I was surprised by that statement and had to look it up and it was, of course, false. Norway was a wealthy country back to the 1800s: sources: https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/no-norway-was-not-a-poor-count... and https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-norway/
Even in my lifetime - I'm 44 - the growth in wealth in Norway has been astounding.
Ironically, for example, whale meat is something I remember from my childhood as a cheap meat substitute (but that is now an expensive "delicacy"; we never saw it as a delicacy then - it is tough and oily) because my parents despite both having good jobs could not often afford beef in the early 80s. Even then we'd usually have it only once a week.
When I was a kid, a packed lunch was an economic necessity for many families.
This was also in some sense exacerbated by more income equality: eating out is relatively expensive in Norway because serving staff are also paid reasonably well.
But I think the main reason the matpakke has survived is basically that this was much closer to the norm a lot of places with low population density (~13 per square kilometer in Norway) berfore urbanization and well into early industrialisation and that Norway also for a long time was very severely lutheran, with a puritan streak. Even if you have money, showing it off is not the done thing.
Every rich country was once very poor relative to its current status though. This doesn't change the fact that Norway was not poor relative to other European countries at the time.
Here's an Italian movie from the 1970s, showing a family in a large slum around Italy.
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.
If you have the time and money, I found the opposite to be true.
The average quality of products like bread and meat is much lower in the US than in Europe, but in the US I have the option of going to some high end shop or bakery and get stuff that is much better than I can get here in Europe. In Europe things are extremely uniform. (Yes, I realize that Europe is a big place and I am generalizing somewhat.)
Good cheese is very hard to find in the US though. Speciality shops are rare and even there you have much less options.
When I go to the US, on the first day I am very saddened by the "bread" and milk I can find, it's just awful, but quickly I go to the good shops and get the good stuff.
When I come back to Europe I am saddened again because now I can't get the good stuff anymore, no matter how much time and effort I put into it. That's why now I bake my own bread here in Europe.
I spend a large proportion of my time in the US, and I found that this phenomenon generalizes to many products. For many products the US average is worse than the European equivalent, but in the US there's a much broader distribution of quality, and the high end tail of the quality spectrum is usually in the US. Of course this quality comes at a cost.
Maybe you need to shop around a bit. There are also high-end shops and bakeries in Europe. Though maybe not in every town.
You can't have the same food culture in places that are covered in snow at least half the year.
Your climate hypothesis doesn’t quite hold unfortunately.
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...
>While the administration of growth hormones known as BST or rBGH to dairy cows is allowed in the US, it is illegal in Canada and therefore not permitted for use with any dairy cows.
https://www.healthcastle.com/what-you-should-know-about-milk...
>In both Canada and the United States, all milk sold must be antibiotic-free, so the issue is more about potential antibiotic-resistance than actually consuming antibiotics through milk. In Canada, a farmer who provides a dairy with milk containing antibiotics will have to pay for all expenses related to the milk that is thrown out. That means farmers take their commitment to providing antibiotic-free milk seriously.
Source - grew up on a NZ dairy farm. Every milk collection from every farm was sampled and tested for bacteria, and antibiotics. Too much of the first, and you were penalised with a lower payment for a start. Any of the latter, and you paid for disposal of all the milk in the tanker load, from your farm, and the others it collected. This was thirty years ago, if anything it will be stricter now.
Solution was simple, look after the cattle, and keep the medicated ones out of the milking herd.
Also the websites only talk about maintaining a database over this not that you need to discard the milk if positive.
Nobody wants out of spec milk because it's not useful. You can't sell it because it will come back to bite you.
Of course this varies a lot based on the store and product.
Unless most people in Europe are buying direct from the dairies, I can't imagine it's appreciably faster. Even then, I grew up having milk delivered direct from the dairy and definitely don't notice any difference between what I grew up with and what I typically buy in the grocery store.
I would guess most of the flavor difference comes from pasteurization differences, since Ultra High Temperature pasteurization appears to be the norm over there.
Same for me. It took me a bit to figure out what was going on with this discussion and then suddenly I realized ..
The US is not a single system and actually the quality does vary a lot. I remember being in Florida and thinking why is the milk so weird.
I wonder if it's due to Spain being a warmer country and the milk spoiling more quickly.
Just remember they moved to Ultra High Pasteurization because 2 weeks was simply not long enough.
What is concerning is the high fructose corn syrup, kelp & skim milk blend that Darigold, Kroger and other US milk producers are advertising as Fat Free Half n Half: https://www.fredmeyer.com/search?query=fat%20free%20half&sea...
(According to various sources I can find when googling this, there's no difference between ultra-pasteurized and UHT.)
That wasn't the idea. It was supposed to sit unrefrigerated on normal shelves. They haven't had great success with the product in the US as people don't trust non-refrigerated milk.
That’s the extreme which would be very unusual, but buying milk that’s ‘only’ 2 week old milk is reasonably common. All it takes is knowing how long the sell by date is after pasteurization and another ~1-2 days to get to that point and you can find how old this stuff is.
Do you have a citation for this by any chance? I've had a quick Google but no luck. Been interested in average food quality differences in US and EU since the "chlorinated chicken" news in the UK.
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 quality tends to be much lower, due to feed/living conditions for livestock. Garbage in = garbage out.