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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2859 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 26, 2024

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It’s like that funny /r/Europe thing recently where the Scandinavians all said it would be weird to offer your kid’s friends who came to play after school dinner, because the custom is that the child should go home for food.

I thought I could perhaps add some context here because this gets blown out of proportion a bit.

When you go to a friend's house after school you are served food (like sandwiches or yoghurt), just not dinner, unless there is an agreement. The reasons for this are threefold:

On a week night people usually make food just for the amount of people that are expected to eat, and will only have bought enough food for this. There are often literally not enough potatoes available to feed another person.

Secondly, you don't want to deprive the other family of their family dinner without asking first. Serving someone else's kid without asking is impolite.

Thirdly, what usually happens is that a bunch of friends go home to someone, not just one person (because the vast majority live within walking distance to school). So it's often not about feeding a single person but 2-4 extra persons. It's also often the case that it's the same house you go to (the one closest to school or whatever) and you go there after school almost every day. So it's not about occasionally feeding a single person a portion of dinner, it's about regularly feeding a number of extra people. The amount of people supposed to be fed varying by as much as 100% is not a small imposition on working parents.

Despite all this people are regularly fed dinner at other people's houses, you just ask first. In middle school I got an earlu dinner at a friend's house ~2 days a week for 2 years.. but I've also sat and waited while friends have had dinner in cases where they had dinner at 5pm and I'm going to have dinner at 7pm.

On a week night people usually make food just for the amount of people that are expected to eat, and will only have bought enough food for this. There are often literally not enough potatoes available to feed another person.

This always got me about Europeans going "we don't need cars, we just carry a single day's shopping home from the grocery store!" Like, what do you do if people are coming over? Or if something's bad and you decide to cook something else, or there's 10ft of snow on the ground?
And I guess sometimes the answer is "there are not enough potatoes available in the house"

or there's 10ft of snow on the ground?

In my area 3m of snow would imply some sort of apocalypse. Not happened in my life. Would result in at least deployment of army for rescue and restoring basic supply, maybe evacuations.

Like, what do you do if people are coming over?

How many and how much they are going to eat? Recently I was cooking for 10 people, brought all the things necessary for it in one backpack.

The Russian custom is that you must offer dinner to your guests, it's your duty as a host, but the guests should come up with an excuse not to eat it and leave before dinner. If you're a kid and your friend's mom is asking if you would stay for dinner, staying for dinner is a social faux pas; if you're an adult, and your friend and your friend's spouse are both saying you should stay for dinner, then it's really up to you, but everyone has this bigass mental ledger of small favors owed that roughly tracks who's in whose debt.

This reminds me of the German custom. You can seemingly drop by for coffee (including cake, of course) at any reasonable time, but while you may be offered dinner it would be very unusual and weird to accept unless it was effectively a pre-planned dinner party or event.

The British seem to mean it more honestly, they’ll say something like “I’m just making pasta for dinner tonight, please stay” and welcome it. But the inverse is that if you’re ever outside the home and they invite you over, there’s a 95% chance they’re just being polite (the famous “oh, we must do dinner”) and would be horrified at you actually expecting a date and time.

Anglos aren’t desperate to feed you but they’re usually happy enough to have the company. Kind of a hybrid between the Scandinavians and, say, Indians or Mexicans who start serving food and don’t stop.

The British seem to mean it more honestly, they’ll say something like “I’m just making pasta for dinner tonight, please stay” and welcome it. But the inverse is that if you’re ever outside the home and they invite you over, there’s a 95% chance they’re just being polite (the famous “oh, we must do dinner”) and would be horrified at you actually expecting a date and time.

My wife used to spend a fair bit of time in the UK for work and she had dinner at home with multiple colleagues, at different occasions, with their families. I've always wondered a bit whether they were just very inviting to their Swedish boss or if she accepted insincere invitations. She thought it was nice but also a bit strange, and the same thing didn't happen with her French or German coworkers, they just ate out.

I've certainly never been invited to have dinner with a colleague and their family in their home.

Maybe it’s just the quality of the food. In my experience, the french are more sparing with their dinner invitations than the germans – understandable, when they feel obliged to offer multiple courses of heavenly delights, while the german casually serves you his dreadful slop, ‘come as you are and eat what is left’.

Our dreadful slop is filling and gives you energy for actual work. Not like the eternal slimming diet the french are on. Their food is art, but art sucks, and ours is meant to get people through a long day of actual work, which it does.

