On Saturdays We Eat Candy (På Lördagar Äter Vi Godis)
I’ve never seen adults eat candy like them, the Swedes. They’re good at it. They practice. According to the Swedish Board of Agriculture, the average Swede eats about 16 kg of candy a year, more than any other country on earth. A big part of that is lördagsgodis, literally ‘Saturday candy’, a tradition dating back to the 1950s that has become part of Sweden’s national identity. I witnessed it every Saturday at the restaurant in Malmö where I worked. Without fail, at least two of my adult coworkers would come into their shift with a wax-paper bag bursting with sour gummies, licorice, and chocolate caramels called Dumle.
At first I was surprised. Growing up in America, candy was generally reserved for children (adults in America average a paltry 3.6 kilograms of candy per year compared to Swedes), but then I learned to love this weird tradition. Why not?
My coworkers and I worked at an American-style burger restaurant where we were constantly chomping on salty fries, and candy was a welcome break to the monotony in our mouths, the day, our lives. Restaurant work can be incredibly stimulating, high-paced and stressful, so some days it’s just about getting through the shift. Sometimes that meant focusing on the light at the end of the tunnel (beer); sometimes it meant stuffing your face with half raspberry, half licorice sugar skulls.
That’s the thing with Swedish candy, it never came in the shape I expected. Licorice and gummies are made to resemble cars, monkeys, bottles, giraffes, boats, mushrooms, and fish among other things. Kolsvart in Malmö even makes different fish shapes – cod, blowfish, pike, char – for people who want to get taxonomically correct about their sweets. I don’t have a sweet tooth or buy my own, but if the candy is there, I eat it. I even developed a taste for super salty licorice, you know the kind that makes your whole face pucker? It’s one of the defining flavors of Swedish gastronomy – it’s in their pantheon of culture, right up there with ABBA.
But despite its reputation as an idyllic, equality-driven country, Sweden too has a not-so-savoury past. In the 1940s, the Swedish Board of Health funded experiments at the Vipeholm Mental Institution in Lund to investigate the effects of sugar on teeth. Dentists experimented on patients aged 15-70 who were medically classified as ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’, and ‘morons’. For two years, they gave groups of patients sweetened bread, sugary drinks, or toffee to see the effect each would have on their teeth. It turns out that the effect of eating eight to 24 toffees between meals is cavities.
Based on the Vipeholm data, doctors recommended that children in Sweden eat candy as a once-a-week treat and a tradition, the lördagsgodis, was born. At first, before I learned about the Vipeholm experiments, Sweden’s obsession with candy seemed funny. When I learned about the experiments, I wasn’t shocked – America has its own horrific history of medical experimentation – but it still left a bad taste in my mouth.
Social control exists in every country. Laws, mores, and norms exist to keep society rooted. When I immigrated to the country in 2015 (a Swedish woman imported me), I didn’t know what kind of social contract I was signing on to. And after a few years, I wasn’t sure I could live there without constantly breaching it. Something about the undercurrent of restraint bothered me. It wasn’t just the government telling me when to eat candy, it was the people telling me to be quiet by example, the cuisine telling me to be bland by its spicelessness, and the general air telling me when it was OK to breathe. Just the ‘right amount’ of personality, the right amount of booze, the right volume of music, all while eating candy only on Saturdays.
But the Swedes call it lagom. Its etymology traces back to the 17th century and the word lag, refers to common-law sense. It can be translated as, ‘in moderation’, ‘just right’, or ‘according to common sense’. Common sense, of course, differs from place to place. The phenomenon of Swedes not feeding their children’s friends dinner would assuredly not be common sense in just about any other nation, but is normal practice in Sweden. Seemingly contradictory, lagom can be both highly individualistic and communal. Every person gets an equal share, but they don’t necessarily share with each other. The origin of this is debatable: it could go back to a lack of feudalism, which left farmers to fend for themselves; or socialism, which left the state to look after its citizens' welfare and freed up individuals for, well, individualism. Whatever the impetus, lagom is undoubtedly a core principle of Swedish society and has a regulatory ripple effect throughout the country. People are never too much, and if you are, you get told to ‘sit down in the boat’ – the ‘boat’ meaning society as a whole.
