Olli Löytty

Indian Baltic herring

Finland has traditionally been considered a small, closed monoculture, a meat-and-two-veg kind of a country — but, Olli Löytty argues, it has actually always been more of a cultural smörgåsbord, with exotic imports

The potato is an immigrant. Food has never respected cultural borders, let alone national ones. In crossing borders, foods have mixed together in ways never before seen, heard, tasted, smelled or, simply put, encountered by the senses. Restaurant menus even list such astonishing food types as Indian Baltic herring. Does this mean the Baltic herring is an emigrant?

When people say that Finland is becoming multicultural, the underlying assumption is that the country was once monocultural. Therein lies the problem of the multicultural concept in a yoghurt pot: the claim that pure, unblended cultures exist. In spite of scholars’ assertions to the contrary, Finnishness is still perceived as a solid, unchanging phenomenon, or even as a quality of character which our forefathers and foremothers carried with them in birchbark backpacks from somewhere behind the Urals. If there were such ur-Finns, potatoes were not among their provisions.

The potato moved to Finland on its own, from South America. As far as is known, potatoes spread with soldiers returning from the Seven Years’ War, so, sometime after the mid-18th century. Some hundred years later the potato became an important part of the Finnish diet, the transnational whizz-of-all-trades having stolen the job from the properly Finnish turnip.

When speaking of immigration, one usually refers to people. Something else moves to Finland along with the people. For lack of a better term, this is customarily called ‘culture’.

I bumped into Indian Baltic herring on the lunch menu of the Telakka Restaurant in Tampere. My luncheon companions and I worked up our indignation at such a dish. If natural selection has seen best that the Baltic herring never swim all the way to India, who is man to defy this arrangement? Mimicking nationalist enthusiasm, we chose the purely Finnish selection from the menu: lasagne.

As we marvelled over the Baltic herring awash in spicy Indian sauce, we presented precisely the sort of arguments used when opposing immigration and multiculturalism. There is a precise national and cultural organisation in the world which should not be muddled. However, if we were to be completely consistent, in the name of cultural purity we would need to oppose not only Indianised Baltic herring but also the potato which has taken root in Finnish soil.

Tampere is not generally thought of as the world’s most tolerant or cosmopolitan city. Tampere is so self-contained that even its main ice hockey opponent is one of its own two teams: either Ilves or Tappara. Nonetheless, the Tampere dining table has been extremely open to welcoming multicultural delicacies. And I am not just talking about pärämätsi here, but rather, a much more familiar ethnic treat.

You ask, what marvel is pärämätsi? Peremetch is a traditional Tatar pastry – a round pie filled with strongly spiced minced beef, somewhat reminiscent of the Karelian pirogy, familiar to every Finn. It was introduced to the Tampere menu by a Finnish Tatar named Mönever ‘Möyssy’ Saadetdin who had played for the Ilves hockey team and worked after his sports career as a baker. It is said that Möyssy’s own mother came to the bakery to teach the staff how to prepare peremetch.

The more familiar ethnic treat to which I referred is pizza, which was already being served in the early 1970s in Tampere’s Tavastia restaurant. According to the menu, this open-faced pie was originally from Turkey, from where it left to travel along two trade routes, one to the west and one to the north. In Italy it developed into today’s more familiar form, but on its journey northwards over the Black Sea and up the Volga it changed shape and the strong spices were washed away, and this led to the birth of the Karelian pirogy [a Finnish ‘calzone’ in which the crust is filled with rice or potato].

Pizza’s two travel routes met and blended, where other than in the Tavastia restaurant I mentioned, which offered not only traditional open pies with tomato sauce on a wheat-flour base, but also multicultural (though already integrated into the home culture) hybrid pies on a rye crust, with cranberry sauce in place of tomato sauce, goat’s cheese in place of mozzarella, juniper berries in place of capers and sautéed reindeer in place of dried ham.

Even if we are not prepared to swallow the claim that the Karelian pirogy has its roots in Turkish ur-pizza, we must in any case concede that it is not originally from Finland and that it, too, has had to become integrated into our society. There is no Kalevalan ur-cook who came up with the Karelian pirogy in a test kitchen. The cultural smorgasbord is full of imports that have travelled to us by many different routes.

In spite of this cultural chaos from the very start, now, in the beginning of the second millennium, we speak of becoming multicultural as a new phenomenon. The world has indeed shrunk and the routes have changed, and perhaps belonging has also become a more complicated issue for many. The necessity of identifying with one single defined place and people is not particularly sensible for many people. Mankind is at least as transnational as the potato.

Nor do the current changes taking place in Finland mean that different, foreign elements enter alongside or into a pure and authentic national culture. As with the Indian Baltic herring, at issue is a totally new kind of food form, a new blend.

When I use food as an example of the continuous and unavoidable cross-border movement and mingling of cultures, my intent is not to simplify the recognised problems of multiculturalism. Food is definitely not a banal detail of everyday life but rather an important part of the obscure and multifaceted subset of life that is called culture. Daily bread is, in many ways, something holy.

Food also reveals how the senses are an intrinsic part of culture. Culture is not simply language and agreements on the meaning of concepts but also fragrances, sounds, smells, colours, shapes, patterns, rhythms, feelings, melodies. It may not be the immigrant family next door themselves, as people, that are annoying, but rather the strange voices behind the wall, the colourful apparel and spicy food smells that linger in the stairwell. The object of fear is not the person but rather his or her appearance, voice and smell. The foreigner seeps under your skin.

