Yoghurt

This is a small observation. The vast majority of Danish yoghurts taste of very little. The fat content is never over 3%. Arla, a large dairy combine, have a virtual monopoly on the milk market and this includes the bit dealing with yoghurt. They have several different lines of youghurt with distinct packaging but the small print reveals all of them to be made by the same people. None taste very interesting. The flavours options are natural, peach melba, raspeberry, banana and there are some combinations of flavours which are bland melanges of the above. I can´t tell if this situation is the result of Danes´ distaste for well-flavoured products or if is the result of Arla´s lack of imagination in the product-development stakes.
This pretty tiny complaint leads into a larger one about the dispiriting lack of interesting food to eat here. If you don´t like pigs being brutalised and you don´t like salmonella then you must avoid pork and poultry. Danish labour costs are so high that it´s hard to buy a chicken breast that is made of Danish chicken. In my supermarket they sell chicken breast from Brazil. The turkey comes from Poland. The upshot of this is that one is left to feast on beef or fish. I quite like the sild but eating it four times a week becomes monotonous. If I want a chicken that has not been brutalised and hasn´t travelled 4500 km to my table, I must fork out €25 for a free-range organic one.
In brief, Danes care little for food. Most of it is of remarkably bad quality and sold for a remarkably high price with the exception of their repulsive pork products. In the vegetable department, one quickly grows tired of the flavourless vegetables and inedible fruit. It´s as bad as American food, which is saying something. I despair when I stand in the supermarket and think "What the hell am I going to eat? None of this looks nice or tastes nice." And then, to cap it all, it all costs a fortune because the bureaucrats in the tax ministry can´t find a way to have differentiated tax levels on healthy food.

Danish Design

The photo shows a spatula designed by Rosendahl, a name in fancy Danish homeware. It costs €20 euros. The little marks on the handles are inspired by the use of rice in Japanese cooking. The black part is vulcanised rubber and it is too rigid to scrape goop from inside mixing bowls. The metal part has sharp edges where it meets the rubber and the surface of the metal part is uneven. The lower spatula costs €4 and works very well indeed. Nobody knows who designed it. The Rosendahl spatula is another nice example of how lost Danish design is today: driven by the cynical wish to part customers from their money in the name of bogus good taste.

Det var et yndigt land

There´s a well-loved song here in Denmark called "Det er et yndigt land" which means "It is a lovely country" or "It is a pretty land." Much in the same way that as we grow older we fail (thankfully) to notice how old our spouses and friends are really getting, the Danes have failed to notice how appalling they have made a vast expanse of their mostly bland landscape. It may be apocryphal but sometimes one hears of how a frog will not leave a pan of water if the temperature is raised gradually from frog-friendly to boiling. Because the increase is gradual the frog doesn´t notice the change and has no trigger to jump out. In a similar fashion, I think Danes have not noticed that their land is no longer the pretty patchwork of fields and forest dotted with small, red-bricked towns nestling in hollows or along rivers that it may once have been. Nor is it the blue-skied fairy-tale place pictured in the holiday postcards, promotional literature or picture calendars. However, idea of the pretty land dominates the the physical reality that about 80% of their towns are mostly sad, unremarkable places or worse, a foaming, unstructured clutter of boxes strewn amongst infrastructure designed by engineers with an Aspergeresque inability to understand that people have emotional needs beyond the requirements for roadways, power-lines and railways.
The other way of looking at is that as long as Danes have a cosy private home, the appearance of the outside landscape does not matter. Of course, it is worth recalling that the private family home (the suburban home) is intended to cut the individual off from society. Richard Sennett has written about this in The Uses Of Disorder (1971). That the pretty land is pretty no more is not important for a society content with the sofas, lamps and other consumer goods that VS Naipaul described in my last post. Yes, Denmark is getting uglier but nobody notices and if they do they don´t much care. The Danes are poster-children for what happens when a privatised life forgets the value of the public world outside the front door.

A small fragment

The brilliant British novelist V. S. Naipaul wrote about it in a letter to his friend Paul Theroux in 1995:

“If you are interested in horrible places, I can recommend Denmark. No one starves. Everyone lives in small, pretty houses. But no one is rich, no one has a chance to a life in luxury, and everyone is depressed. Everyone lives in their small well-organized cells with their Danish furniture and their lovely lamps, without which they would go mad.”

