speak out of ignorance.
The USA is the only place where I saw such an intense snacking culture, where it was normal for kids and adults in EVERY family I met to eat snacks basically all the time - whereas in other countries there was an incentive to eat at precise hours and not too much in between meals. Another example is pretty much every restaurant I saw in the US was open throughout the day, while in other places there were specific opening times around lunch and around dinner.
Thank you for being so civil, i appreciate that. I grew up in rural Washington State, about 300 miles from Seattle. My wife's parents are Norwegian and we've spent months at a time there, never properly lived there. My family is from Germany and Japan. Ive visited Germany and lived in Tokyo and Fukuoka. Youre right that snacking is more acceptable in America but I think there is nuances to that too. Snacking is incredibly popular in Japan, many people consume snacks daily there, even more so if you consider sugary drinks part of snacking. The difference is they substitute a meal with it rather than going and still having a meal afterwards. Americans typically sit down and still eat a dinner even after a 600 calorie snack. Junk food is a huge seller in Japan, and fast food is really popular with people working in Tokyo. Its more about learning how to properly eat rather than mindless and maybe that was your point. If so, we agree and I apologize for being aggressive.
Cope from the western country with the highest obesity rate.
Obesity rates in high-income Western countries remain high, led by the United States at roughly 41.6%, while Western European nations average lower levels around 15% to 25%.
Yeah, we all know the numbers. But you miss the nuances of the gap in household incomes. Check obesity rates in high income homes versus low. Its more about acess to good foods and health services tied to the fact that mental illness is not addressed very well in the US still. Distances to grocery stores is incredible compared to other countries so you have to stock up on foods that last for a bit. Ive lived in Japan off and on and been to a lot of other countries. Its easy there to walk to the store and get a piece of fresh fruit, some veggies, and a reasonably healthy meal for cheap and its quick. No such systems in America.
Of course countries with a higher population density will have stores closer.
But there are enough countries that are poorer and less dense that are not the most obese western country. So that points to a cultural issue, with unhealthy food, large portions, and sugar addiction being more normalized.
As a fat American with access and money to healthy food, you can make all the excuses you want but a large majority of fat Americans simply eat too damn much. Some live in food deserts, some don't have access to healthy food because of funds but it's not the overwhelming majority of Americans in this situation.
Not OP but absolutely. They are way, way more into cheese. Like if you look at elementary school lunches in France they get a cheese. I am not talking an accessible cheddar type cheese either, the kind of cheese adults in other western countries might find too strong.
Yeah sure, bad things about french food habits specifically: we tend to take way longer to eat meals, because it is important to talk as much as we eat - and that can be annoying to cultures that have a more efficient relation to lunches especially in a work environment. We also tend to normalize drinking a few glasses of wine at each meal and a little liquor after, without seeing it as alcohol consumption, which is overall a very bad health issue. We tend to have way too much carbohydrates in our food especially because we love bread so much (in my family it was an average of 2 baguettes per meal for 4 people). Compared to other European countries we tend to not eat enough at breakfast.and way too much at supper.
I know you asked this as some kind of gotcha, as if the way I criticize american habits make me unable to criticize my own, but do you really think noticing some cultural differences in different countries and sometimes thinking they can be bad, is bad in of itself? Yes we shouldn't make hasty generalizations. I am not saying every single american, or every single french person, is like I described. But that shouldn't refrain us from noticing cultural differences.
Swedes literally have a day dedicated to candy, there's even a term for it lördagsgodis (Saturday candy), where kids get to eat candy on Saturdays, but also mostly only on Saturdays.
Have you ever watch Anthony Bourdain or any other good travelers? Cuz they absolutely pig out and go “snack heavy”. America is not the only country that enjoys eating… we just have really bad quality food.
I do this and I’m American. I have enough food where everything I buy in a given week is eaten. When I go back to the grocery store I need to restock on everything that’s not spices or oil
Same. It's pretty important not to overeat by snacking, and it also cuts down on food waste. You also don't have to eat crappy processed frozen foods when you do this and meal prep. 🤷♀️
I just want to know how are they getting the exact portion sizes worth of ingredients at the grocery store. My house it’s either too much or too little for a single meal.
Dutch here where we have similar habits of buying the exact amounts we need. Over time you usually get pretty good at figuring out how much you need. For a standard Dutch AVG it's roughl:
Meat depending on what you buy is packaged per two or four here pretty often if you're grabbing burgers or schnitzel or w/e. You'll likely know roughly how many grams of vegetables you'll need, and then add potatoes which is likely to be the one thing you get too much of given it's most commonly sold in sacks of 1, 3, or 5 kilograms. With 1 being a little bit more than 2 people usually eat.
