The fourth in an occasional series.
Ten: Predatory seating
Nine: Culinary relativism
Eight: Preëmptive planningSeven: Premature mastication.
For some time, it has been apparent to me that the media here are pushing brunch as the new cool thing for Stockholmers to do on weekends. Newspapers, city guides, television and radio have all decided that if it’s good enough for the Sex and the City cast, this should be the next big cultural import from New York. But there is an element of willful obliviousness involved: Swedes invented brunch generations ago, and in fact brunch every weekday, when they take an hour off from work for food. At 11.30 am.
Stockholmers might think they are eating lunch then, but they’d be wrong. Food consumed at 11.30 am can be wonderful, but it is not lunch. Lunch is what the Italians have at 1.30 pm. It’s what the Spanish have between 2 and 5 pm. That said, the Swedish weekday brunch is a lovely ritual — all the restaurants cater to it, friends meet in the old town to catch up and swap gossip, mamma-ledig (“mommy-free”) mothers on their year-long leave from work cart their offspring in SUV-sized buggies to meet admiring pals, and officemates can flirt without really calling it a date. In fact, Swedish brunch fulfills all the same social functions as the New York version, with the added benefit that you get to do it during office hours.
So, to clarify, I don’t hate the brunching tradition as such, but I do bemoan its misclassification as lunch, and one additional opportunity cost: The resultant temporal shift of all mealtimes. Swedes are constantly hungry ahead of the rest of Europe — their eating habits are, in fact, synchronized with those of Iraqis. Walk home from work shortly after 5 pm and you will see Stockholmers sitting at restaurant tables, ordering. The tail end of a three-martini lunch, perhaps? No, the start of middag, which they believe is dinner.
Clearly, dinner is not served at 5 pm. This is obvious to all foreigners. For example, Ayse and Cemo, who are visiting from Istanbul on a baby-goods shopping spree this weekend, were asked by Joachim, a Swede, what time they’d like to meet for dinner tonight. They said 8:30 pm. Joachim nearly gargled his café latte. He had 6 pm in mind. Because it was Saturday.
Stockholmers, stop being so defensive about your bizarre eating habits; stop trying to shoehorn your meals into accepted global norms, and celebrate your otherness! I suggest trying to export the 5 pm meal to New York as something sophisticated and maybe even a touch decadent, as in “look how early I can get off work.” New York restaurants would take to it in an instant: they could always use an extra sitting. If Carrie and the girls had another season on HBO, they’d definitely be meeting for lunner, or maybe they’d call it dinch.
Hey! Dont forget our lawful right to have am and em coffebreaks, without them i would never make it between breakfast and lunch! Actually when i think about it i might be a hobbit.
7.30 breakfast
8.45 second breakfast
10.30 fruit
12.00 lunch
14.30 coffee and fruit and maybe a sandwich, sweet roll or cookie
17.00 more fruit
18.00 fruit on the train home to keep me from fainting from lack of food
19.00 dinner
See it as a possibility – you can easily have first and second lunch AND first and second dinner at both swedes AND other europeans will be happy, they’re far enough apart!
No one has dinner at 5 pm! Do they?
Second breakfast? Are Swedes Hobbits in disguise?
Matthew, please pay attention when people are commenting on my site.
And the Swedish word for “brunch” should be “frunch” (frukost + lunch).
I remember when school mates would be invited to dinner at our house, their parents used to call and ask where they were when we were just sitting down to eat (at 7 PM).
Oh, yes, right. I see. Very well.
Matthew, I am a little worried about you. This is not the first time recently you have repeated yourself, or repeated others. People in your line of business can get themselves in all sorts of trouble for plagiarizing, you know. It would be most embarassing if the header on the WSJ on Tuesday was ‘Dewey Defeats Truman.’
That would explain why they gave him the editing gig: Less chance of Blairuptions in the newsroom, and keep the risk factors at the front of the class, as it were, where they can keep an eye on him.
So John, would the “u” in frunch be from “frukost” or from “lunch”? I can’t make up my mind, and it matters to the pronounciation.
Stefan,
urging Stockholmers to take pride in their eating schedules contradicts the notion that this is something you hate about Sweden. Which is it?
And what do people do all evening long, if dinner is over by 6.30? Does no one succumb to late-night gluttony? Very healthy, those Swedes: if Americans put a few active hours between dinner and bedtime, we wouldn’t all be lard asses.
I wish I could say “long time listner, first time caller” but I only found this blog less than a week ago so bare with me.
Most Stockholmers have done brunch, e.g. at Källhagens, for easily 10-15 years. That Swedish trash media & so-called ‘City Guides’ for “bonn-läppar” (Stockholm’s version of bridge and tunnels) are now tuning into it says more about the writers/editors of those medias than anything else.
Regardless, one cannot talk about Swede’s eating habits without contemplating on the phenomenon of “fika”, i.e. coffee and biscuit/Danish. At 10 AM, after lunch and again at 2:30-3:00 PM. Lots of Gevalia coffee.
And Swedes eat dinner at 5-6 PM because it is too cold/dark/shitty to do anything else at that point, and then you have to watch the news at 7:30.
It all makes sense to me now. I think…
So, Charles, which part of “I don’t hate the brunching tradition as such, but I do bemoan its misclassification as lunch, and one additional opportunity cost: The resultant temporal shift of all mealtimes” don’t you understand?
For my own part, I don’t understand any of it.
For *my* own part, I feel like Rhett Butler. I think you meant to lash out at Jame…
Actually, the u sound in “lunch” and “frukost” are identical in Swedish, but you can take it from “frukost”, if in doubt.
Charles, Stefan is not well, which explains both why he mistook you for me, and why his answer still partly contradicts his concluding exhortation. But you probably deserved to be yelled at anyway, naughty boy.
My day (if we skip the constant eating):
Workday:
07:50 Breakfast
(08: 00 Subway/bus to work)
10:00 Fika
12:00 Lunch
15:00 Fika
17/18:00 Dinner
Freeday:
10:00 Breakfast
16:00 Dinner
18:00 => Crisps, etc.
You have dinner early to spend time with friends/hobbies/family. Most people are “free” after 18.00 which makes being spontaneous much easier, no? 😉
Small children usually watch “Bollibompa” 18.15 and go to bed afterwards, which means they have to be fed early which makes dinner late impossible.
When did country’s have set times for lunch? The States lunch is obviously 12:00. Breakfast traditionally is at 6:00AM-Lunch12:00PM-Dinner6:00. Do you see where lunch kicks in? Its like a in between meal to keep hunger down. Mexico doesn’t have a set time for lunch. They eat meals, about the same time we do.
Piss off back to America then. We don’t all have to be like you.
you forgott the “vickning”, that’s how we swedes manage the weekends. A late night meal after the early dinner served around midnight or just before. Often “Janssons frestelse” is served as vickning
When I studied in Japan all classes had lunch break at 12 pm. This is the normal lunch hour in many countries. And if the spanish have lunch between 2 and 5, would brunch be between 12 and 3? And would breakfast be between 10 and 1?
Southern european countries like to eat a lot each meal, in Sweden we’d rather eat less but more frequently.
The set dinner time in my japanese home was 6.30, which I find normal. I wouldn’t be opposed to eating as late as 9 especially if I had my lunch at 5 like the spanish…
Being swedish, my mother often tried to impose a set dinner time at 4.30 which I never understood… I would tell her I’d only get hungry again before bed. But she likes to go to sleep early and I stay up late, so I guess different people have different habits, even within the same culture or family.