And Now For Something Completely Different!

How many distinctly Swedish things can you spot in this photo!?


LUND--Now if Sweden is famous--and rightly so--for anything of importance, it must be meatballs. Sure, they have some award thing every year and they stand as a beacon for social justice and an equitable society or something like that and make good, boxy cars and excellent artillery. But what they really do well are meatballs. Meatballs and cleverly designed, reasonably priced furnishings. So its no wonder that these two things go very well together.

Meatballs are available everywhere. Any supermarket has multiple brands in packages ranging from sufficiently sized to tide over a lonely bachelor to enough to feed a boatload of Vikings on their way to Vinland. Any convenience market has them as well and they are a refrigerator staple, always ready to nuke up when nothing else seems appealing.

Now any Swede will tell you, being human more or less, that the best meatballs are, of course, Grandma's (or Mom's, who of course learned from Grandma). The second best meatballs, however, unanimously come from IKEA. IKEA, in order to make shopping palatable for the whole family, has a cafeteria smack in the middle of its showrooms (among other tricks). And while there are various choices of foodstuffs the meatball platter reigns supreme. Dished out by well-designed Swedish girls, the plate brims with meatballs in gravy, boiled potatoes and lingonberry jam.

I had not had the IKEA meatballs since my very first trip to Sweden and a few weeks ago we were nearing IKEA on the way to the summer house and, it being around lunchtime, I suggested we roam IKEAland and eat of its fare. Now no Swedish woman can resist such an offer any more than a Texan would refuse a steak and a trip to the gun store and, well, so we dined. Of this there is little more to say. The furnishings were well-designed, the meatballs were tasty, and if you eat too many of them over too many years the health care is affordable!