This begs the question, how do you find the ‘right amount’? After all, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Moderation is notoriously hard to come by. Maybe lagom is just meant to be aspirational. Maybe it’s meant to be rebelled against. It’s an imperfect concept, sometimes not working at all, sometimes just causing shame.
More importantly, what if you can’t find the right amount?
In most restaurants around the world, you drink after work. In some restaurants, you drink during work. But Sweden worked on a different system because drinking after work wouldn’t be lagom. No, in Sweden they wage war against their drunk-lust, only letting it win at appropriate moments.
Sweden’s conflicted history with alcoholism and temperance manifests today through the state-owned liquor monopoly known as Systembolaget. It controls all alcohol sales and is ostensibly there to promote healthy habits, or at least stem the worst of unhealthy ones. On one level it works: Swedes only consume about two litres of alcohol each per year on average as opposed to 9.5 in America or 10-12 litres in the UK and Denmark. On the other hand, the prevalence of binge drinking in Sweden is high with 27 percent of men and 11 percent of women reporting heavy episodic drinking. So while the Swedes don’t drink as often as other countries, when they do drink, they get drunk.
Episodic for me and my coworkers meant every day after work. Restaurants exist in their own world so it makes sense that we had a different measure for lagom. ‘Just right’ meant just drunk enough to ease the adrenaline after a stressful shift, just sober enough to be able to work the next day too. Lagom is situational. People rebel against it, within certain lines of restraint. A little excess is ok, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your dental hygiene or your ability to hold a job. So go ahead, eat a shit ton of candy on Saturdays, drink five to ten beers after, and a shot of Fernet Branca while you’re at it.
If Saturdays are for letting loose, then Sundays are for getting your shit together. In restaurants that usually means working through a hangover. Typically slow but not slow enough to close the restaurant entirely, Sunday shifts are meant to be survived. Everybody wants to die – including the customers. If the hangover’s too bad, you have a drink before the place opens. If it’s worse you keep drinking to the end. Usually, on our side of the bar right next to the cash register there’s a bag of leftover lördagsgodis to pick at. It’s all the shitty candy that nobody wanted to eat the day before. You stuff your face with it anyway. Turns out you can get cavities any day of the week.
At first I was surprised. Growing up in America, candy was generally reserved for children (adults in America average a paltry 3.6 kilograms of candy per year compared to Swedes), but then I learned to love this weird tradition. Why not?
My coworkers and I worked at an American-style burger restaurant where we were constantly chomping on salty fries, and candy was a welcome break to the monotony in our mouths, the day, our lives. Restaurant work can be incredibly stimulating, high-paced and stressful, so some days it’s just about getting through the shift. Sometimes that meant focusing on the light at the end of the tunnel (beer); sometimes it meant stuffing your face with half raspberry, half licorice sugar skulls.
That’s the thing with Swedish candy, it never came in the shape I expected. Licorice and gummies are made to resemble cars, monkeys, bottles, giraffes, boats, mushrooms, and fish among other things. Kolsvart in Malmö even makes different fish shapes – cod, blowfish, pike, char – for people who want to get taxonomically correct about their sweets. I don’t have a sweet tooth or buy my own, but if the candy is there, I eat it. I even developed a taste for super salty licorice, you know the kind that makes your whole face pucker? It’s one of the defining flavors of Swedish gastronomy – it’s in their pantheon of culture, right up there with ABBA.
But despite its reputation as an idyllic, equality-driven country, Sweden too has a not-so-savoury past. In the 1940s, the Swedish Board of Health funded experiments at the Vipeholm Mental Institution in Lund to investigate the effects of sugar on teeth. Dentists experimented on patients aged 15-70 who were medically classified as ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’, and ‘morons’. For two years, they gave groups of patients sweetened bread, sugary drinks, or toffee to see the effect each would have on their teeth. It turns out that the effect of eating eight to 24 toffees between meals is cavities.
