Observations on Swedish Culture

Lately I've fallen into a bit of a breakfast routine: if I've overslept or just don't feel like making breakfast at home, I swing by my favorite bakery/pastry place on the way to the subway and grab a croissant. Then, I duck into one of the ubiquitous Pressbyråns (combo newsstand and mini-mart^*) and grab a single-serving bottle of delicious, nutritious, Yoggi drinkable yogurt:


As you can see from the photo (click to enlarge to a readable size), this particular brand is available in a wide variety of flavors. There are a few that I like and drink regularly; the raspberry- boysenberry- blueberry combo (far left) is my current favorite. The third one from the left, with the hearts on it (kärlek, which literally translates to "love"), is also surprisingly decent: cherry with a touch of chocolate and hot pepper. It sounds weird, but it's actually pretty good.

But then there are combinations that seem like the result of some sort of bizarre contest to see who can come up with the most hurl-inducing flavor. These include:

• banana-mango-orange (C'mon shake your body baby do the Conga? No thanks.)
  
• pineapple-guanabana-vanilla (If I ingest guanabana, will I be able to see dead people?)
• pitango-passionfruit-mango (What the hell is pitango? It sounds like a high-speed wireless access service. And I don't feel like drinking a cable modem for breakfast.)
  
• raspberry-pomegranate-guarana (Isn't that the crazy South American fish with the really sharp teeth??)
  
• litchi-something (I'll just point out that the Wikipedia article says that the fruit can be dried, "at which point the flesh shrinks and darkens, somewhat resembling a human earlobe in texture." I don't want any earlobes for breakfast, either.)

Who thinks of this shit? What demented Swedish focus group decided anyone would actually want any of these flavors? Did the CEO lose a bar bet? Or did the Yogurt Flavor Designer Posse get all schnockered on some weekend dairy retreat and start playing Exquisite Corpse or something? Whatever—I think some of those are awfully weird. But while they're at it, I have a few more suggestions:

• Lemon-peanut-butter-and-tarantula
• Strawberry-phillycheesesteak
• Mango-raspberry-Velveeta
• Windex-kiwi-lime
• Blueberry-roadtar
• Soot (OK, so this isn't really a combination. But you have to admit it would be funny if drinkable yogurt came in "soot.")

On second thought, maybe I shoud get up earlier and make breakfast at home more often.

^* I positively refuse to write it as "Kwik-E-Mart" or anything like that. As far as I can tell, this deliberately-misspelling-the-name-to-get-it-to-stick-in-people's-minds thing is a uniquely American phenomenon; I simply haven't seen it anywhere else. And I generally avoid patronizing such places if I can, just on principle. Learn how to spell, morons.