Do Swedish People Feed Their Guests - The New York Times

08/06/22, 06:08 Do Swedish People Feed Their Guests?
- The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/world/europe/sweden-feeding-
guests-dinner.html
Do Swedish People Feed Their Guests?

After a Reddit post brought an unusual Swedish dining custom to light, Nordic people are
trying to explain why they won’t share the pickled herring.
By Amanda Holpuch
June 2, 2022
A Swedish child sits at a dinner table while his friend and the friend’s parents dine on
meatballs, mashed potatoes and lingonberry sauce. The delicious aroma wafts below the
child’s nose, but there is no plate for him.
This setting, while quite normal in Sweden and other Nordic countries, has horrified
people around the world, shocked to learn that some Swedish families do not invite their
children’s visiting friends to eat with them at mealtime.
Instead, when it’s time to eat, a child might go home, stay in the friend’s room and play or
sit at the table with the family and not eat.
The custom was the subject of much conversation (and a little concern) online after a
recent Reddit post circulated widely. The post asked “what is the weirdest thing you had
to do at someone else’s house because of their culture/religion?” and in one of the more
popular replies, someone described going to their Swedish friend’s house and being told
to wait in a room while the family ate. “I wish my abuela were still around,” Lynda Carter,
the actress who played Wonder Woman, said on Twitter. “She’d be trying to airlift
tamales to Sweden.”
The people of Sweden, a country UNICEF ranked as the most family friendly in 2019,
were left to explain why there did not seem to be enough pickled herring to go around.
Hakan Jonsson, a food studies professor at Lund University in Sweden, said sharing food
is the foundation of culture, so he understands why other people might see this custom as
a “hostile” act. A few years ago, he was part of a program to discuss Swedish cultural
customs with immigrants and this practice was “regularly mentioned” as being very
strange.
Professor Jonsson said he had not studied the custom, and it was not one his family
practiced, but he guessed it could be traced to several parts of Swedish identity.
Before advances were made in food storage, he said, Swedish people would have three to
four months to harvest a year’s worth of food in the cold climate, so spontaneous dinners
have never been a part of the culture. He said Swedish people also want to respect the
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08/06/22, 06:08 Do Swedish People Feed Their Guests? - The New York Times
independence of the family and offering another person’s child a meal could be seen as a
critique of the other person’s ability to support a family.
“There has been a very strong urge of independence, to not rely on others’ good will for
having a good and independent life,” Professor Jonsson said. “It was a very strong driver
toward the welfare state, to create this impersonal assistance, where you did not have to
rely on any other person.”
Zara Larsson, a Swedish pop star, said the custom was “peak Swedish culture,” though
her family and many others she knew did not practice it.
Ms. Larsson said on Twitter that at the homes of people who did practice it, she would
either be told to go home at mealtime or be left in the friend’s room, something she said
was “kinda fun because that gave me time to snoop around.”
The custom is not exclusive to Sweden, though the country is incurring the bulk of the
internet’s wrath. People in Finland, the Netherlands and other parts of Northern Europe
said online that the practice was familiar.
Lotte Holm, a sociology professor at the University of Copenhagen who studies how
people eat in Nordic countries, said it was common for children to not eat meals at their
friends’ houses when she was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s in Denmark.
When she was raising her children, she would allow their friends to stay for a meal, but
asked them to call their parents to make sure it was OK.
“It can seem a bit stingy and very unfriendly to exclude someone if you’re eating,” she
said, “but I think it is about respect for the family unit.”
Professor Holm said she had been surprised by American students who described to her
how they could open the refrigerator at their friends’ houses and eat whatever they
wanted.
Sofi Tegsveden Deveaux, director of LYS förlag, a publishing house in Stockholm that
focuses on works related to the process of moving to Sweden, said in an email that it was
not considered impolite to decline an offer in Sweden. So, children sometimes decide they
don’t want to eat with their friend’s family but are still invited to the table while the
family nibbles at fish fingers with rice.
When Ms. Deveaux was a child in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she said, she spent
many afternoons after school at her friends’ houses and dinner was a natural moment to
end playtime. As a mother now, she said she had never asked her children’s friends to
wait while they have dinner, but she has asked them to leave when it’s dinnertime.
08/06/22, 06:08 Do Swedish People Feed Their Guests? - The New York Times
“In some cultures, food is very important,” Ms. Deveaux said. “In Swedish culture, it’s
very important to respect others’ privacy and their rights to take their own decisions and
do things the way they prefer.”

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