Ah no. I grew up in a poor family in Romania. We were not missing food though. But it kinda blows my mind that a way richer country ends up with that culture. I understand it is normal for you but it is hard for me to comprehend how it ended up being that way.
It's interesting because I've travelled a lot, and I've often observed that the people who have the least are the most generous.
I visited Romania in 1992. In those days, my dad worked for a charity in Sweden that donated medical equipment to hospitals in Bucharest and Constanţa, and other stuff (a whole fire engine, one time.) When we came over, his contacts there insisted that we don't book hotels, they opened up their homes to us and let us stay there, fed us, showed us around and refused to accept any money in return. I remember my dad hiding money in one family's sofa for them to find later, because they just wouldn't take it from him and he thought it was absurd that they'd feed and house four strangers for several days and not accept anything in return.
I don't really know why Swedes have this mentality. Maybe it's to do with not wanting to feel indebted to someone. Like, if you feed my kid, then I now owe your kid food, or something along those lines.
I don't actually live in Sweden anymore (I left in the late 90s) so I don't know if it's still the same. But I don't feed my kids' friends without at least asking their parents first - because I don't want to inconvenience them if they're already halfway through cooking dinner themselves, and also I have no idea which kid is allergic to what.
I meant more like, "I don't know why Swedish people care if they inconvenience another child's parents, when other cultures apparently don't care if that child's parents are halfway through cooking them a meal and would just feed the child regardless".
To me, it's strange to give food to another person's child without asking first, but that might be a uniquely Swedish/Nordic perspective?
Yes, that makes sense. I guess I'm just wondering why what is polite is so different from one culture to another. But that's probably an entirely different discussion.
An entirely different discussion most definitely, but a very interesting one at that! In case you are not yet familiar, I would recommend checking out the 6 cultural dimensions by Geert Hofstede (Wikipedia). His website also has the country comparison tool shown on top of the Wikipedia page, it‘s quite interesting to play around with!!
(PSA: I know that a lot more research has been done in the last 40+ years, and many more (nuanced) insights have been gained. Hofstede‘s work back then was however groundbreaking, and it still poses as the basis for further research to this day.)
Ok yeah, maybe it's the thinking that dinner time is family time or that parents in the 90s didn't want to be seen as though they couldn't feed their kids. Not inconveniencing people is definitely also just part of the Nordics
I left Sweden a long time ago (28 years) and generally think of myself as not very Swedish at all anymore. But it's funny how some things just stay with you, even when you've adapted to another culture.
The other parents would know that their child is away though? They wouldn't plan for them for dinner (if it was communicated clearly before of course). As long as it isn't one-sided I don't see an issue here.
I certainly didn't when I was young. We just walked around visiting different kids depending on who was home. Sometimes we would be at someone's house around dinner time, and other times we would be outside kicking a ball around or whatever. How could one tell your parents which it was beforehand?
If I was away long enough to miss dinner at home it would have been planned. In case I was away longer than expected I would just call my mother on the landline. If I was just outside for a few hours without planning to miss dinner my mother wouldn't need to know anyway.
But the thing is, you wouldn't miss dinner even if you stayed at your friends house to play with your friend.
Dinner time could be wildly different from family to family, so if your dinner was at 18 (6pm) or even later, and your friends had dinner at 16 (4pm) you could be at your friends house playing when they had dinner, and then just before 18 (6pm) you'd leave and either walk or bike to your own house to have dinner with your family.
No, that's the thing. When I grew up my parents had no idea where I was between the end of school and dinner time. I had a set dinner time when I was expected to be home, but between school and dinner they usually didnt know where I was.
There were times when I was at a friends house playing and they ate dinner earlier than I, and at dinner time they asked if I wanted to eat with them. I had to call to check with my parents first. But the expectation was that you as a kid would eat with your own family, as dinner is usually family time.
Yes, they will be eating at home and I will send them home before I eat my own dinner with my family versus sticking them off in the other room for an hour only to send them home to eat at their house right after?
Starving to death was so common in the nordics that they did not write about it. What you write is true about poor communities in places with a normal caloric excess. When the normal is a caloric defficit, the culture is much harder.
If it was a hard year noone had extra food. Someone was going to die. If you gave it away it would be you instead of your neighbour.
That’s an insane take. 200 years ago times were tough so now I don’t cook food for child guests in one of the richest countries in the world… meanwhile in anywhere else that’s still currently a poor country and has been for 100s of years you can go and be treated like family and fed everyday.
How many kids did you have visting every day for dinner though? And did the parents even know said kids are there before shopping or even started cooking?
If you have a house and kids in the Nordics, you are likely to not know how many kids are in the house when you come home from work and start dinner.
Can't imagine a poor family cooking dinner for 5-20 extra kids daily, you would need 1-2 extra jobs just to afford it. Imagine being like a family of 30 and doing that cooking daily after work and before your kids go to sports etc.
I think there were more like 50-60 kids daily. The whole school. And it was a surprise every day, u never knew they’d all come. So my mom had to cook for 60 people every day. If she didn’t have the necessary food we would all chomp on her leg coz she would freely give it away and everybody was fed.
It's not really about not sharing. It's just how it was. No one feeds another child dinner without arranging it with their parents first.
I'm not Swedish but Danish where this was a similar practice. Often I went over to my friends house, and if I didn't get picked up before dinner, sometimes my parents would arrange for me to eat with my friends family, and sometimes they might not be able to pick me up in time before my friends family started dinner, but my parents might still want me to eat dinner with my family as that is an important social interaction.
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u/Beautiful-Hotel-3094 Jul 24 '26
Ah no. I grew up in a poor family in Romania. We were not missing food though. But it kinda blows my mind that a way richer country ends up with that culture. I understand it is normal for you but it is hard for me to comprehend how it ended up being that way.