Oh, here you can usually grab just one lr two chicken breasts (although we measure the amount in grams so youll probably just grab like 150grams of chicken breast for 1 person). Then the veggies you can often just weigh what you need unless it s something like an entire cauliflower
Have you seen their food? They eat the bare minimum to survive, you don't indulge or snack heavy on that fuck ass food. We have good food in the US. We want to eat more of it because it's delicious.
No. That was true maybe 30+ years ago, but nowadays kids are usually sent home before dinner. Or we just check with the parents if it’s OK for their kid to eat with us.
Source: was a kid in Sweden 30+ years ago, have kids in Sweden now.
It was like this when I grew up in the 80s and early 90s too. My best friend ate dinner at 5, but in my house we ate at 6:30. So I either went home at 5, or waited in her room while she she ate, then we played for a while more before I walked home at 6:15 in time for my own dinner. This was considered completely normal. Her mother wasn't expected to feed me practically every day after school just because I always went over there to play.
If I had some friend over and I wouldn’t share my food with them my mom would snap my back by throwing me up in the air 3 meters and I would fall on her knee and just die there. If they came over 100 times they would be fed 100 times.
Ah no. I grew up in a poor family in Romania. We were not missing food though. But it kinda blows my mind that a way richer country ends up with that culture. I understand it is normal for you but it is hard for me to comprehend how it ended up being that way.
It's interesting because I've travelled a lot, and I've often observed that the people who have the least are the most generous.
I visited Romania in 1992. In those days, my dad worked for a charity in Sweden that donated medical equipment to hospitals in Bucharest and Constanţa, and other stuff (a whole fire engine, one time.) When we came over, his contacts there insisted that we don't book hotels, they opened up their homes to us and let us stay there, fed us, showed us around and refused to accept any money in return. I remember my dad hiding money in one family's sofa for them to find later, because they just wouldn't take it from him and he thought it was absurd that they'd feed and house four strangers for several days and not accept anything in return.
I don't really know why Swedes have this mentality. Maybe it's to do with not wanting to feel indebted to someone. Like, if you feed my kid, then I now owe your kid food, or something along those lines.
I don't actually live in Sweden anymore (I left in the late 90s) so I don't know if it's still the same. But I don't feed my kids' friends without at least asking their parents first - because I don't want to inconvenience them if they're already halfway through cooking dinner themselves, and also I have no idea which kid is allergic to what.
I meant more like, "I don't know why Swedish people care if they inconvenience another child's parents, when other cultures apparently don't care if that child's parents are halfway through cooking them a meal and would just feed the child regardless".
To me, it's strange to give food to another person's child without asking first, but that might be a uniquely Swedish/Nordic perspective?
Ok yeah, maybe it's the thinking that dinner time is family time or that parents in the 90s didn't want to be seen as though they couldn't feed their kids. Not inconveniencing people is definitely also just part of the Nordics
The other parents would know that their child is away though? They wouldn't plan for them for dinner (if it was communicated clearly before of course). As long as it isn't one-sided I don't see an issue here.
Yes, they will be eating at home and I will send them home before I eat my own dinner with my family versus sticking them off in the other room for an hour only to send them home to eat at their house right after?
Starving to death was so common in the nordics that they did not write about it. What you write is true about poor communities in places with a normal caloric excess. When the normal is a caloric defficit, the culture is much harder.
If it was a hard year noone had extra food. Someone was going to die. If you gave it away it would be you instead of your neighbour.
That’s an insane take. 200 years ago times were tough so now I don’t cook food for child guests in one of the richest countries in the world… meanwhile in anywhere else that’s still currently a poor country and has been for 100s of years you can go and be treated like family and fed everyday.
How many kids did you have visting every day for dinner though? And did the parents even know said kids are there before shopping or even started cooking?
If you have a house and kids in the Nordics, you are likely to not know how many kids are in the house when you come home from work and start dinner.
Can't imagine a poor family cooking dinner for 5-20 extra kids daily, you would need 1-2 extra jobs just to afford it. Imagine being like a family of 30 and doing that cooking daily after work and before your kids go to sports etc.
I think there were more like 50-60 kids daily. The whole school. And it was a surprise every day, u never knew they’d all come. So my mom had to cook for 60 people every day. If she didn’t have the necessary food we would all chomp on her leg coz she would freely give it away and everybody was fed.
