It’s been years since I last wrote anything substantial on here, but I decided on a whim that 2021 would be the year I revived this neglected corner of the food internet. I wish I could claim that such a decision was the result of an inspirational bolt from the blue, or a wholesome desire to do more things that I enjoy as a result of the miserable devastation wreaked by 2020…but the honest truth is that I had to pay 155 dollars to Squarespace for the privilege of reinstating my expired domain, and I’ll be damned if I let that money go to waste. I will chain myself to this desk and churn out post after post until I feel some arbitrary sense of having gotten ‘good value for money’. Welcome to 2021 on Nutmegs, seven: powered by stubbornness, excessive thriftiness and a vague, directionless sense of spite. It’ll still be an improvement on 2020.
I’d love to begin with some luscious, instagram-worthy recipe and a chirpy anecdote, but that is precisely the point. I haven’t felt inspired to post anything of the sort for over two years, and although there are a number of factors involved in this – laziness, possibly; a desire not to spend my entire day at work looking at a screen only to then come home and start writing at a screen again; having expended a lot of my creative energy on my first cookbook – it occurred to me that perhaps the feeling is best summarized by the thought that it just…stopped being fun.
And I can pinpoint with some precision the moment it stopped being fun. I can trace it to a September afternoon in 2018, the day after I moved my life to a cramped, dark apartment in Oslo, when I went for a walk to buy something for breakfast the next day. I can still remember taking the tub of Greek yoghurt and four pears to the till, and finding out I’d be paying the equivalent of £11 for the privilege. (Just for context, this would probably set you back about £2-3 in a British supermarket).
What an epic journey of frustration, disappointment and apathy it has been since then.
When your entire life revolves around food, Norway is not a good place to be. There, I said it. Beklager, Norwegian patriots – I’m not intending this to be a critique of the motherland you know and love, and once quick look at my Instagram feed will assure you that there are plenty of aspects of Norwegian life I do very much enjoy, so don’t hate me too much. But from personal, lived experience (and I’ve given it 2.5 years): being a food lover and a food writer in Norway is slowly eating away at my soul.
Let’s begin with the prices, for this is probably the heart of the matter. I’m lucky enough to have grown up in the UK which, for all its many problems, has astonishingly cheap groceries (and, I should point out that Brexit may well change all this in the horrible dystopian future that is no doubt around the corner). I’d be the first to argue that they shouldn’t be that cheap. I have taken my fair share of umbrage over the years: Sainsburys selling whole chickens for less than the price of a takeaway coffee (and that’s a British takeaway coffee, which will set you back about £2 – not a Norwegian one, which incidentally would be closer to £5 or £6) was a real low point, and I was genuinely staggered to see Tesco advertising bags of sprouts for 14p just this Christmas. Considering I like to cook quite a lot of exotic dishes, few single ingredients have ever stood out as unnervingly expensive (I’d also be the first to acknowledge my privilege, as a comfortably middle-class southerner, in being able to say this: we also suffer from staggering social inequality and a horrific amount of the population having to depend on food banks, but if you haven’t realized by now that this entire blog is based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, then please accept that and bear with me).
When you live in a country for most of your adult lifetime, you get used to what things cost. It becomes a ‘standard’ of sorts. Consequently, every single foray to the shops for groceries in Oslo over the past two and a half years has involved the same micro-rollercoaster of unpleasant emotions; usually a combination of astonishment and outrage. Bear in mind that I lived in Denmark for two years, so you’d think I’d have been gently initiated into the world of Scandinavian prices. Norway is famed for being one of the most expensive countries in the world: 44% more expensive than any other country in Europe (only Iceland is more expensive). You might imagine, then, that groceries tend to be around 44% more expensive than they would be in the UK, but it’s not that simple. Wandering through the aisles of a Norwegian supermarket feels like a Kafkaesque nightmare where all logic and reason has gone out of the window, and they’ve let some maniac in with a wad of shelf stickers who just makes up the prices according to his or her capricious whims.
Milk, bread, eggs – what you might call staples – are entirely reasonably priced compared with the UK, largely because they’re fairly cheap items to begin with, so adding that potential 44% on top doesn’t result in an outrage factor. Fine.
But would you like to buy a block of halloumi (or, as I think of it, ‘vegetarian bacon’, and it’s basically become my go-to since I mostly stopped eating meat)? That’ll set you back between £6 and £9. What about a small bag of flaked almonds, the kind you might strew liberally across the surface of a banana loaf before baking? £10. A tub of ice cream from one of the big brands? £8-12. White chocolate chips for baking? You can only buy one brand, an American one, and a packet will set you back something absolutely insane like £15. Even if you just buy a bar of plain white chocolate and chop it yourself, it’s still markedly more expensive than in the UK (and hard to find, too). A bottle of my favourite, grapefruit juice, is usually £4-5 unless on special offer. And, one of the most insane discoveries: a packet of gnocchi, the kind you can pick up for £1-2 in the UK, costs £9 in Oslo. Nine pounds, for what is essentially a packet of pasta.
