Tags
average Norwegian pizza consumption, first in the market, Frozen pizza, grandiosa, pizza consumption, unofficial national food.
I recently read a article in the newspaper that got me thinking, it said that Norway has the highest frozen pizza and microwave popcorn consumption per capita in the world, with a total of over 5 kg frozen pizza consumed per person each year, so that’s over 25 million kg frozen pizza eaten every year in our small country.
That fact does not surprise me much, since coming on the market in 1980 the frozen pizza type “Grandiosa” or “Grandis” as it is also referred to as, has been a household favorite here in Norway, often referred to as Norway’s unofficial “national food”, sad as that might sound, it’s not even that good, it just happens to benefit from being “first in the market” and having some catchy commercials.
We do not eat nearly as much “fresh” pizza, and I use the term “fresh” as loosely as possible, most pizza restaurants here being “pizza hut” style mass production places, with that amount of mass production somewhere the “love” just gets lost.
Love being the essential ingredient all of these chain “restaurants” are missing, but they just to not get that.
The US are much better when it comes to fresh pizza, but on the other hand our problem could be that we do not have any Italians (it’s to cold).
The US has as many small pizza shops as we have small “kebab” shops since almost 12% of people that live here are not Norwegians and half of those being from the middle east, we have quite a few “kebab” or other middle eastern restaurants.
I must admit to being guilty in consuming my fair share of frozen pizza, it being easy to make and relatively cheap about 8-10$ (ca50kr) per pizza ( keep in mind it is expensive here), compare that to buying a whopper menu at burger king that cost about 15-18$ (ca100kr) or end up spending double that for making food for your family at home, and dont even get me starten on the price if goingnto a nice restaurant, when you look at those numbers agains each other then I think most people will understand why we eat so much frozen pizza, it’s simply the easiest and cheapest, but simply not the best.
Eating that much frozen pizza or frozen anything for that matter cannot be good for “food understanding” and respect, but when we live in a world where we want our food fast, cheap and with minimal amount of work, then I guess that these sort of statistics about the amount of consumption will just continue to grow and grow as the years go by, in the future maybe making food yourself will be as common as hunting or building a fire is now (that being something we slowly do less and less).