Lethal Lunch

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There is one detail in the structure of the Finnish workday that remains a bit strange; lunch. In the US, few workplaces have a cafeteria and most folks either eat at their desk or drive to the nearest Taco Hell and make a run for the border in their car. Lunch is an unceremonious affair if people take a lunch at all. I spent years either working instead of lunch or eating a sandwich at my desk somewhere around 2pm. Here, lunchtime is 11am and it seems, with rare exception, that everyone heads to the cafeteria and has a hearty, hot lunch. I presume that since few people have cars that driving off the rez for eatz just isn't possible, so a large majority just eat in. Lunch still feels like a guilty pleasure even though I've grown used to the 11am schedule, but the food....well, no.

My weight hadn't changed by more than a kilogram or two in 10 years until I started eating lunch at the cafeteria at work and I'm starting to suspect that the Finnish lunch is, in fact, deadly. Actually, I don't think my diet has really changed at all, except for the work cafeteria food, for the past 3 months so it must be responsible for my expanding landscape. I had heard rumous about the Finnish cafeteria food, but the scathing reviews didn't come close to the reality. It's not an all-you-can-eat buffet and I'm not snarfing heaping globs of the grey, unidentified goo that the cook feels compelled to stand next to and reassure the diners that it really is edible and does taste good in spite of the colour. The cook also seems to love curry for those days where the leftovers are 'repurposed' by putting them into a bright yellow curry goo and served with rice. When the entree isn't grey or curry yellow, it's brown. Rice, pasta and au gratin potatoes of some variety are a fixture. It's all the food that the videos in health class warned you not to eat. I keep imagining that we'll watch someone keel over from a massive heart attack in the middle of a mound of pyttipannu topped with 2 or 3 fried eggs. You know it's a bad day when most tables have salt, pepper and/or HP sauce being passed around as they did today. I never take the dessert, often a vat of an unknown gloop, since I generally prefer a dessert with texture even if the stuff happens to taste good. And water is the only beverage since Finnish cafeterias haven't been bought by the soft drink conglomerates which leaves a variety of milk products and a slightly alcoholic beer called kotikalja that, even at 1% ABV, I just can't bring myself to drink during working hours. Perhaps Martha Stewart's next book could be on mess hall/cafeteria/prison cooking in an attempt to help prisoners everywhere get a decent meal. We can only hope.

I really must stop eating lunch in the cafeteria every day and start riding my bike to work again soon instead of sitting on the bus so that I'll hopefully be able to avoid what really terrifies me most: shopping for new clothes. In Finland.