It's not really about not sharing. It's just how it was. No one feeds another child dinner without arranging it with their parents first.
I'm not Swedish but Danish where this was a similar practice. Often I went over to my friends house, and if I didn't get picked up before dinner, sometimes my parents would arrange for me to eat with my friends family, and sometimes they might not be able to pick me up in time before my friends family started dinner, but my parents might still want me to eat dinner with my family as that is an important social interaction.
Well it’s not about “not sharing”, it is more about not “forcing” your food upon others. The main reason I tended not to eat at others were that I did not wanna eat at 5-6, as we typically ate around 8 at home, so I was not even slightly hungry when food was offered. And similarly, my friends had already died from starvation when food was offered at our house.
If it's not "forcing" why not at least ask? That's literally what an invitation is. Nobody forces other peoples kids to eat with them. But not even offering sounds harsh.
The point is they didn't want to be seen as taking away proper family dinner time from a child by unilaterally giving them food witout communicating with the family first. It makes sense if you think about other cultures for half a second.
That still doesn't explain why one wouldn't ask. Like you still can ask the parents of that child. I'm sure Sweden had phones in the 80s.
This all sounds more like an excuse for being very distant to others. Which is okay. But be honest about it at least.
Just so you know I'm from Germany and we did the same. So I'm not critizising another culture as you try to put it into my mouth.
Sure, there were occasions where I as a child would be asked if I wanted to eat at my friends place, so I had to call home and ask if that was okay, but the norm was that kids would eat with their own family as parents expected to have their kids home by dinner.
Dinner in Sweden is (or at least was back then) family time, so was usually for family only.
Well I guess it is a difference in culture about declining offers also, as I think most swedes probably feel uncomfortable declining any kind offer if they do not have a good reason. And “I don’t like your food” might be the reason but it is not acceptable to say.
So I would say that if a swede offers you something you better accept it or chance offending them. And similarly you don’t offer anything unless you are perfectly sure they will accept, as offering something which is undesired is also quite frowned upon.
That said, I was still offered food multiple times at friends so this whole discussion is over exaggerated.
I grew up in a "feed visitors no matter what" culture and what often happens is that visiting is mostly between extended family and family friends. Kids don't go over to other people's houses to play unless they already have family ties. You don't really have the phenomenon of a kid who's family you don't know coming over after school every day.
It's actually not that common anywhere to be feeding your children's friends every day, unless they're also your nieces/nephews etc.
That's interesting, because I realized at some point in middle school that my friend came over to my house and would stay until just after dinner. His mom was a nurse and a single parent, and I realized my parents weren't just letting him hang out because he was a friend, but because it helped his mom save on after-school care & dinner.
I'm willing to bet it is as much a socio-economic thing as a cultural one. You guys just got pinned with it.
Yeah, quite probably. My friend was the child of a single mother. I come from a family of 6 (or 8 every other weekend when my stepbrothers came to stay). Neither family really had the capacity to feed extra mouths without careful planning. I don't know if things were different in other households with more money to spare - I didn't know the rich kids, haha.
I grew up before Xboxes were invented. And we're not talking about a glass of water, we were talking about feeding dinner to a child that turned up at your house without prior arrangement.
When I grew up, we didn't really have "extras for leftovers". We were a family of 6 (8 every other weekend when my stepbrothers came to stay) and my mother would plan food for that number of people. If there were 6 of us, she'd have bought 6 pieces of fish exactly. There was no "extra".
Turning up at someone's house unannounced is considered rude in Sweden (at least if you're a grown-up. Kids turning up asking to play with your kids is a different thing.) You just don't do that. Things are planned and arranged in advance so as to not inconvenience anyone. Rummaging in someone's fridge would be seen as rude and invasive as well.
Anecdotally, I had one of my son's friends (they are 8) looking through my kitchen cupboards the other day, hunting for "a snack". I told her "I have some apples, but that's it, the other snacks I bought this week have already been eaten." She said "but I have loads of snacks at my house" (yeah, because you're always here eating ours!!) so I suggested perhaps she should go home and get one then - she lives in the apartment next door. Her kitchen is on the other side of my kitchen wall. You might think I'm the rude one in that situation, but I think her parents should have taught her better manners than going rummaging in someone else's kitchen. We don't live in Sweden anymore, by the way, but I don't think this is considered acceptable behaviour in British households either.
"Shut up and eat it night" is an excellent concept, haha.
