For several years, Internet users have been spreading the claim that Finns call mozzarella Moomin meat. We decided to check if this is true.
A collage of two pictures is popular on social networks: a photo of a mozzarella ball and an image of a Moomintroll with a frightened expression on his face. “I just found out that in Finland mozzarella is called Moomin meat. My life will never be the same,” social media users caption this collage. Such posts can be found, for example, in Telegram, X, Facebook And "VKontakte".
Moomins - characters from books by Finnish writer Tove Jansson. She drew illustrations for her works, first published in the mid-20th century. Thanks to these drawings, readers learned that Moomins are round, white-skinned creatures vaguely similar to hippopotamuses.
The posts mentioned above go back to one English-language source: post by Twitter user (now X) Tom Walton (@edgeblend) on September 13, 2020. Russian-speaking bloggers use the same pictures and also translate the caption almost word for word.
However, Walton's publication is not the primary source of the story about sarcastic Finnish slang. In numerous discussions on this topic on Reddit (e.g. here or here) users from Finland and Sweden (Jansson was a Swedish-speaking Finn, and books about the Moomins are written in Swedish) agree that in everyday speech mozzarella is not compared to Moomin meat, it’s just a “bearded” and not very funny joke. Moreover, similar jokes are made not only about mozzarella, but also about any white cheese - for example, halloumi, Lapland leipyayuusto and even cottage cheese (he, accordingly, becomes minced Moomin trolls).
Journalist for the Swedish publication Sydsvenskan Patrick Lundberg in 2011 suggested, that jokes about Moomin meat were started by the Swedish-speaking Finnish poet Peter Mikwitz. In his essay "Holiday with the Moomins”, published in 2008, he wrote, ridiculing stereotypical Finnish patriotism: “Who among us does not have happy childhood memories associated with the Moomins - all those feasts when the whole family, relatives and friends gathered around the Moomin to celebrate a grandparent's birthday, an older brother or sister's graduation from school, or some other important event? Taking a break from the busy day and getting together over a delicious Moomin is a family tradition that my wife Gittan-Lollan-Lillan-Gullan-Millan-Kikkan considers important to pass on to our children. Eating troll together provides an unmatched sense of togetherness.” Next, Makwitz talks in detail about how to prepare the Moomins. True, he recommended roasting them on a spit, like a ham or a Christmas goose, but snow-white Moomins are still weakly associated with real meat (which cannot be said about white cheese).
The version expressed by Lundberg is supported by the fact that “Verified” was unable to find a single earlier mention of Moomin meat on the Internet, either in Swedish or in Finnish (which, of course, does not exclude the possibility that the joke could previously have appeared only in oral speech). The oldest mention of it in open sources that we could find dates back to 2010. The editors of the Finnish website for parents KaksPlus asked their readers a question: “What should you tell your kids if they eat too much mozzarella?“One of the answers read: “That this is Moomin meat. A friend recommended this to me. A terrible thought, in fact, it’s good that my children are already big.” Later, jokes about Moomin meat and mince began to appear on Finnish and Swedish social networks more or less regularly. Sometimes they ended up in English-language publications. In 2018 there is one such fast on Twitter received almost 9,000 reposts (more than Walton’s tweet), but remained almost unnoticed outside the social network. But Walton’s post was noticed by the popular (more than 500,000 subscribers) satirical community Very Finnish Problems on Facebook and posted his screenshot on his page. Since then, the group administrators have repeated this publication more than once, and each time it caused a new wave of reposts.
Thus, in Finland (and Sweden) mozzarella (and not only this type of cheese) is indeed sometimes called Moomin meat, but quite rarely and only as a joke.
Cover photo: collage by Tom Walton
Read on topic:
If you find a spelling or grammatical error, please let us know by highlighting the error text and clicking Ctrl+Enter.
