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I promised someone I would do this today, so here goes... Something silly:
To understand the Swedish people, and the Swedish mentality, you have to understand our milk. Sounds peculiar? Well maybe! You see, our milk is very important to us (for some reason, hopefully a historical one, and not some unhealthy obsession about bovine mammary glands and udders and stuff...). We've been raised since generations on it, and teached that milk is good for us; it is nourishing, and makes our bones strong (to prove the point, it is fortified with vitamins too). Recent scientific studies may point in a different direction however, but that's kinda beside the point, really.
The point is, milk is kind of a big thing over here. We're some of the biggest milk-drinkers in the world actually (along with coffee, but that's ALSO beside the point).
So let's get right to that point. I mean like, RIGHT NOW:
In the beginning, in the dawn of time, there was only MILK. It was pasteurized and homogenized of course, and had a set, standardized fat content of tree percent (and even wayer back, before the dawn of time I guess, it actually came in glass bottles and not the cartons we all are used to today). Seemed nice and proper at the time it was decided I'm sure, three percent. Gives it a nice and well-rounded taste without making your mouth feel buttery and slick. Actually, it was decreed the entire, banana-shaped kingdom of ours, a length of some 1.574 kilometers or in the thereabouts (that's 977 miles for you metric-challenged peeps), should have the same milk. No regional deviations, oh no. Not in Sweden. We don't do things like that over here.
Sure, three's a fine number in most respects, but then we started discovering cardio-vascular diseases and such, and the correlation between those and saturated fat intake. So in an effort to let people cut down on that, another kind of milk was introduced; 'light' milk. It comes in blue containers, as compared to standard milk's red, and it has just half a percent of fat in it.
Many years passed, the Swedish people was rested and content - for the most part anyway - but eventually we discovered something was missing in our lives. You see, we're really a people mostly devoid of extremes in either directon. We don't like it when things become too controversial, we close our eyes or look the other way. Nice and quiet, that's how we want it. A bit 'hobbitey' you might even say.
We even have a word for that. A word which has NO correlation in the English language (and indeed, most of the other languages on this planet, either spoken today or extinct I believe). That word means something like, "not too much and not too little", or maybe, "just about right", something like that. And we realized our milk JUST WASN'T RIGHT. We had one extreme, and the other, but what about all those people who wanted the richer taste of standard, but the lower fat contents of light? SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!
And it was.
Lo and behold, 'middle' milk was created! It comes in green containers ('green' in Swedish rhymes with the word 'pleasant', not sure there's a real correlation there, but one can always pretend), and it has a fat content of one and a half percent. A nice compromise I'm sure you agree, and very, very Swedish!
One of our more famous writers, stand-up comedians and playwrights (and, he's gay too by the way), has written a book with a slightly peculiar title. It's called "The land of the middle milk". I haven't read it, but I suppose it is about us.
So now you know FAR more about Swedish milk than you ever wanted to know...!
My friend, was that silly enough?
"But he that hath the steerage of my course,
direct my sail."
-William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act One, Scene IV
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Silly.
By: lenny on Tue, 03 September 2002 15:01 |
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Milk?
By: tim on Tue, 03 September 2002 16:58 |
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Please: What is that magic swedish word for "just about right"?
By: jasper on Tue, 03 September 2002 18:19 |
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What, no 'got milk?' jokes?
By: lenny on Tue, 03 September 2002 22:31 |
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Re: What, no 'got milk?' jokes?
By: e on Wed, 04 September 2002 02:21 |
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New state slogan for Wisconsin
By: trevor on Thu, 05 September 2002 05:12 |
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With the right 'dairy air' that might not be a half-bad proposal!
By: lenny on Thu, 05 September 2002 05:30 |
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Middle Milk ???
By: smith on Tue, 03 September 2002 21:27 |
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