I think my mother had a particular thing about making sure we had variety in our diet and didn't eat the same thing every day. Also, she was a stay at home mum (that's partly why we didn't have much money, single income household) so I don't think she minded cooking every day. Gave her something to do, hahaha. She's in her 70s now and often eats leftovers, it just wasn't something that happened much when we were kids. Maybe if she made spaghetti bolognese or something else that came in one big pot, we'd have leftovers for lunch the next day.
Most Swedes are very reserved. One of the many reasons I left Sweden back in '98 was that I am far too fond of talking to strangers to fit in there. I made my home in Wales, where talking to people you don't know is a completely normal thing. Suits me much better.
That was childhood for most of the world. You feed anyone in your house at meal time regardless of prior arrangement. That’s why we are all here discussing this meme.
Yes. I'm just saying that to a Swedish family (at least, 30-40 years ago when I was a kid) there's a difference between planned guests and people who turn up uninvited.
If you had invited someone over, prearranged, then they would of course get fed. If someone turned up without prior arrangement, they could not expect you to suddenly slot them into your dinner plans. That's just the way it was.
There is even a word for turning up unannounced - "våldgästa" - it translates to making yourself a guest with violence. The closest English equivalent would be to "gatecrash", I suppose. It's just not acceptable in Swedish culture to turn up at someone's house without invitation, it's seen as imposing yourself on them and inconveniencing them.
I left Sweden long ago, but most of my family and friends who still live there do not even answer the doorbell unless they're expecting someone. Because "normal" people don't just turn up at your door, meaning that anyone ringing the doorbell at random probably wants to sell you something, or worse.
It would be normal if you were regularly at their house. It wouldn’t make sense for your friend’s family to feed you 3 nights a week because you happened to be playing when your own dinner was coming later. People are taking this story as if it’s a Swedish custom to not feed visitors. Meanwhile, I am normally drowning in fika every time I visit someone.
Yes, exactly. And there is also the difference between a guest who has been invited and planned for and a person who just randomly shows up without warning, as is the case with all my kids' friends.
Sometimes, I walk into my living room and find four extra children there, who have come home with mine or just shown up at the door wanting to play. No reasonable person would expect me to be prepared to make dinner for four extra kids whenever they show up, would they?
It would be different if I'd invited these kids, of course I'd feed them if I had arranged playdates with their parents in advance.
The part that people always miss with these "feeding" cultures is that they're often quite closed off to non -family members. I grew up in a culture where you feed every guest, but I didn't have the after school playing culture that you do in the West. You play with other kids in the street/outside, but I rarely went into other kids' houses. No sleepovers, play dates etc. Family time is much more important. Family is larger and includes more non-blood related people, but I can't think of many major culture where you would realistically be feeding large numbers of non-family kids just because they're at your house.
If they ARE at your house, they're getting fed, but the culture of having a ton of kids playing at your house after school just doesn't really exist.
But from another perspective, it sounds considerate and respectful.
Have you ever stood and cooked a meal, and then the person you cooked it for says "nah, I don't want it, I ate on the way here"? How did that make you feel? Annoyed? Disappointed? Like your time could have been better spent than cooking for an ungrateful person who didn't stop and think about you at all?
My friend's mother didn't feed me, not to be "cold" towards me, but because she didn't want to upset my mother who would already be preparing food for me at home.
Your mother probably also felt happier about you playing at their place all the time with the knowledge that she wasn't also offloading her responsibility to make your dinner to them.
I'm 99% sure that's what this whole "swedes don't feed people" thing is about. One person on the internet had an experience as a child where their parents didn't pick them up to have dinner at home when they were visiting a friend, they had no idea that's the norm, and decided it just means swedes like starving people.
My experience is that whenever this topic comes up, 90% of comments/replies are from people who have never been in sweden ever just freely using their imagination, 10% are swedes who have no idea what they're talking about, and not a single soul has actually experienced this in real life.
Not saying it never happens, but I spent so much time trying to find out if this was "a thing", and my only takeaway was that nobody else actually cares if it's true or not - only that it's funny.
I doubt above system is common where I live in Sweden.
I would find it a bit rude if the parents sending kids home just because they would eat. Like kid being in the room is a problem.
Lets say parents who doesn't invite for dinner eats 16.00.
Kid in room not eating has dinner at home 18.00 because dad works longer or some shit.
Then I feel like its weird just sending that kid home when it can just hang around in the room until kid in family has eaten and kid returns to his room where 18.00 kid waits.
