I Learned to Eat Like the Happiest People in the World
Happy people eat together, I learned in Denmark
When I arrived in Denmark, ranked the second happiest country in the world, I was lost, tense, neurotic, and hard as a rock. A normal state of mind for a New Yorker, but for a Danish person — almost unheard of. Even in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, people seemed calmer, quieter, and at peace with each other and their surroundings. In the land of such contentment, I was almost embarrassed by how anxious and restless I was.
Sure, I was coming from a complicated city in a complicated country but now I was ready to relax, even if it meant faking it at first. In the hopes of feeling better, I decided to do as the Danes did. Fake it till you make it, they say.
I wrote about “borrowing” the habits of Danish people in this well-received piece. Since then, I realized that there was more to their culinary happiness than homemade dinners.
It all started when I joined a local co-working space (mostly a gathering of small tech companies). What was mean to be just a desk to work at ended up being an anthropological experiment which taught me, among other things, how much a simple act of eating together can contribute to a person’s, and a nation’s, well-being.
