7 ms·

Former Norway resident here, 3yrs. Their lunch traditions are definitely basic, as they were not a wealthy country for hundreds of years before striking oil in

• colanderman 7y ago
  I like bread, and have visited many countries. The loaf I remember most is from Norway. Crusty outside, chewy inside, overall delicious.
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  The milk quality in the US is fine, it's just different. Each carton has been pasteurized differently, then homogenized, fortified, and contains milk from thousands of cows. There are lots of other differences that affect flavor, mouthfeel, aroma. We may also use different cows, environment, etc.
  • Retric 7y ago
    US Milk also tends to be rather old by the time it reaches consumers, with ~2 weeks being surprisingly common. That has several implications which alter it’s taste. Of course this varies a lot based on the store and product.
    • RandallBrown 7y ago
      Milk in the US is only a couple days old by the time it's in the grocery store. Unless most people in Europe are buying direct from the dairies, I can't imagine it's appreciably faster. Even then, I grew up having milk delivered direct from the dairy and definitely don't notice any difference between what I grew up with and what I typically buy in the grocery store. I would guess most of the flavor difference comes from pasteurization differences, since Ultra High Temperature pasteurization appears to be the norm over there.
      • laut 7y ago
        In Denmark you can get milk at the grocery store that was inside the cow less than 24 hours ago. Ultra High Temperature pasteurization is not really normal in Denmark, but I think it is in Germany.
        • collyw 7y ago
          Its unusual for milk not to be UHT here in Spain. I wonder if it's due to Spain being a warmer country and the milk spoiling more quickly.
          • ahbyb 7y ago
            Yes, that's the reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_processing#Worldwide_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_process...
            • collyw 7y ago
              They have fridges these days....
        • Aenyn 7y ago
          I miss UHT and homogenized milk since I moved to Denmark :( I loved being able to buy a six pack of milk bottles back in France and keep it in a closet for weeks, now I can barely drink a carton of milk before it goes bad.
          • mcv 7y ago
            While most milk in Netherland is pateurised and therefore keeps only a few days, there's also sterilised milks which keeps for months. Doesn't taste as good, though.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • Retric 7y ago
    • peterwwillis 7y ago
      About two days old, after being stored at 39 degrees while constantly circulated. There's no indication that mass-produced milk in Europe is any "fresher", and if it's UHT milk, just forget freshness.
      • Retric 7y ago
        Milk can legally be up to 48 hours old before it it’s picked up from the farm. With ever other day pickups being very common and multiple milking per day some get’s close to that. It can then sit at the factory for another 72 hours before pasteurization though this uncommon. It then varies though Ultra High Temperature (UHT) gives you up to 70 days at this point. That’s the extreme which would be very unusual, but buying milk that’s ‘only’ 2 week old milk is reasonably common. All it takes is knowing how long the sell by date is after pasteurization and another ~1-2 days to get to that point and you can find how old this stuff is.
        • n4r9 7y ago
          >buying milk that’s ‘only’ 2 week old milk is reasonably common Do you have a citation for this by any chance? I've had a quick Google but no luck. Been interested in average food quality differences in US and EU since the "chlorinated chicken" news in the UK.
  • _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
    the homogenisation is the problem. and it's hard to find non-homogenised milk in the US.
  • grawprog 7y ago
    American milk also has anti-biotics and bovine growth hormone in it. I was fairly disappointed when they recently started allowing American milk to be sold here. Luckily it has to be labelled.
    • billh 7y ago
      This is simply not true. Milk is tested frequently and antibiotics are very rarely found [1]. Milk tankers that test positive for antibiotics are discarded and this milk never enters into the human consumption stream. 1. https://www.fda.gov/federal-state-local-tribal-and-territorial-officials/contracts/national-milk-drug-residue-database https://www.fda.gov/federal-state-local-tribal-and-territori...
      • grawprog 7y ago
        https://bcdairy.ca/milk/articles/does-milk-contain-growth-hormones-and-antibiotics https://bcdairy.ca/milk/articles/does-milk-contain-growth-ho... >While the administration of growth hormones known as BST or rBGH to dairy cows is allowed in the US, it is illegal in Canada and therefore not permitted for use with any dairy cows. https://www.healthcastle.com/what-you-should-know-about-milk-when-shopping-in-the-united-states/ https://www.healthcastle.com/what-you-should-know-about-milk... >In both Canada and the United States, all milk sold must be antibiotic-free, so the issue is more about potential antibiotic-resistance than actually consuming antibiotics through milk. In Canada, a farmer who provides a dairy with milk containing antibiotics will have to pay for all expenses related to the milk that is thrown out. That means farmers take their commitment to providing antibiotic-free milk seriously.
        • andylynch 7y ago
          There's another, simple reason which predates the very real concerns another antibiotic resistance these days; it's impossible to make cheese or other dairy products with even slightly antibiotic contaminated milk. Source - grew up on a NZ dairy farm. Every milk collection from every farm was sampled and tested for bacteria, and antibiotics. Too much of the first, and you were penalised with a lower payment for a start. Any of the latter, and you paid for disposal of all the milk in the tanker load, from your farm, and the others it collected. This was thirty years ago, if anything it will be stricter now. Solution was simple, look after the cattle, and keep the medicated ones out of the milking herd.
• rjplatte 7y ago
  American raw milk is some of the best, though. I love my Amish raw milk. Some of the most nutritious stuff you can get.
  • 4ad 7y ago
    Unfortunately you can't get raw milk in most states.
  • Phillipharryt 7y ago
    Raw milk has no nutritious difference to pasteurised milk, unless you count diseases as nutrition.
