Our school lunches where I work are a lot better then this but were also a petty good district in the state with decent funding.
Our school lunches where I work are a lot better then this but were also a petty good district in the state with decent funding.
I was guessing Sweden (the lingonberry jam and right to roam). I was close!
I started reading the Under the North Star series by Vaino Linna, about the struggles of Finnish history. I've read book 1 so far and plan to read the sequels. I was an au pair in Finland too, many years ago. I loved it and would have loved to stay there but health issues combined with the fact that the nordic countries aren't that easy to move to, made it impossible. I would definitely like to learn more about Finnish history. I keep intending to watch The Unknown Soldier too.
Oh that is very cool.
You should definitely watch The Unknown Soldier. It is one of the rare war movies that doesn't glorify war. The writer was a leftist and his sentiment about the war is a lot clearer in the original book, but later prints and the movie too are pretty heavily bourgeoisie-washed. Other great leftist authors are people like Lauri Viita, but pretty sure he was never translated. On marxist.org there are also amazing writings by commies from here that are all also in Finnish, but they can tell you the leftist history of this country, the war and how we ended up where we now are.
OT: I will add that the right to roam law in Finland is very different from the Swedish one and the Finnish one is the most expansive. It originates from the time where the various peoples living here had no concept of landownership and people would just take up a spot in the forest and live their life there (slash&burn farming) and when you moved on from a spot, it was again free for anyone to live in. As a result all sorts of foraging and sleeping in the wild is allowed and nobody can announce anything as private property even if they own it. In Sweden it was more like "you can spend a night in the lords lands and eat one handfull of nuts from the tree, but then you need to move on".
What do you mean, later prints are bourgeosie-washed? Do you mean that they changed later editions of the book? If so I will have to see if I can find an old copy one day. I would love to read more from Finnish writers, it's too bad most didn't get translated. It took me about 15 years just to find a translated copy of the first Under the North Star book. It only got translated into English once, many years ago and all the copies got sold and never re-printed. After years of searching I found a library with a copy.
I would love to read more about how Finland came to be the way it is, it seems to have such an interesting history. I wanted to learn the language too (it sounds lovely) but I don't have the energy to take on such a task and there aren't that many resources for learning it. I learnt a little Swedish many years ago and there seemed to be a lot more resources for learning Swedish at home, very few for Finnish.
The bourgeoisie very much took on the nationalistic project and the works of Finnish authors and kind of claimed them. The original print Linna wrote was never published as it was as the publisher demanded parts of it to be censored and the local bourge press turned the book into a moral panic as it went against their narrative. The original book name would be just "A War Novel" and today you can find it printed under the name Sotaromaani. In it he takes clear stances againts nationalism and militarist for example and these are things that have been purged from The Unknown Soldier. There is a study about it here in Finnish that might be translatable. Linna also personally held some anti-Soviet brainworms and some of these were also purged so it's complicated as well. But later the book and the movie both have been heavily utilized to advance nationalism, militarism and russophobia even though it was the Whites who used to hate this book.
It's a shame that most if not all of the actual leftist history here is these days underground or only in Finnish. But I do know that O.W. Kuusinen also wrote in English and these works can at least be read online.