Based on the Vipeholm data, doctors recommended that children in Sweden eat candy as a once-a-week treat and a tradition, the lördagsgodis, was born. At first, before I learned about the Vipeholm experiments, Sweden’s obsession with candy seemed funny. When I learned about the experiments, I wasn’t shocked – America has its own horrific history of medical experimentation – but it still left a bad taste in my mouth.
Social control exists in every country. Laws, mores, and norms exist to keep society rooted. When I immigrated to the country in 2015 (a Swedish woman imported me), I didn’t know what kind of social contract I was signing on to. And after a few years, I wasn’t sure I could live there without constantly breaching it. Something about the undercurrent of restraint bothered me. It wasn’t just the government telling me when to eat candy, it was the people telling me to be quiet by example, the cuisine telling me to be bland by its spicelessness, and the general air telling me when it was OK to breathe. Just the ‘right amount’ of personality, the right amount of booze, the right volume of music, all while eating candy only on Saturdays.
But the Swedes call it lagom. Its etymology traces back to the 17th century and the word lag, refers to common-law sense. It can be translated as, ‘in moderation’, ‘just right’, or ‘according to common sense’. Common sense, of course, differs from place to place. The phenomenon of Swedes not feeding their children’s friends dinner would assuredly not be common sense in just about any other nation, but is normal practice in Sweden. Seemingly contradictory, lagom can be both highly individualistic and communal. Every person gets an equal share, but they don’t necessarily share with each other. The origin of this is debatable: it could go back to a lack of feudalism, which left farmers to fend for themselves; or socialism, which left the state to look after its citizens' welfare and freed up individuals for, well, individualism. Whatever the impetus, lagom is undoubtedly a core principle of Swedish society and has a regulatory ripple effect throughout the country. People are never too much, and if you are, you get told to ‘sit down in the boat’ – the ‘boat’ meaning society as a whole.
This begs the question, how do you find the ‘right amount’? After all, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Moderation is notoriously hard to come by. Maybe lagom is just meant to be aspirational. Maybe it’s meant to be rebelled against. It’s an imperfect concept, sometimes not working at all, sometimes just causing shame.
More importantly, what if you can’t find the right amount?
In most restaurants around the world, you drink after work. In some restaurants, you drink during work. But Sweden worked on a different system because drinking after work wouldn’t be lagom. No, in Sweden they wage war against their drunk-lust, only letting it win at appropriate moments.
Sweden’s conflicted history with alcoholism and temperance manifests today through the state-owned liquor monopoly known as Systembolaget. It controls all alcohol sales and is ostensibly there to promote healthy habits, or at least stem the worst of unhealthy ones. On one level it works: Swedes only consume about two litres of alcohol each per year on average as opposed to 9.5 in America or 10-12 litres in the UK and Denmark. On the other hand, the prevalence of binge drinking in Sweden is high with 27 percent of men and 11 percent of women reporting heavy episodic drinking. So while the Swedes don’t drink as often as other countries, when they do drink, they get drunk.
Episodic for me and my coworkers meant every day after work. Restaurants exist in their own world so it makes sense that we had a different measure for lagom. ‘Just right’ meant just drunk enough to ease the adrenaline after a stressful shift, just sober enough to be able to work the next day too. Lagom is situational. People rebel against it, within certain lines of restraint. A little excess is ok, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your dental hygiene or your ability to hold a job. So go ahead, eat a shit ton of candy on Saturdays, drink five to ten beers after, and a shot of Fernet Branca while you’re at it.
If Saturdays are for letting loose, then Sundays are for getting your shit together. In restaurants that usually means working through a hangover. Typically slow but not slow enough to close the restaurant entirely, Sunday shifts are meant to be survived. Everybody wants to die – including the customers. If the hangover’s too bad, you have a drink before the place opens. If it’s worse you keep drinking to the end. Usually, on our side of the bar right next to the cash register there’s a bag of leftover lördagsgodis to pick at. It’s all the shitty candy that nobody wanted to eat the day before. You stuff your face with it anyway. Turns out you can get cavities any day of the week.