German cooks are often good when they cook you the food of their people, but they have an awful fondness for the most awful bastardizations of “Asian food” imaginable. The English, meanwhile, are usually either good cooks at multiple cuisines or terrible at all of them, including their own.

Germans just don’t care about food like the french do. Even working class french people spend considerable money and time preparing different kinds of meat, on any given day of the week. Middle class germans eat potato salad with sausage on christmas. If they’re feeling adventurous, they’ll spring for some schweinemedaillons – but whatever happens, it’s all pork all the time. I don’t really mind, I enjoy the lack of fuss. I find the french high maintenance, generally. At work, at school, at dinner, germans are more laid back.

Middle class germans eat potato salad with sausage on christmas. If they’re feeling adventurous, they’ll spring for some schweinemedaillons – but whatever happens, it’s all pork all the time.

Really? I thought the tradition was fish on Christmas Eve - in the far south they had the (amusingly Jewish to my mind, although of course not really) smoked salmon with latkes (kartoffelpuffer), and then goose on Christmas Day. Pork was reserved for breakfast or the 26th.

Truth is that almost every family has their own traditions here. Ours was grilled chicken.

I thought I could perhaps add some context here

No, don't, stop, you're only making it worse.

It's a cultural difference, it's fine. Cultures are weird, and that's what makes them fun, celebrate diversity and all that. If you try to provide additional explanations like "there's not enough potatoes" you'll just end up looking silly to people who make a fraction of your salary and have saying likes "where there's food for four, there's food for five".

I don't care if people like it or not, I dislike when people get the wrong idea and then spread it. I've seen so much false claims about this and it irritates me.

People are fed, they're just not invited to dinner as a rule. They're not invited to dinner because they're not planned for (and people actually are planning) and because people don't want to presume or irritate other families. That there isn't enough food isn't the only reason, it's one of the multiple reasons that taken together amount to why people might not be invited to dinner.

If people don't like this, then that's fine. It's just that it is not true that people aren't invited for dinner as a rule, it's just a possibility. It isn't weird to offer your kid's friend dinner, if you check with their parents first.

I’m not scandinavian, but it seems to me there’s more to it than these practical considerations. Of course it’s not a question of a lack of generosity. But regularly feeding another family’s child goes against your aggressively egalitarian ethos, by marking one family as poor and the other as rich.

That is not it at all. No one is that poor and no one would even consider that an issue for a second.

It's about the child being an imposition (on that particular day), and depriving the other family of their family time and fucking up their planning.

It's almost the other way around. The more affluent the family is the the more precise their planning will be and the parents time more precious, and they likely have their children's time planned out as well.

That can’t be it, I doubt Scandinavians are more likely to be helicopter parents than Americans of the same class. The family time explanation, I don’t know, you’re not really “losing” family time if your family eats together with your kid’s best friend, not in any practical sense.

It's not the family that offers dinner that's deprived of family time, it's the other family whose kid isn't home for dinner that's losing their family time.

Sorry for being unclear.

I still think your society is uncomfortable with gifts because it implies an unequal relationship and disturbs the law of jante, which also explains the going dutch and the rest of your peculiarities. And it’s just more fun to believe that, rather than your culture being particularly anal about eating times and potatoes.

People are for sure uncomfortable with gifts but a weekday home dinner is too small to be considered a gift, even if it repeats.

Don't underestimate how anal and uptight at least Swedes can be.

People are fed, they're just not invited to dinner as a rule.

Yes, good, exactly, this is what you should stick to! There's nothing more to it.

That there isn't enough food isn't the only reason, it's one of the multiple reasons that taken together amount to why people might not be invited to dinner.

No! You're doing it wrong again! There are no other reasons. All these other dinner-by-default cultures are subject to the same constraints, they don't have infinite food or infinite family time either, but if they have a guest at home, they invite them to join. The moment you start trying to explain yourself with anything other than "them's the rules" you start looking silly.

I'm not on a PR campaign trying to deceive you to perceive us in a more positive ligbt, I'm trying to explain whats going on and how people are reasoning.

Furthermore, I don't think the conditions are the same. Maybe in the general sense they are, people could organise their lives differently, maybe, but in the moment the choices are made the conditions are different. If you plan your meals (and shopping) more meticulously and you have practically twice the female labour force participation rate, having extra meal guests is a larger imposition and such a consideration is more important.

If this highlights a cultural difference then then that may be so, it doesn't make it a factor people doesn't consider and doesn't consider important.

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