    • jotm 7y ago
      The taste is different (better imo), goes bad really fast.
    • 0-_-0 7y ago
      Pasteurization destroys some vitamins. Also, supermarket milk goes through more than just pasteurization: some protein and fat is removed to make other milk products like butter and cheese.
    • rjplatte 7y ago
      It tastes far better, and as long as basic hygiene is followed, is very clean, too.
• trhway 7y ago
  Absolutely. The quality of typical supermarket bread, bologna, cheese, butter in US is pretty low, so while it may look similar the taste and afterall feeling is really different. A very typical and widespread cousin of the Norwegian sandwich from USSR/Russia - "buterbrod" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterbrot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterbrot . Bread + butter topped with cheese or bologna or hard salami and chased down with black tea (hot, or at least warm, to make sure that the high fat content of the butter and the topping blooms into great taste, and it probably also helps digestion considering how good it feels :). Topped with cold smoked fatty fish (typically a red like salmon) or red or black caviar - great "zakuska" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakuski https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakuski) to chase down vodka or cognac.
• j7ake 7y ago
  There are other countries that have not been wealthy but still would consider such basic lunches unpalatable (e.g., Korea, China, Singapore).
  • kristofferR 7y ago
    All these countries are warm Asian countries, where street food stalls actually work due to the climate. You can't have the same food culture in places that are covered in snow at least half the year.
    • j7ake 7y ago
      Seoul has average temperature below 0 during January and February . Same with Beijing. These temperatures are in line with temperatures seen in countries like Netherlands, which also have a “basic” lunch culture. Your climate hypothesis doesn’t quite hold unfortunately.
• umeshunni 7y ago
  > as they were not a wealthy country for hundreds of years before striking oil in the 60s. I was surprised by that statement and had to look it up and it was, of course, false. Norway was a wealthy country back to the 1800s: sources: https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/no-norway-was-not-a-poor-country-before-oil-was-discovered-b58dd365e5 https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/no-norway-was-not-a-poor-count... and https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-norway/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-norway/
  • vidarh 7y ago
    The second paragraph of the first link specifically makes it clear it is a question of point of view and concedes Norway was poor relative to today. Meanwhile the distribution of wealth was a bigger issue. Even in my lifetime - I'm 44 - the growth in wealth in Norway has been astounding. Ironically, for example, whale meat is something I remember from my childhood as a cheap meat substitute (but that is now an expensive "delicacy"; we never saw it as a delicacy then - it is tough and oily) because my parents despite both having good jobs could not often afford beef in the early 80s. Even then we'd usually have it only once a week. When I was a kid, a packed lunch was an economic necessity for many families. This was also in some sense exacerbated by more income equality: eating out is relatively expensive in Norway because serving staff are also paid reasonably well. But I think the main reason the matpakke has survived is basically that this was much closer to the norm a lot of places with low population density (~13 per square kilometer in Norway) berfore urbanization and well into early industrialisation and that Norway also for a long time was very severely lutheran, with a puritan streak. Even if you have money, showing it off is not the done thing.
    • graeme 7y ago
      > The second paragraph of the first link specifically makes it clear it is a question of point of view and concedes Norway was poor relative to today. Meanwhile the distribution of wealth was a bigger issue. Every rich country was once very poor relative to its current status though. This doesn't change the fact that Norway was not poor relative to other European countries at the time.
• 4ad 7y ago
  > Many Europeans won’t drink the milk here in the States because the quality tends to be much lower, due to feed/living conditions for livestock. Garbage in = garbage out. If you have the time and money, I found the opposite to be true. The average quality of products like bread and meat is much lower in the US than in Europe, but in the US I have the option of going to some high end shop or bakery and get stuff that is much better than I can get here in Europe. In Europe things are extremely uniform. (Yes, I realize that Europe is a big place and I am generalizing somewhat.) Good cheese is very hard to find in the US though. Speciality shops are rare and even there you have much less options. When I go to the US, on the first day I am very saddened by the "bread" and milk I can find, it's just awful, but quickly I go to the good shops and get the good stuff. When I come back to Europe I am saddened again because now I can't get the good stuff anymore, no matter how much time and effort I put into it. That's why now I bake my own bread here in Europe. I spend a large proportion of my time in the US, and I found that this phenomenon generalizes to many products. For many products the US average is worse than the European equivalent, but in the US there's a much broader distribution of quality, and the high end tail of the quality spectrum is usually in the US. Of course this quality comes at a cost.
  • dannyw 7y ago
    If the most affordable option is “good enough” instead of bad, it makes sense there’s a narrower distribution for quality.
  • mcv 7y ago
    > "The average quality of products like bread and meat is much lower in the US than in Europe, but in the US I have the option of going to some high end shop or bakery and get stuff that is much better than I can get here in Europe. In Europe things are extremely uniform." Maybe you need to shop around a bit. There are also high-end shops and bakeries in Europe. Though maybe not in every town.
• ChrisWreck 7y ago
  Comparing the cheese to what you get in the States, it might look extra creamy. Being a Swedish born living in Norway, I'd say most of the cheese is boring and tasteless! The typical cheap cheese in Sweden (Hushållsost) is much more creamy and tastes a lot more than the cheapest alternatives in Norway (Norvegia). You have to go up about 40-50% in price to get the most equivalent (something like Novergia Fyldig). The milk though, tastes much better in Norway.
  • vidarh 7y ago
    My favorite growing up was Norwegian Gräddost. And yes, you're right, that's a Swedish name; shamelessly stolen.