Sweden’s Love Affair with Tubed Foods

I marvel at the vast selection of tubed foods in a Swedish grocery store.

Walk into any grocery store in Sweden, and you’re bound to run into a dazzling assortment of tubed foods. This is nothing new for locals, but as an American, I was highly intrigued. Sure, we like tubes, too, for things like toothpaste, condiments, syrup, and frosting, but we pretty much limit our use of tubes to those edibles that are easily and naturally squeezed out. Not so for the Swedes — their tubed foods encompass an amazing range of products. We’re talking bacon, lobster, ham, mushrooms, and the ever-popular caviar — these things, last time I checked, are not of a consistency conducive to being stuffed in a tube, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Here, everything is turned into a paste (often of a cheese variety).

This is quite helpful, I suppose, for those who have trouble chewing, are always on the go, or don’t have easy access to a refrigerator (I do find it slightly disconcerting that most of these tubed foods don’t require refrigeration, but who am I to question a system that’s clearly been working for quite some time?).

Eating what are regularly solid foods in tubed form reminded me a little too much of my elementary school days when I thought it was actually okay to eat cheese out of a can (some of that residue is probably still clogging my arteries), so I didn’t partake. It was, however, a missed opportunity to eat like a local, so I should’ve just gone for it.

If you’ve ever indulged in Sweden’s tubed foods, how did you like them? Are they a handy invention or a strange mutation?