(Roughly) Daily

Not so, as Tim Hayward explains, in Norway…

… To understand matpakke, you first need to understand a little about lagom. In Sweden, the word refers to a profound belief, at a culture-wide level, in the notion of sufficiency — the correct or adequate amount. This leads to a noble pursuit of balance and moderation in everything. In Norway, there is a similar motivating spirit behind the national packed lunch.

These lunches originated in a system of free school meals launched in 1932 called the Oslo breakfast. It required no cooking and was supplied free to all — including bread, cheese, milk, half an orange and half an apple. This simple, unembellished meal was a universal provision, and proudly displayed an entirely non-competitive standard of adequacy. Rich kids couldn’t get a better breakfast, poor kids wouldn’t have a worse one. The food was precisely sufficient. Today, the noble ideals of the Oslo breakfast persist in matpakke. Despite the encroaching decadence of alien customs, such as going out to lunch, most Norwegians observe the traditions of the state-mandated half-hour lunch break, when every worker from floor sweeper to chief executive will unwrap a wax-paper package containing two sandwiches and one piece of fruit. Being Norwegian, the sandwiches are open-faced and use a modest single slice of bread each — a specially manufactured sheet of greaseproof paper (mellomleggspapir) is placed between the sandwiches to separate them. The fillings are simple: cheese, ham, salami, liver paste or jam. It would, after all, be wrong to include any ostentatious condiments — aside from the occasional pickle or sliced red pepper — and antisocial to produce something that was more pleasurable than that of your colleagues. It would be kind of insulting if your lunch was more temptingly delicious than your neighbour’s . . . if you “looked forward to it” for any reason other than peckishness. I can’t think of any other situation in the world where the driving imperative is for the food to be reassuringly dull…

The “matpakke,” a model for the rest of us to follow? “Beware the rise of the competitive packed lunch” (a gift link), by @timhayward in @FinancialTimes.

* George S. Kaufman

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As we brown bag it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1765 that John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, stepped down as Secretary of State for the Northern Department in the British government.

Montagu is better remembered as the namesake of the Sandwich Islands– named for him by Captain Cook, whose expeditions, Montagu enthusiastically supported while serving as First Lord of the Admiralty.

But Montagu is best remembered (if possibly apocryphally) for his inspiration of our lunchtime staple…

The modern sandwich is named after Lord Sandwich, but the exact circumstances of its invention and original use are still the subject of debate. A rumour in a contemporaneous travel book called Tour to London by Pierre-Jean Grosley formed the popular myth that bread and meat sustained Lord Sandwich at the gambling table but Sandwich had many bad habits, including the Hellfire Club, and any story may be a creation after the fact. Lord Sandwich was a very conversant gambler, the story goes, and he did not take the time to have a meal during his long hours playing at the card table. Consequently, he would ask his servants to bring him slices of meat between two slices of bread, a habit well known among his gambling friends. Other people, according to this account, began to order “the same as Sandwich!”, and thus the “sandwich” was born. The sober alternative to this account is provided by Sandwich’s biographer N. A. M. Rodger, who suggests that Sandwich’s commitments to the navy, to politics, and to the arts mean that the first sandwich was more likely to have been consumed at his work desk…

Wikipedia