But maybe it is easier to understand curry, couscous, pelmens, jeera, sauerkraut, garam masala, basmati rice and garlic, when we know that even the potato is an immigrant. Maybe it is also easier to understand Indian Baltic herring when we know that our familiar potato is an important part of the diet of many different cultures.

Food preparation can be a useful metaphor when speaking of multiculturalisation. Perhaps one could think of society as a mixture bubbling on the stove or in the oven. What is essential is the proportions, not the ingredients. Perhaps this metaphor of society as a slow-cooking pot is a fitting starting point for considering how to manage differentness.

Culture is a slippery concept which can be used to explain almost anything, whether spices used for food, musical rhythms, so-called honour killings, or just in general the custom of human society to organise its life and give meanings to its surroundings. For this reason it is also a dangerous concept. By referring to culture we can repeat and spread thinking that is essentially based on racial classifications without once mentioning the word ‘race’ or referring in any way to people’s skin colour. By applying the term culture, racist thoughts can be dressed as something quite acceptable.

In conversations about multiculturalism and integration, culture can easily become a means of explaining problems, when it is used to discuss such collisions of civilisations as head scarves, or Lutheran hymns sung in schools with pupils of various religions – that is, both world politics and everyday banalities at the same time. As an explainer of conflicts, however, culture is poor in that it prevents us from seeing the individual’s responsibility. People who live governed by their culture act like remote-controlled robots, incapable of deciding their actions by themselves. We cite culture when we speak of Finns’ intolerance and negative attitudes toward immigrants, and we again turn to culture for help analysing the immigrants’ difficulties in adjusting.

Put bluntly: culture is what leads brothers to beat their sister to within an inch of her life when she is dissatisfied with their marriage plans for her. Culture is to blame when some people consider it their right to make fun of others’ religion, and culture is also to blame when those insulted by the mockery then thirst for revenge. Culture is bad, bad, bad, because precisely culture, and not, for instance, an individual’s own choices, leads people to kill one another. This predestinating effect of culture is most clearly evident when we compare the ways we explain crimes committed by immigrants on the one hand and the native-born population on the other hand: for whose crimes do we more readily seek reasons in societal structures or individual history, and for whose actions do we seek reasons in the culture?

Then again, the significance of culture can be examined through the concepts of public and private. For instance, when we speak about the policy of multiculturalism, we think of private life as the realm for one’s ‘own culture’ and of public life, on the other hand, as a neutral, ‘culture-free’ common area where the ideal is equality for all members of society. It would be considerably more fruitful to think of culture as pervading all areas of life.

Sometimes in the discussion there’s a suggestion of the thought that immigrants’ culture is perfectly acceptable as long as it remains in a carefully restricted area, in events celebrating multiculturalism and within the walls of homes. In the background lies the wish that cultural pluralism remain in the private realm, out of sight, out of hearing and out of reach of the nose. Integration here acquires an ominous shade of meaning, because, understood this way, it is literally entrenchment in one’s home.

Culture, then, can even acquire contradictory meanings. Culture is used to explain people’s choices and acts, but it can also mean something that people shut within the walls of their home. On the one hand, culture is thought to control a person, and on the other hand it is like a piece of clothing which a person can remove at will. What makes recognising this particularly complicated is the fact that both of these meanings of culture are sometimes used simultaneously, and through some strange logic, they reinforce each other.

The effort to keep cultures separate from one another brings to mind South Africa’s apartheid policy, albeit on a small scale. Principles of separate administration turn private homes into bantustans, tribal homelands from which people go to work in the dominant culture and return home in the evenings. If this kind of thinking takes hold in society, it is no wonder that immigrant homes become cultural bubbles where people live in a very different reality than elsewhere in the society.

Everyone concerned with issues of multiculturalism needs to stress at least the following things: First, immigrants are a heterogeneous group. This may seem a very simple concept, but its consequences for integration are radical. There are as many different integrative processes as there are immigrants. The conditions needed to integrate a refugee who is unable to read or write into Finnish working life are totally different than for an IT expert. Nevertheless, both are termed immigrants.

Gender and age also affect integration opportunities. Moreover, Finns are a heterogeneous group, something that appears to be often forgotten, especially when speaking of multiculturalism. Discussion of cultural differences is often based on the hidden assumption that Finns are all the same. Third, integration is two-directional and two-sided; in a word, mutual. This deserves emphasis, especially because all simplifications and generalisations connected to integration are dangerous.

When the intrinsic heterogeneity of ‘us’ and of ‘the others’ is understood, then, it becomes possible to unlearn some of the juxtapositions that may make it harder for both the immigrants and those already living in the country to integrate into a new, ever-changing situation. This parsing, of course, is also flawed in that it repeats such juxtapositions or at least such parallels as ‘Finns and immigrants’ as if it were a question of two eternally separate groups.

Perhaps we need to strive for the more radical goal and rethink the whole separation in two and consider how multiculturalism is evident within Finnishness, and Finnishness within multiculturalism. In any case, every day we have more people among us who identify themselves as both Finnish and something else; people who are not either Finns or Russians, but both; people who are not either Muslims or Finns, but both. After all, for centuries people have lived within these borders who are not either Sámi or Finns, but both; people who are not Roma or Finns, but both; people who are difficult to situate in the multicultural pie according to ethnic, religious or cultural slice but who are perfectly at home in the weaves of the transnational world.

Translated by Jill G. Timbers

Extracts from Maltillinen hutu ja muita kirjoituksia kulttuurien kohtaamisesta (‘A moderate Hutu and other essays about the meeting of cultures’; Teos, 2008)