Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

clothes and English newspapers. I thought this didn’t exist in Iceland, I say. I thought nobody here was interested in where food comes from.

Mads smiles at me. Some people are, he says. At first it was just an upper-class trend, typical of people who travelled a lot and were much more interested in Italian artisanal food than anything Icelandic farmers could produce. But it’s changing now, partly because of the financial crisis, the kreppa. The króna’s collapse has made imported food much more expensive, and Iceland has been importing more and more of its food since trade restrictions were lifted in the 1970s. Almost all fruit and vegetables have always been imported, and while the economy was booming everyone could afford it and it was the Icelandic farmers who were struggling. Consumers’ habits are shifting now. People are buying more local produce, meaning that farmers are able to invest in increasing the supply of local produce, and also buying the traditional foods again, switching back from chicken to lamb, picking up the blood puddings and liver sausage and sheep’s heads again.

Is that, I ask, a patriotic response to the crisis, a willingness to support the local economy, or just because it’s cheaper? There is no free-range chicken available in Iceland, free-range eggs are hard to find, and pork and beef are intensively farmed. There are organic vegetables and dry goods, but they are all American imports. It’s rare to find anything labelled with its country of origin. There’s little in the marketplace to suggest that this is a country that thinks much about where food comes from. From abroad, from útlönd, the foreign world.

Maybe some of each, Mads says. People say both, but of course really they buy the cheapest thing. Icelanders have a higher consumption of ready meals than any other Nordic country. They are less critical of American models of consumption than other Europeans. But he is hopeful; he calculates that, with the right government policies, Iceland could be ninety per cent self-sufficient. There is no reason why fruit trees as well as salad leaves and tomatoes shouldn’t grow in geothermally heated greenhouses. At the moment, farmers pay more for geothermal energy than Alcoa, the American company that runs the aluminium smelters and was highly favoured by the overthrown government, and a law forbidding farmers to sell their produce directly to the public has only recently been repealed. But things are changing, and Mads thinks there is a new willingness to develop shorter food chains. The gardens of Reykjavík won’t foam with cherry blossom any time soon, but there will be Icelandic apples, new cheeses, winter cabbage, more than three kinds of fish (haddock, cod, salmon). In any case, he adds, most Icelanders still think of ‘fish’ as haddock. Cod is for when you can’t get haddock and it’s unusual to have a taste for salmon. But if we would like to come to dinner on Friday, he and Mæja would be delighted to show us some Nordic home cooking. We would love to, I say. Thank you.

We meet Mæja for a swim in their neighbourhood pool before dinner. We’ve swum a couple of times in our local pool in Garðabær, because the novelty of outdoor swimming in a heated pool is fun and because swimming is almost free and within walking distance of the flat and both children enjoy it, but I’m still learning the rituals of Icelandic swimming. Within the separate changing rooms for men and women, there are no cubicles, and no stalls for the showers. You remove your shoes in an ante-room and leave them on shelves, proceed to the main changing room where you strip naked and leave all your clothes in a locker. Then you walk through the changing room to leave your towel in the drying area, and then walk through to the showers, where signs in Icelandic, English, German and French instruct you to wash all over with soap and pay special attention to your underarms, genitals and feet. There are cartoon illustrations as back-up. Then you may put your swimming costume on – Icelandic women always do this under the shower – and go outside to the pool. The tradition of communal nakedness was one of the things I found liberating when I was nineteen. For the first time, I saw women’s bodies that had not been airbrushed and arranged to present an ideal form, and for the first time I understood that the perfection I knew from magazines and films wasn’t the norm. I even had the glimmer of a sense that my own active nineteen-year-old body was, comparatively, aesthetically acceptable. I am sure that it’s important for the new generation of teenage girls to see bodies that have been stretched by child-bearing, scarred by surgery, over- or under-fed, shaped by exercise or by a life spent in the courtroom or the library or on the shop floor. I am less sure that I want to expose myself, my uncertain foreign self, to the gaze of Icelanders at home in their own pools, especially while Tobias likes to run off towards the water as soon as I’ve stepped out of my knickers.

Being with Mæja helps. She doesn’t seem to notice that we’re taking our clothes off as she tells me that the children will soon learn Icelandic, that I will enjoy my job, that she and Mads will take us around the city and show us the best food shops. She tells me about how Mads settled in here, that it took time, and of course sometimes he misses Copenhagen, but together they have found pleasures and discoveries they couldn’t have anywhere else. Their summer project has been to learn to ride Icelandic horses. They spent the weekend picking blueberries out in the national park, which is barely ten minutes from our apartment in Garðabær. Mæja intercepts Tobias as he runs for the door, and smiles at me so that it feels like a hug. Let’s swim,