About two months into my life in Norway, I wanted to bake the pumpkin cheesecake recipe that you can now find in my cookbook. Had I gone to the shop and filled my basket with the necessary items (namely, a tin of pumpkin puree and 3 tubs of cream cheese), it would have cost the equivalent of £22. I made it in the end, because it was for a recipe piece I’d been commissioned to do. It tasted even better, seasoned piquantly with my frustrated tears.
Recipes I’ve cooked habitually for years, or ingredients I’d normally pick up without a second thought, have become borderline inaccessible. Before the Scandisplainers (yes, this is a term I’ve coined) start parroting ‘Oh, but salaries are proportionally higher there’: well, yes, but it’s not so simple. Certain food items cost, sometimes, six times more than they might in the UK. I certainly don’t earn six times more than I would in the UK. Nor is this necessarily a question of affordability: I am grateful that I can afford to spend £22 on the ingredients for a cheesecake, in the sense that this would not bankrupt me or put me in financial jeopardy. It’s the principle, the arbitrary madness of it all. There are various factors behind the astounding markup on some of these food items, and a lot of it has to do with Norway being outside the EU, and with its infamous monopoly and protectionist culture:
Government officials have long tried to pinpoint the reasons for Norway’s famously high food prices [...] The protection for farmers and resulting high prices for milk or lamb meat despite overproduction, for example, isn’t the only factor. Officials also cite Norway’s powerful concentration of grocery retailers and wholesalers, which can reduce competition. Just a few companies dominate the grocery market and can more easily set higher prices for everything from imported cranberry juice to brie. Norway also has higher costs levels regarding what merchants, for example, must pay for commercial rent and their employees. All those factors remain under another investigation into food prices in Norway that was launched by the government last year. (‘Norway’s Food Now Priciest in Europe’)
Just in the past month, it was announced that a certain string of Norwegian supermarket chains are under investigation for price-fixing. I could go on, but I won’t bore you too much with the details; just enough to give the impression I’ve done some research, which I have, and that I’m not just whining (which I am, but isn’t that the point of an indulgent personal blog, and something that expats do particularly well?) So much of the Norwegian grocery store system seems designed to steer you away from all those nasty ‘exotic’ ingredients like halloumi and almonds, and towards supplies of farmed salmon, brown cheese, meat and potatoes. You’re priced out of variety, innovation, and experimentation. Your tastes are being shaped by corporations that seem to arbitrarily slap frankly insane prices on whatever they like that isn’t home-grown (and, given that only 3% of Norway is farmable land, what isn’t home-grown is…most things).
My life derives its joy, structure, purpose and meaning from food and experimentation – eating my way around the globe from the safety of my kitchen, particularly in the middle of a global pandemic – which means that my shopping list looks different almost every day. There’s always some new ingredient that I haven’t yet tried to buy in Norway, which means that there is always the potential for disappointment and fury when (/if – more on that below) I track it down and find that the price is so astronomically insane that dinner plans have to be rethought on the spot. It’s wearing, frustrating, and it just makes me want to throw something on the floor in the supermarket and start screaming. Not as much, though, as my second major bugbear: lack of choice.
I’ll pre-empt your potential objections: I’d be the first to say that too much choice is at the heart of so many of our problems these days, from global food waste to the ‘decision fatigue’ that psychologists are linking to modern mental health issues. We don’t need an entire yoghurt aisle in the supermarket (an example also used by David Wallace-Wells’ disturbing but necessary book on climate change, The Uninhabitable Earth). In fact, there is some speculation that the reason the standard Norwegian matpakke (packed lunch) is so horrible is because it prevents decision fatigue and leaves more scope for creativity. But, speaking from personal experience: when you’re used to being able to find all the ingredients for a single recipe under one roof (whether that be the sterile, fluorescent strip-lit ceiling of a major supermarket chain, or the colourful awning of a good local market, like the ones I’ve known in York, Oxford and Cambridge), moving to Norway is a perennial exercise in disappointment and frustration. There is so little choice. If you do even manage to find the item you’re looking for, there’s usually only one option. No ‘budget’ version, mid-range version and luxury version, as we are so accustomed to in the UK. Usually just one, and the price might be that of the ‘luxury’ version in the UK…without the matching quality. But more often than not, if you want to gather the ingredients for a single recipe, this will necessitate trips to at least two different shops. The supermarket, which has the basics of dairy, bread, meat, fish, etc. that you will often pay dearly for, and then one of the many innvanndringsbutikker (the name literally translates as ‘immigrant shop’ … Norwegians themselves have realized that they need a new name) that stock a decent selection of herbs, spices, and vaguely ‘exotic’ dry goods like rice, pasta, dried fruit, nuts, etc. They are the only shops that attempt to sell (some) fruit and vegetables without a metric ton of plastic around them. They are also a little cheaper (many of them get their goods from Sweden, where groceries are markedly less expensive, so they can afford to pass on some of the savings to customers).
