When school meals are discussed in Finland, the conversation often carries a whiff of enlightened civic virtue and moral certainty. Any sensible adult is expected to have just one view: school meals are worth supporting. Full stop.
Free school meals became available to all elementary school students in Finland in 1948. In the early years, kids’ favorite school lunches in Helsinki included meat soup and semolina porridge, according to Ritva Kylli’s book on Finnish food history.
The most hated dish was thin, milk-based macaroni porridge. At the time, macaroni was too exotic an ingredient for Finns, and it was favored in institutional cafeterias because preparing it was much easier than peeling potatoes.
Macaroni’s exotic aura, meanwhile, is long gone. On offer now are spaghetti, lasagna, penne casserole, marry me pasta and Palermo pasta, now something of a Finnish school-cafeteria classic. The recipe was created for a 1998 school food competition by Sirkka Anttonen, the kitchen manager at Kärpänen School in Lahti. In a 2023 Helsingin Sanomat article, Anttonen said she was looking for a name for the dish, turned to a map of Italy, and happened upon Palermo.
School meals were once an effective weapon against poverty and malnutrition in Finland, too. When children’s stomachs aren’t growling, learning outcomes improve, as well.
The full story by Virpi Salmi is featured on Kotona.com, a Finnish lifestyle site covering homes, design, crafts and everyday living in Finland. (Kotona means “at home” in Finnish.)
