Never get between a Norwegian and his coffee

After 30 years in the newspaper business, I've developed a reputation it seems, namely, my "Norwegianness." Thank goodness I have some defining trait to hang my hat on.

Sons of Norway member Sue Sande e-mailed me recently and asked if I'd put in a plug for Knut Jensen's concert here on Jan. 26.

"You do such a great job of bringing 'Norwegianness' to readers," she told me. "Your knack for writing about the quirks of Scandinavians is so entertaining and widely read."

With all that praise heaped upon me, there was no way I could leave out a mention of Jensen's upcoming concert. The young Norwegian pianist is a master at playing the music of Edvard Grieg and telling about Grieg's life and emphasis on the folk life of Norway.

Anytime you can go hear a Norwegian in concert, do it. Trust me, it'll be great. The concert starts at Glacier High School Performance Hall at 7 p.m. And get this, COFFEE and Norwegian goodies will be served.

That brings me to the real reason for this week's diatribe - Norwegians and their coffee.

Just the other day a co-worker commented about how all the novels she'd ever read by Norwegian authors had myriad references to Norwegians and their coffee drinking.

"They're always drinking coffee," she mused, wondering how it is that a country as far north as Norway ever developed a coffee habit in the first place.

I really couldn't tell her. It's a custom that transferred to Norwegian immigrants and then was passed along to future generations. I don't remember ever having a meal without coffee being served when I grew up in Northern Minnesota. And it wasn't served only at meals. The farm folks had to have their forenoon coffee and their afternoon coffee, always black.

At Lutheran Church functions - even if they started at 8 p.m. - there would always be coffee afterwards, long before decaf was invented.

My dad used to drink coffee to quench his thirst, which seems odd now that I think about it. He'd come in around 4 p.m. after toiling in the hot sun on a tractor, and the first thing he'd reach for was the coffee pot.

Norwegian blogger Rolf Buskerud has done the math on his country's obsession with coffee. He says that in 2007 Norwegians consumed 45,000 metric tons of java, an increase of 500,000 kilograms from the previous year. It means that every coffee-drinking Norwegian consumed an average of 2,192 cups of coffee last year, or roughly six cups a day.

Norwegians still top the list of coffee-drinking European nations, Buskerud proudly proclaimed, with nearly 2.8 million coffee-drinking Norwegians out of a population of more than 4.5 million.

On the "Study in Norway" Web site, a recruiter tells prospective exchange students that "Norwegians drink more coffee than anyone else in the world" and explained that getting invited over for coffee would be the highlight of their social life there.

Just this week I learned what might be feeding Norwegians' addiction to coffee: Drinking too much of it can trigger hallucinations. An article by Scientific American said British psychologists reported in a medical journal that college students they studied said they sometimes heard voices after drinking at least seven cups of coffee daily (an amount dangerously close to Norwegians' daily habit).

Could it be that Norwegians are using coffee as their drug of choice? It would explain a lot.

Norway is known for its trolls, those ugly, fearsome members of a mythical race from Norse mythology. I'm guessing it was a bunch of Norskies strung out on coffee that first conjured up the idea of trolls, then turned it into a marketing bonanza.

And I suspect that if we delved even deeper into Norse heritage, we'll find that Norwegians hallucinating from too much coffee might be to blame for the invention of lutefisk. No person in their right mind would ever have thought it was a good idea to soak perfectly good fish in lye.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com