So I read this NYT article and I’m confused. At the beginning of the article it says:
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.
Now, all of those things are “not inviting visiting friends to eat” but I haven’t really be able to understand from the article what the custom is in Sweden - and whether it applies to adults as well or only children.
Is it that children playing at a friend’s house are expected to go home at mealtime? That doesn’t sound unusual to me and I would be surprised if people are outraged about that. On the other hand, if the situation described in the Twitter post is common ( child visitor told to wait in child’s room while family ate) , that would seem unusual to me. I’m sure it happened to that person - but just because that family did it doesn’t mean it’s common and it seems people interviewed for the article did not ask their children’s friends to wait while the family had dinner.
There was a Reddit thead about this a few weeks ago and multiple Swedish people confirmed that when they were kids when it was time to eat with friends over they’d leave their friend in their room while they went to the kitchen to eat.
I saw this topic erupting elsewhere. From my experience in the US Midwest (no shortage of Swedes there) in the era of free-range kids/Depression-baby parents:
Lunch time here is lunch time at Tommy’s house too. Tommy went home for lunch.
If lunch was simple and easily augmented to a few more slices of bread and baloney, Tommy ran home to ask if he could be your guest (phone calls were not made: they cost money per each).
Tommy’s dad had been laid off, and his mom encouraged him to be playing in your yard at mealtimes. Sad, but your mom still drew the line.
My experience with Swedish people and food is tangential to what’s described in the article, but it was memorable. My husband and I (American) were invited to lunch at a Swedish couple’s house. No children were involved.
We went expecting, well … “lunch.” Maybe sandwiches, an interesting salad, something a little on the light side like that.
Instead we were served what to us was an unexpectedly heavy dinner, with large pieces of meat, potatoes, gravy, etc.
I recall that we talked about our differing cultural expectations and had a chuckle over it, but I no longer remember the explanation from our Swedish friends. It was something fairly mundane like “we typically eat our main meal in the middle of the day rather than in the evening” or “when guests are specifically invited we feel obligated to serve a generous meal.”
I was someone’s guest in the Swedish countryside for a couple of days, and I don’t remember starving. I think you are right about eating relatively early, no huge meals at 9 p.m., main dinner at mid-day.
Swedes traditionally have a heavy lunch, which contrasts clearly with Norwegians, who at least traditionally had two sandwiches in a lunch box. Swedish office workers generally have an hour long lunch break, Norwegians have 30 minutes.
I thought that was a fairly common custom throughout Europe in general. Just what I’ve heard second-hand though; the closest I’ve come to Europe is visiting Toronto.
Thanks for the point to the NYT article. This is a custom I hadn’t heard of (then again, I’ve never knowingly eaten at a Swedish household). I did learn after watching Ted Lasso about how Swedish people are very frank.
In my neighborhood here in Chicago, largely working class growing up, it was a very rare instance that I was invited to dine along with my friends’ families. Typically, it would mean it’s time to go home to eat or, if I decided to stay, I would play Nintendo in my friend’s room while they ate. After all, dinner would be available to me when I got home. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of ever being invited to eat food with any of my friends’ families. Maybe I once got a slice of pizza, but I certainly don’t remember ever having a meal.
It never occurred to me as being odd at the time. That’s just how it was. None of those friends were Swedish. Meanwhile, when my kids have their friends over, I always offer them food, and they themselves have no problem raiding my fridge or cupboards.
I might not have been clear- I don’t think it’s unusual for it to be rare to have dinner with a friend’s family. In my own childhood and my children’s the normal course of events was that the friend went home at dinnertime * and depending on age, time of year etc, the friends might get back together after dinner. That sort of “not inviting the friend to dinner” does not seem at all strange to me, and I can’t imagine why anyone would find that outrageous.
It’s the times when the friend stays and sits at the table without eating, or is told to stay in the child’s room that seem odd to me, and I can imagine why people found that strange. I never had that experience as a child, and as far as I know my kids didn’t either, And TBH, I probably would have been kind of annoyed if Josh from two blocks over didn’t go home at dinner time if he hadn’t been invited to dinner. So I’m going to ask you if you don’t mind, how did it come about that you stayed at your friend’s house while their family ate dinner ? Didn’t your own parents expect you to come home for dinner?
* And if the circumstances were such that the kid couldn’t go home on their own ( too young or too far), more like a formal playdate, pickup would have been before the host family had dinner.
When I was in university I had a Swedish roommate who had been a chef. She was admirable for her enthusiasm for the alternative music scene and desire to learn about Canadian and Quebecois music. Food? Not so much. Almost every meal seemed to involve crisp bread and fish from a container. Though not inclined to judge students harshly, chef seemed a generous descriptor.
