Ingrid works part-time at Spånga Konditori on weekends, and often brings home leftover bread and pastries that would otherwise be thrown out. Buns that are too lopsided, pastries that look uneven, various things that are just too old to sell.

Almost every time, she brings home a loaf of sourdough bread. The darker kinds of bread, the bakery sells at half price the day after. But the light sourdough bread they don’t think is good enough even at half price, so all that’s left over at the end of the day gets thrown out.

She doesn’t bring it home for us to eat, because there’s no way we would be able to eat that much! I’d get bored of the bread well before it’s gone. It’s good, but this kind of light bread is a bit too bland for my taste.

No, she brings it to me so that I can take it with me to work. I used to do it at tretton37, and now I do it at Sortera. The folks at the Sortera office are getting used to having nearly-fresh sourdough bread for lunch on Mondays. I tend to plan my own lunch around it as well – maybe a soup or a lighter stew – and together we eat all or nearly all of it.

Today I brought a loaf with me to Active Solution. And discovered that the people at this office have very different meal habits. Many go out to eat lunch at a restaurant; lunch boxes are far less common here, so they don’t even sit in the kitchen for lunch, and then of course have less opportunity to eat the bread.

Probably as a result of the above, there’s also much less of a culture of shared stuff in the fridge. I’m so used from all previous offices that there would always be at least, like, butter, cheese and ketchup in the fridge. Here I had to go out and buy a package of butter.

At the end of the day, three quarters of the loaf was still there and came home with me again. Over half of what did get eaten, I ate myself. I think I’ll be making bread pudding of the rest tomorrow.

Just… interesting to see how such a basic thing as bread and butter can work differently in different places.