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Review: In Cod We Trust
Feb. 8th, 2016 11:05 pmI once decided I'd rather read something other than travelogues for my media-from-other-countries project, but this title caught my eye, so I read Eric Dregni's In Cod We Trust: Living the Norwegian Dream (2008). An American with Norwegian roots moves to Norway with his wife for a year to see what it's like (and write a book). The wife ended up getting pregnant before they left, and they had their baby there. The baby seemed to love the cold, the darkness, and getting bounced around a lot--it just goes to show how everyone's different! I learned loads of stuff about Norwegians, too. Note that the following are gross generalizations, of course.
It turns out that Norwegians do not open up to strangers right away; you say hi to your neighbor and they look at you like you're strange before they look away. The author says it's part of their Janteloven philosophy - don't show off, even to yourself. (That philosophy matches the main character's insistence in Broken that he was humble--so maybe it wasn't just about his own personality but also about what is expected in Norway.)
There's a Norwegian saying I like: "Don't go tramping in the salad." It means means don't show how dumb you are by opening your mouth. Another interesting one: "There's no bad weather, only bad clothes." They don't put heaters in the bedrooms because no one likes to sleep where it's hot. In Norway. Hot. At night. In the winter. Yeah.
They work 35 hours a week (or less) and are not into efficiency. They are into the welfare state, even the people paying a lot of taxes. One reason they haven't joined the European Union is because they want to keep up this tradition of taking care of their own. Similarly, they don't want to open up their waters to international fishing; they have rules to prevent overfishing.
They refer to Minnesota as "our colony in America."
I already knew they ate a lot of fish. They also love butter. In one cookbook the author found, half the recipes were for butter-laden pastries. There's a whole chapter for different kinds of porridge--which is not for breakfast, but for dinner. And they eat meat, but not many vegetables. There's a Saturday night tradition that kids eat as much candy as they want, there's porridge for dinner, and you hang out in front of the TV.
This made me wonder: how many kinds of porridge do I know about? Several actually. There's oatmeal of course. But also cream of wheat. And grits probably count. And I got a recipe from chikuru called Yulgrit which is rice pudding, so that probably counts. Norwegians also make something involving sour cream that you can't make here because our sour cream doesn't have a high enough fat content (35%) for it to work.
Their licorice is salty. And someone told the author "You know that the beef you find in Norway are old dairy cows that don't produce milk any more, not cattle raised just for food like in the U.S. That's why Norwegian hamburgers taste funny. You should really eat moose." Which apparently is delicious.
Boys are not circumcised except for religious reasons. Medical care seems amazing. For example:
After the birth, we were given a large room for the three of us with three meals a day (plus a snack and late-evening soup) delivered right outside the room. Many of the mothers, though, preferred that their husbands stay at home, so they could form a sort of girls' club while pushing their babies around the hospital in their little beds on wheels.
The midwives told us that we should stay at least three or four days in our family room to make sure that the breast-feeding was going well. In this large room with a view of the snow-capped mountains and meals delivered, why would we leave? We asked the head midwife, Sigrid, if they ever have trouble with mothers who won't leave the hospital. She told us, "Sometimes if we have too many people having babies, we have to ask mothers who have been here for a long time, 'so, how are things going? Do you have any plans?'"
Norway went from being one of the poorest countries in the 1880s to being one of the richest today, partly due to the discovery of oil offshore.
The author knew that his grandfather had emigrated from Norway when the country was poor. When he went to visit the place where his grandfather used to live, he met a shopkeeper who had the same last name. He jumped to the conclusion that they were related. Then he found out that back when his grandfather lived there, the laborers would take the same last name as the land owners. The store owner was a descendent of the land owner and the author was a descendent of a laborer, so they were not related. Oops!
Overall, it was an interesting read with bits of humor. Maybe I prefer travelogues where people are learning about someone else (in this case, the author's grandfather and other Norwegians) over ones where people are trying to find themselves.
It turns out that Norwegians do not open up to strangers right away; you say hi to your neighbor and they look at you like you're strange before they look away. The author says it's part of their Janteloven philosophy - don't show off, even to yourself. (That philosophy matches the main character's insistence in Broken that he was humble--so maybe it wasn't just about his own personality but also about what is expected in Norway.)
There's a Norwegian saying I like: "Don't go tramping in the salad." It means means don't show how dumb you are by opening your mouth. Another interesting one: "There's no bad weather, only bad clothes." They don't put heaters in the bedrooms because no one likes to sleep where it's hot. In Norway. Hot. At night. In the winter. Yeah.
They work 35 hours a week (or less) and are not into efficiency. They are into the welfare state, even the people paying a lot of taxes. One reason they haven't joined the European Union is because they want to keep up this tradition of taking care of their own. Similarly, they don't want to open up their waters to international fishing; they have rules to prevent overfishing.
They refer to Minnesota as "our colony in America."
I already knew they ate a lot of fish. They also love butter. In one cookbook the author found, half the recipes were for butter-laden pastries. There's a whole chapter for different kinds of porridge--which is not for breakfast, but for dinner. And they eat meat, but not many vegetables. There's a Saturday night tradition that kids eat as much candy as they want, there's porridge for dinner, and you hang out in front of the TV.
This made me wonder: how many kinds of porridge do I know about? Several actually. There's oatmeal of course. But also cream of wheat. And grits probably count. And I got a recipe from chikuru called Yulgrit which is rice pudding, so that probably counts. Norwegians also make something involving sour cream that you can't make here because our sour cream doesn't have a high enough fat content (35%) for it to work.
Their licorice is salty. And someone told the author "You know that the beef you find in Norway are old dairy cows that don't produce milk any more, not cattle raised just for food like in the U.S. That's why Norwegian hamburgers taste funny. You should really eat moose." Which apparently is delicious.
Boys are not circumcised except for religious reasons. Medical care seems amazing. For example:
After the birth, we were given a large room for the three of us with three meals a day (plus a snack and late-evening soup) delivered right outside the room. Many of the mothers, though, preferred that their husbands stay at home, so they could form a sort of girls' club while pushing their babies around the hospital in their little beds on wheels.
The midwives told us that we should stay at least three or four days in our family room to make sure that the breast-feeding was going well. In this large room with a view of the snow-capped mountains and meals delivered, why would we leave? We asked the head midwife, Sigrid, if they ever have trouble with mothers who won't leave the hospital. She told us, "Sometimes if we have too many people having babies, we have to ask mothers who have been here for a long time, 'so, how are things going? Do you have any plans?'"
Norway went from being one of the poorest countries in the 1880s to being one of the richest today, partly due to the discovery of oil offshore.
The author knew that his grandfather had emigrated from Norway when the country was poor. When he went to visit the place where his grandfather used to live, he met a shopkeeper who had the same last name. He jumped to the conclusion that they were related. Then he found out that back when his grandfather lived there, the laborers would take the same last name as the land owners. The store owner was a descendent of the land owner and the author was a descendent of a laborer, so they were not related. Oops!
Overall, it was an interesting read with bits of humor. Maybe I prefer travelogues where people are learning about someone else (in this case, the author's grandfather and other Norwegians) over ones where people are trying to find themselves.