In addition to having so few options, some things just don’t seem to exist in Norwegian grocery stores. Watercress, to pluck a random example from the air. Very common in bags for salad in the UK; non-existent in Oslo. In fact, many types of greens: cavolo nero, spring greens, both of which I love, are not sold here. I’ve grown them myself with good results, which makes it even more puzzling that you can’t buy them. I suspect there just isn’t demand: lack of choice potentially breeds lack of demand for more choice. Maybe there’s a Stockholm-syndrome-style explanation: you learn to love your lack of options. Oslo supermarket syndrome?
I’ve been told by many Norwegians, and expats, that the situation is rapidly improving, and I’ve even witnessed it myself (paneer, for example, just recently graced the supermarket shelves, and there are now gluts of persimmons appearing in mainstream shops in the winter), and I should also mention that there is some compensation in the fact that Norway has excellent forageable food, but the bottom line is: this is not a country for someone with a voracious appetite for culinary experimentation. I’m tired of having to go on a detective hunt every time I turn the page in a recipe book and think ‘This looks nice’. I’m tired of having to haul my bike (yes OK it is electric, but I have so many intense locks to stop it getting stolen that just locking and unlocking it takes about half an hour each time) from one end of the city to another, simply to make one meal. I’m tired of having to make two shopping lists for different dinners, just in case Plan A is unfeasible due to either availability or price (or a combination of both). Sometimes both Plan A and Plan B have been no-goes: cue a minor meltdown in Aisle 4. No, I don’t want to rein in my cooking and just live off salmon and potatoes, or some vaguely fish-based product that comes in toothpaste-style tube. Especially this past year, cooking has been basically all I’ve had to transport me away from a country in which I have felt cripplingly lonely and isolated since day one.
This has also led to an almost obsessive-compulsive fear or hatred of wasting food. When food is so expensive, to waste even a smidgeon of it feels unconscionable (and, of course, given that food waste is linked to climate change, it really is literally unconscionable anyway). It is years since I decided what to cook based on what I felt looked nice in a recipe book, or on Instagram. My entire cooking is dominated by trying to use up whatever is in the fridge or freezer (I’ll often buy things in the reduced section of the supermarket, due to aforementioned insane prices). Sometimes I will get distracted at work by obsessively itemizing, from memory, the contents of my cupboards, fridge and freezer, so that I can feel some small sense of accomplishment at having made inroads into their contents. I write endless lists. They achieve nothing. At least I haven’t quite got to the stage of hoarding the water from cooking pasta or potatoes, as Nigella admits to in her latest book, but reading her admission was oddly comforting. It seems I’m not the only one.
Some of this is linked from a desire to avoid food waste; the rest, I think, is the result of having had to move house four times in the last four years (two of those moves international ones) and the slight residual trauma that accompanies the dual perils of renting and being an academic: I have no idea what part of the world I’ll end up in for my next job, and my landlord might suddenly decide to sell my flat out from under my feet, as happened two years ago. It leads to this strange mentality whereby an empty fridge and empty cupboards become the Holy Grail. Just how some productivity gurus fetishise the notion of ‘Inbox Zero’, I fetishise the concept of ‘Larder Zero’: my life in food is lived with the constant fear that I could be required to gather up and move my entire life with very little notice, and I wouldn’t want any edible food to be left behind.
So, there it is. Food stopped being fun a long time ago. I no longer feel I have the luxury of deciding what to cook based on a whim, or something that has caught my eye in a recipe book. I am a slave to Larder Zero, to the Norwegian supermarket monopolies, to the limits of my salary (for which I am very grateful, but I would also like to maybe consider buying a place to live one day, and just as millennials were advised by an Australian millionaire that they’d never afford property if they keep eating avocado toast, so I’ll never achieve my dream if I keep making £22 cheesecakes).
This is personal experience. I am very aware that I am privileged enough to live in a country with an excellent social welfare system, earning a salary, and that lack of grocery availability is hardly the end of the world. But when your world is scaled down to the confines of a shopping list or the walls of a grocery store, particularly in the midst of a pandemic, tiny disappointments and price outrages are felt as sizeable ripples on the already storm-tossed lake of a stressed and lonely mind.
I’m hoping that reactivating this blog in 2021 might help me to remember why I grew to love cooking in the first place. Perhaps I’ll use it as a space to share some of my recipes, produced in the eternal quest for Larder Zero. Perhaps I’ll take advantage of a platform from which to vent furiously about lack of watercress or the price of marinated artichokes. Perhaps I will simply scream miserably into a void, and then go and make a cake. We shall see.