I found this at http://blogs.denmark.dk/peterandreas/

Inconsistency?

The Danish Government is hosting the COP15 climate change conference at the moment. For many people this is entirely consistent with Denmark´s image as a green and eco-friendly land. Think of Denmark and you might think of wind-turbines and avid recyclers and cyclers on their bikes. The wind-turbine part is true. Vestas and several other firms make thousands of wind-turbines each year and this forms a big part of Denmark´s export business. This is the part about the business of green that the Danish People´s Party/Liberal/Conservative (OVK) coalition is interested in. In this sense the "environment" is a business opportunity rather than something you might want to take care of for its own sake.
Since winning the general election in 2001 the present admininistration has tirelessly sought to downgrade issues concerning what I prefer to call nature (rather than that insipid term "the environment.") The first OVK prime-minister awarded the climate change sceptic Bjørn Lomborg with a large cash grant and an organisation of his own to promulgate his views, the Institure for Environmental Assessment.
The Ministry for the Environment was stripped of cash and influence.
Motorway construction has been given a priority and where motorways are built there soon come other buildings dependent on motor-transport.
Rail transport has been starved of funding.
The Danish Government sought carbon credits for the straw that Denmark had buried in the ground since 1989. The point of this was to estimate how much extra carbon Denmark could then emit later on. If 2 million tonnes of CO2 had been buried then Denmark sought permission to emit an extra 2 million tonnes later on.
If you drive a Porsche Cayenne but have the rear seats removed you can call it a business vehicle and get one third off the price (this amounts to a €30,000 rebate to pollute).
Commuters are given a tax-break to drive to work but only if they drive more than 9 km a day. This amounts to an incentive to live as far from work as you can - many people do so and Danes routinely drive 2 hours a day. This is thanks to a work and employment policy that encouraged commuting instead of supported moving nearer to work. The policy is 30 years old but you´d have thought that subsidising driving was ripe for review.
90% of Danes live in bungalows miles from the nearest services. These energy inefficent homes come with a lot of downsides but the one I wish to note here is their wastefulness. Even so-called carbon-neutral homes are dependent on an average annual vehicle use of 12-16,000 km a year (which means about 1300 liters of petrol per car)
In short, at the micro and macro level, Denmark fall far short of image of environmental awareness other than at the level of health and safety where safety hazards are minimised.
After the Dutch, the Danes throw out the most packaging waste in the OECD. Packaging is encouraged because it is collected and burnt to generate heat. In effect, the Danish government gets citizens to pay extra for superfluous packaging which they give for free to the heating provider who then charges them for the energy they use. The energy use is itself dependent on the style of housing Danes prefer, which is free-standing bungalows rather than in denser streets of row-houses.
The truth is that Denmark is an energy intensive society wedded to the idea of motorways, motorised transport, land-hungry suburban housing, two-car households and a legion of ill-considered polluting subsidies. A recent poll of Danes asked them if they would alter their personal behaviour to help avoid climate change. 70% said they wouldn´t, thank you very much.

Stumbling blocks

One of the single biggest innovations in street construction has been the invention on standard concrete paving slabs. These mean easy and safe walking for people of all ages, conditions and levels of fitness. In Denmark this helpful means to easier walking has been made less effective by the inclusion of strips of cobbles. These cobble blocks eventually get misalligned as the sand beneath them heaves due to the effect of freezing and thawing of the ground beneath. The blocks thus form small edges for you to stumble over. At major corners these are laid diagonally in up to four alternating rows of slabs and blocks. If you are in a wheelchair, use high-heels or push a pram these consitute a constant, unavoidable small nuisance. Why would a land so focused on functionality persist with this design? Because Danish architecture is the best in the world, and that includes the paving.

Ruko locks

Let´s start with an annoying daily detail before we get to the big societal issues. A very large number of doors in Denmark are fitted with locks made by a local firm called Ruko. Their ingenious design requires that you use both of your hands to open the door. One hand must twist the upper knob while your other must turn the lower handle. The upper knob requires a fair amount of twist-force acting upon a small area. This means you need a free hand and a good strong grip to open the door. If you are carrying something in one hand you must put it down. If your hands are slippery you may well lose your grip of the door. And if you are an older person with a weaker grip you´ll just be fed up with the whole thing. Why would a company persist in producing such a manifestly unhelpful design? One answer is because by dint of being made and designed in Dermark it is axiomatically world-class design!