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How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch

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Re: How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch

#111

Post by wingerlang »

adventured wrote: post #96
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but honestly your lunch sounds depressing as hell. I never understood this nordic lifestyle I saw in Scandinavia, Benelux and Northern Germany where people refuse to take a proper lunch break and just eat some random cold food in front of their computer for the sake of productivity for their employer. It's just depressing to see and unhealthy in the long term. In southern Europe(Austria) having a walk to…

> No offense, but honestly your lunch sounds depressing as hell. I don't know about the preferences of the parent you're replying to, however the description in this article - and what others here have said - sounds depressing as hell. You're being strongly downvoted because you're not allowed to say anything negative about Scandinavian culture. If this food story were about the US, it would be held up as an example…

What it is is subjective. People love their sandwiches and if you don’t - pack what you like.. no one is forcing you to eat like this.

Re: How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch

#112

Post by wingerlang »

crazygringo wrote: post #106
iikoolpp wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assume you need 2,500 calories/day Well, your first mistake is there

As a 6'1" male who goes to the gym regularly, I need 2,800 calories/day just to maintain my weight which is in the middle of the range for normal-weight BMI. (If I'm trying to build strength, I need a bit more.) So enough with the snark, please. 2,500 cal/day is well-known as the average male guideline, while 2,000 cal/day is the average female guideline. None of this changes my original point. Obviously nobody's hea…

If you care about training you will adjust, and eat what you need and not 2 slices of bread.

People generally don’t count calories, certainly not how many percentage per meal they need. There’s also breakfast, snacking, dinner, more snacks etc.

Re: How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch

#113

Post by jib »

GuiA wrote: post #55
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but honestly your lunch sounds depressing as hell. I never understood this nordic lifestyle I saw in Scandinavia, Benelux and Northern Germany where people refuse to take a proper lunch break and just eat some random cold food in front of their computer for the sake of productivity for their employer. It's just depressing to see and unhealthy in the long term. In southern Europe(Austria) having a walk to…

It’s kind of sad to see the meal culture eroding in other parts of the world. The “quickly ingest some food at your desk so you can keep working” mentality has taken hold. I’m French, and at my first office job - almost 15 years ago - the entire office was empty from noon till 2p. People would go get their kids at school, have lunch with them at home, and bring them back before returning to work. Or child free people…

I too worked in France. I hated the long lunches, since it meant you left work at 6 or 7 in the evening. I’d rather be out the door at 5 (like I do now in the US) or 3-4 (like I did in some previous Swedish jobs) than spend the entire evening in the office.

Re: How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch

#114

Post by billh »

grawprog wrote: post #83
peterwwillis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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-territori...

Re: How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch

#115

Post by davidweir »

kristofferR wrote: post #14

I feel like this article somewhat undersells brødskriver. They can be delicious. Most important is good bread, which is super common here, despite it being totally unavailable in most other countries. All ordinary grocery stores get freshly baked bread every day, whole in paper bags of course. For example - with a thick slice of butter, then some oven-baked liver paste and two slices of gherkin on top and boom - you…

> Most important is good bread

Having lived in Norway for two years, and resorted to deep frozen baguettes from Meny (an upscale supermarket chain) because the fresh bread was so bad, I'm... not sure about this.

Glad to be back in Finland where the bread is good (seriously!) and the lunches are substantial, healthy, warm and filling.

Re: How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch

#116

Post by andrewflnr »

crazygringo wrote: post #92

Serious question: how is this enough calories for lunch? Assume you need 2,500 calories/day. Suppose you need a third of those at lunch, that's 830. (And given the traditional light continental breakfast, I'd expect an even larger lunch to compensate, so probably closer to 1,000.) A single sandwich with three layers of bread and three single layers of cheese or meat, can't be over 400 calories. I'd be starving and un…

My sister spent some time in Norway and convinced me to try making matpakke. Long story short, I couldn't finish it, and I'm not exactly a light eater.

Re: How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch

#117

Post by drstewart »

adventured wrote: post #96
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but honestly your lunch sounds depressing as hell. I never understood this nordic lifestyle I saw in Scandinavia, Benelux and Northern Germany where people refuse to take a proper lunch break and just eat some random cold food in front of their computer for the sake of productivity for their employer. It's just depressing to see and unhealthy in the long term. In southern Europe(Austria) having a walk to…

> No offense, but honestly your lunch sounds depressing as hell. I don't know about the preferences of the parent you're replying to, however the description in this article - and what others here have said - sounds depressing as hell. You're being strongly downvoted because you're not allowed to say anything negative about Scandinavian culture. If this food story were about the US, it would be held up as an example…

You're completely correct.

Hilariously, in this thread you have people arguing that Americans eat bland flavorless food while also arguing that Americans "obsess" over food that tastes good, both from a negative perspective.

Re: How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch

#118

Post by drstewart »

Symbiote wrote: post #28
gnud wrote: post #13

Well, unlike the US we usually have tasty bread here. That helps :)

The first time I went to the US, the waitress brought over extra bread, "I know you Europeans like bread, so I brought you extra". It was awful. Like ecological packaging pellets. I didn't want to offend her, so I hid the extra rolls in my bag. (We had other meals that were excellent. The quality of meals was very erratic, and had little relation to the price.)

I feel in Europe people are obsessed with eating "nice and flavorful" stuff instead of eating something because you actually need to eat.

Oh wait, that's what someone was criticizing the US for earlier in this thread. Weird. So is that the case or not?

Re: How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch

#119

Post by euske »

opdahl wrote: post #16

I'm a Norwegian, and where I work I have the option of eating a big warm lunch, but I very rarely do. I've noticed that eating a big lunch makes the following hour extremely unproductive, so for the last year I have made a matpakke with 3 slices of bread. Normal _pålegg_ is liver paste, cheese or peanut butter. I can easily go through my lunch in just few minutes, and even while working at the same time. My thought p…

There are two solutions to this: Eating less for lunch is one, taking an afternoon nap is another.

I'm taking the latter one. I eat lunch at 1pm in normal days, and my sleepiness usually kicks in around 2pm. Then I take a 15-min power nap, and I become fully energized again.

The process I take a nap is 1) open up a terminal and press the enter, so the current time is shown in a prompt. 2) literally headdesk. 3) wake up and hit the enter again, then you'll know how long you've slept. You can even set up a small script to measure your sleep time.

It turned out that my nap time is almost constant between 15 to 20 mins. Technically I can argue that I'm splitting my lunch break into two parts and using it for different purposes (45 min for lunch and 15 min for nap), so I'm not that much slacking.

Re: How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch

#120

Post by trhway »

mogadsheu wrote: post #6

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 the 60s. The point to remember is that while the fare is basic, the quality is typically very good. Their cheese is extra creamy and nutritious, as is the bread. The same goes for the milk. Many Europeans won’t drink the milk here in the States because the qua…

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 . 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) to chase down vodka or cognac.

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