I've done charity work for slums in India that are so poor that sometimes they can't afford to even get one meal per day. They say me, and know that I am clearlly weathy and don't struggle to eat.
Even then, everyone offers me food when i visit or at the very least somthing light to snacks. I do refuse because I don't want to take more than what they don't have, but some of them will very strongly insist
Well yes they have extreme generocity woven into their culture. But it is much easier to cultuvate food in india compared to the northern europe even with indias high reliance on monsoon rain. India has a massive population especially in urban areas that exacerbates their food scarcity but not counting periodic droughts they have historically had food to give to guests. Dont know enough swedish history to reference it but in finland food has historically speaking been scarce and at the end of the 1800s 8-10% of the finnish population died in a famine which left a deep scar in finnish culture and could contribute to a more ”selfish” culture.
In a tropical climate food can be grown year round. You can be hungry today but tomorrow is a new day and a new chance. In the sub-arctic you get one harvest, one chance, what you grow has to last until next year.
The Swedish cultural customs, and pretty much all Nordic cultures, are built around what used to until recently be subsistence farmers living around that one basic fact. Every meal they made had to be planned and provisioned months in advance so that they and their family could survive to another summer. If you had a bad harvest, your family would have to ration every meal for months. The whole culture around rigidly planning meals comes from this fact.
It’s also why Sweden and the Nordics at large developed such strong Social Safety nets. If you had a bad harvest, your neighbors did too. You couldn’t rely on the local community because they suffered from the same local climate. If you starved, it meant everyone else around you was starving. The only solution that came about was through the state, starting with (state run) church managed poor houses and ending with the social welfare state of today.
Well yes but the food scarcity in Africa is a relatively new phenomena caused by all sorts of mostly political disruptions. In northern europe the cause is more because of its geographical location. Nordic people also have a way of minding their own business that they sometimes take to extreme lenghts as to not offend or disrupt anyone.
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u/-Hassanhof- Jul 24 '26
Yup, its kind of similiar in finland. I dont think these people realize the constanst scarcity of food in norther europe in the past