My recollection is that would have happened when I was older, like a freshman or sophomore in high school, and I simply wasn’t expected to be home at dinner.
And actually, come to think of it, when I was a little younger, the way my parents shifts worked is such that we had dinner at 3 or 3:30, right after I came home from school, so I would have already eaten. I don’t think my friends’ parents would have necessarily known that, though. The rule in my head was just “you eat at your own house; don’t eat at a friend’s house unless specifically invited.” I also don’t recall any of my friends ever staying over for dinner when our dinner was at a more usual time, but I suspect my mother would have invited them for dinner if they were around while we were eating. (Her culture – from a farmtown in Poland; came here in her early 20 s – would have definitely stressed the importance of feeding your guests.)
Oh, I think I assumed you were talking about a younger age, probably because if I/my kids weren’t home for dinner in high school, we also weren’t at a friend’s house.
That’s why I would have been annoyed if my kids’ friends had stayed at my house at dinnertime instead of going home - I would have felt obligated to feed them and I didn’t always have enough of what I planned for dinner for a couple of extra people.
While I don’t consider it “cooking” to open a can of sardines and layer them on crisp bread, it’s actually one of my favorite lunches. I like to accompany it with red juice – cranberry, cherry, pomegranate, or a mix of those is best. Ideally, the juice should be thick and sour, not flavored sugar water.
Yeah. Expecting a guest who hadn’t been invited for a meal to go home when mealtime approached wouldn’t have been odd to me – if one was visiting and the family seemed to be making meal preparations, the polite thing to do was to excuse yourself/say goodbye and go home. If they wanted you to stay and eat, they’d then explicitly say so.
But the idea of eating while not offering food to a guest in your house would have been considered nearly unthinkably rude. Even if it wasn’t mealtime, guests were offered something, even if only a glass of water. And guests accepted something, even if only a glass of water. Refusing food to a guest in your home would have been a serious insult – and refusing to eat or drink in someone’s house was also insulting, at least unless there was an issue involving, say, no kosher dishes to even drink water from. (You could refuse a particular item, of course.)
I remember a great-aunt, with dementia in a care home, seriously upset because she had no food to offer us when we came to visit. She couldn’t remember who we were; but she remembered that one offered food to visitors. (We were somewhat indignant on her behalf, because we felt the home should have kept a few boxes of cookies or something around that residents could offer to visitors.)
Cultural differences can be drastic. Think twice before assuming somebody’s trying to be rude to you: they may be doing something they think is entirely polite and normal, even if you grew up thinking it was horribly rude.
Yeah, several of these responses are absolutely shocking to me. Maybe just a result of being from farmer stock,(depression era as well)* but no-one ever would have expected anyone to sit on the sidelines for any meal.;dinner or lunch or whatever. Dinner always had enough for any extra 5 people at a moments notice if necessary. Even the biddiest of the ol’ Biddies would never have let anyone in, or at, their house at meal time go hungry. Hounded and battered into submission to eat something, was the expectations even if you were stuck at the shitiest cook in the neighborhood.
Seriously not only kids, If a dude had an interesting car issue, and all the other neighborhood dudes were deep into helping out, when the resident dude ran out of "just another minute"s and the meal was served, they ate on random plates and bowls, in the driveway with dirty hands.
When dinner “happened”, where ever you happened to be , you ate.
ETA: when I say “shocking” I mean the American types, I have no idea what the Swedes do for meals, but I assumed those socialists had enough Christian babies aging on pikes to feed the whole village 10 times over.
As a child I would not have expected to eat a meal at a friend’s house, certainly not supper. This is the first time it ever occurred to me. I recall one time eating dinner at a friend’s house and his mother called my mother to make sure it was okay. I realize now he didn’t have many friends and his mother was making an extra effort for me. I also have just one memory of eating lunch at a friend’s house, they were visitors to the US, diplomatic work I believe, and they seemed eager to have me over to eat. It was delicious Korean food but I don’t remember what. These are really old memories, only 2nd or 3rd grade.
While I do generally accept drinks when offered by a host (and then compliment the food) because it’s usually a quick way to ingratiate yourself to someone (especially at a household with a different culture than yours), I have to say that I think it’s pretty fucked up that some people consider it rude. If a guest in my house doesn’t want food or drink, so what? Maybe they’re just not hungry or thirsty. Why consider it an insult? My job as a host is to make the guest feel comfortable, not force food and drink down their gullets.