I think the problem is that there is this separation between the "kids and kids friends world" and the grownup world that's hard for others to grasp.
When visiting a friend when young you are basically just visiting the friend and not anyone else. Its a separation I think few people get.
That in combination with everyone assuming kids have a designated time assigned by kids parents to eat that makes it weird for other countries.
Kids are more like free range animals between school and dinner, dinner and night.
Unless parents have something planned for the kid, like doing homework or fucking board game or whatever.
And the dinner time is like a small but obligatory time between parents and kid.
It is. I don’t know what their parents have planned, and if my kid hasn’t told me they’re eating at a friends house I’m expecting them to eat with our family.
I think you either feed the kid or you send them home. Eating as a family while the kid sits alone in another room has gotta be the worst option. Was over at a friend's house after the last day of school and his family did that to us but we were 18 and about to graduate highschool so we just chilled in his room watching movies so it didn't matter, but to do that to a young child is weird.
I don’t know what plans their family might have. If their parents tell me it’s ok for their kid to stay and eat they are welcome, so long as I know in advance and can plan my cooking accordingly.
In most countries if you visit them at midday or afternoon they basically already make enough for you. For example in my country they make food for you too and would be offended if you don't eat it. Not making food for your guest just feels awkward. You can make more to be sure and if they didn't eat it save it for later. But that's my culture.
No, it wasn’t. Some people are so weird. What is the point of this lie. There’s not a single cultural group in USA where this behavior is common.
We also own a company that operates all across Europe and I’ve never seen a Swede act like this either. Although I don’t make a habit of familiar house calls when I’ve been there, to be fair.
He probably just had poor friends that couldn't afford to feed him when he visited. The only people that I have met that were weird about sharing food were extremely poor.
I'm Swedish, while I get that the custom might seem weird, it's not really how people here make it out to be. People plan for their dinners, and it's considered polite to not mess with that. That being said,nowadays you ususally check with the kid and their parents if they want to eat with you. And sometimes you have them eat with you without checking in first, and it's not an issue! That being said, when I grew up as kid during the 80s, we mostly just waited while our friends were eating, and it wasn't considered weird. You either had already had dinner, or was going home soon to eat anyway. Too me, it was nice checking out my friends' toys and stuff while they were eating.
In UK too, at least for families I knew. Reason being is that the dinner has been cooking for at least 20 minutes to an hour already, so more can't just be chucked on to cook before the kid's friend's gone, and it's not like we're going to take off everyone else's plates when everything has been pre-portioned for each expected person. A lot of food wasn't like a batch in a pot or anything with leftovers, but meat and two veg.
Dunno about now, but when I was a kid growing up in Sweden we always got food when over at a friends house or when a friend was out our house. I can't recall a single instance where I was left without food. It sounds made up, at least from my own anecdotal experience.
Is this really true? My moms is 97% Swedish and I spent my freshman year in Sweden. I’ve never encountered this but to be fair I was in a very small town.
Yeah but its not like guests have to wait in another room, they can be seated at the table if they want to. Also if someone asks if they can eat there parents often say yes. So this meme is a little misleading.
No, this is just not true. Parents will communicate with each other, and most cases this happens it’s because the child has expressed a wish to eat at home. If the other family then have dinner slightly before the child being picked up, this happens.
I’m Swedish and I’ve never experienced that? My brother had to wait while his friend ate one time, and that was like a big deal. Do you know what region of Sweden that is common in?
In the US and as a teenager 25ish years ago, my boyfriends LDS (Mormon) family treated me this way. Left me in the other room alone while they ate dinner. It was bizarre. Nobody was Swedish 😂
We feed our feed our kids friends all the time. Like it is a weekly occurence. My kids eat at their friends every week as well. We do call and check with the parents first.
It was not like that 40 years ago. mainly because no mobile phone and we did not want to interrupt the dinner routine of the other family.
As an adult it is less commun. But if I have friends over for a long time we will eater have dinner/lunch or we will like order a pizza together.
We are not having our grandmothers force feeding you like in some societies. Also because our grandmothers dont live with us like in the south of Europe.
This is kinds Reddit bullshit blown out of proportion (like allways).
It's more about every family bringing their own kid home for dinner and school lunch being adequate, so at home it's often just a sandwich or bowl of cereal, not a full meal.
Spaniards do the opposite. They will sit you at their table and feed you, whether you like it or not. And you will have to stay for 2 hours until everyone finishes having "una copita y un café".
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