Finnish Hacks to Feeding Your Family

Nourishing my family was driving me crazy, so I started doing meals the Finnish way. Would you dare to welcome this ease?

May 30, 2025

Picture this: you have planned the meals and brought the groceries, fed the kids a snack after school, and then made the dinner and set up the table—at a time when you would rather be in pajamas in your bedroom with some candles lit, reading or watching Netflix.

You herd the children to the table and before they are even seated, they instantly vocalize their disinterest in eating what is being served.

“How many bites?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“What’s for desert?”

Instead of the blissful family dinner you had deliriously fantasized about, you debate with your kids to eat at least something, only to have most of the food end up in the compost, and to start the battle over desert. With deep breaths, you take in the tantrums over the three pieces of chocolate that’s ”too little” and outbursts over the missing treats that had been hidden in the candy box—that some kid had sneaked into earlier and emptied.

Then begin the fights over putting the dishes into the dishwasher, and cleaning up the kitchen. Why is it somehow news to everyone, every night, that everyone needs to participate? You silently decide to only feed your family from compostable paper plates from now on.

You know you are so done for the day, but alas, you need to start thinking about tomorrow’s school lunch. “Ok, let’s plan what you will pack for lunch for tomorrow.” Your child goes and gets pita chips. As you, again, start making the point that they will need more food for the 7-hour school day, your kids vanish, somewhere, shouting on their way out of the kitchen: “I don’t want to eat dry bread.” But, what else is there to pack?

Ten minutes later they are back in the kitchen: “I’m hungry!”

It’s a shit show.

Or, shall I say, it was a shit show until the Finnish mom meal hacks saved my evenings, well, and mornings, and honestly all meal times. Now my life has simplified so much, I actually can’t believe it. My kids have stopped battling over meals, and in general, are so much happier because they eat more regularly and more fulfilling foods. And, I do find myself, a few times a week, in my bedroom at typical dinnertime reading or watching Apple TV, with lit candles giving me hygge vibes. Even my American husband, who was initially hesitant, can’t believe what has happened.

“Do you now think this was a great idea?” I asked yesterday,

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s never go back.”

So, what did I do?

Disclaimer: This newsletter is not about nutritional guidance. Different cultures and even experts within cultures disagree on what exactly we should all eat. Here, I’m giving you cultural insight into how Finnish parents commonly and typically handle meals.

Earlier Dinner Time

My (Finnish) mother visits us often, and luckily, stays for a while. Last time, after observing our evenings for a week, she pulled me aside, saying: “can I offer a suggestion?”

“What if you tried to do the evenings the Finnish way, and at least the kids would eat dinner earlier, right after school?”

This would mean that I would skip the after-school snack and the later dinner, and instead offer healthy, simple dinner-type foods at a time when they were the hungriest and needed fuel for their sports, around 4-5pm. It actually sounded so smart, I’m not sure why I hadn’t done this before. I was in.

With varying schedules, with two extreme picky eaters, and with my husband eating a very different diet from me, dinner for us often meant at least three different types of meals, and ended up being late, when everyone was tired and at least in my case, cranky. We had been sticking to it really, because of the “cult of the family dinner.”

After hearing my mom’s suggestion, I could see that waiting till everyone was at home and sitting down together to eat the most complicated meal of the day, that required a big clean-up, wasn’t serving any of us. And that if we started doing things differently, we would actually achieve what we were supposed to get out of family dinners to begin with: better family dynamics.

So, I spearheaded the change, and now my kids actually eat, and eat better, I have a clean kitchen before 6pm, and the evenings are much happier and calmer for all.

Night Snack (& Breakfast)

When you have a dinner-type meal early, you don’t need any after-school snacks, but kids will need another lighter meal before bed. The Finns have solved this challenge with the famous “iltapuuro” or “evening porridge”.

Porridge: a dish consisting of oatmeal or another meal or cereal boiled in water or milk. [Per dictionary].

Finns turn numerous different grains quickly and easily into delicious porridges. You can use oats, barley, semolina, rice, rye, millet, or quinoa. They can be made with water or different milks or plant-based milks, and you can add anything you want into them based on your preferences. My favorites range from chia, hemp & flax seeds to different nut butters, berries, fruits, and honey (frozen sea buckthorn berries with honey top my list)—you can even make porridges savory if you wanted to.

What’s so nice about this “night snack” is that you can prepare porridge in bulk to last in the fridge for a few days and then warm it up before eating, or mix cold, “soaked” versions (think soaked oats). We often do these in single serve mason jars, so they are ready to eat, or heat and eat.

Finns often do some type of porridge for breakfast as well, so you could use these for the morning too. I recommend you give it a try, it’s way more filling than cereal!

Warm Lunch

In Finland, kids always eat a warm, healthy lunch. This is of course much easier in Finland, where public schools have chefs and kitchens that serve warm meals for free, but I have discovered a workaround— as I had to. Last time we got back from Finland, one of my boys got literally teary-eyed about the sadness of his cold lunch sandwich in the US. He wanted a real, warm meal (the meals you can buy in his school are not usually suitable).

As his school didn’t let me buy microwaves for the kids, re-heated food that sits in a thermos is as close as we have gotten to the Finnish warm school lunch. But, I have learned, it is still way more satisfying and fills a little belly more, than said sandwich. To make sure my kids can do it independently, we now often lean on ready-made packets of rices and sauces with beans or lentils, or soups that can be quickly heated in the microwave in the morning and placed in the thermos. Because the lunch time is quite late, they also bring a separate snack to eat at snack time—this could be the bread.

School feels much better for them with a warm meal.

Offer Eating Opportunities, and Skip Snacking

Think: breakfast, warm lunch (+ snack), warm dinner, and porridge for night snack. What makes feeding a family the Finnish way easier in general, is that meals are not made complicated and kids don’t do on-the-go snacking. To give you just one example, instead of a bag of chips for a snack, a more Nordic alternative would be a slice of fresh, sourdough or multigrain bread with butter.

It’s about calories in from healthy foods that kids enjoy five times a day, sitting down to eat, and not snacking on the go. It’s also about skipping the mom guilt over food: as one American mom in Finland who consulted a local dietician for her picky eater, told me, the advice was to not stress as long as the child was growing, and to focus on grains, calcium-containing foods or milks, and fruits for vitamins.

Regardless of what you feed your family, avoid buying anything with ingredients you are not familiar with or can’t pronounce. I asked a Finnish family coach about the best way to react, when my child sees other children having things that we don’t consider “healthy foods”. She suggested I tell my child that “I love you so, so much that I want you to eat things that are good for you.” It’s OK to say no to junk food, drinks like Gatorade or sodas, and artificial food ingredients, sugary cereals and so on. But what about sugary treats and deserts? There’s a Finnish hack for that too.

Candy Day

The cherry on top, so to speak, in the Finnish way of feeding a family, is to enjoy treats, deserts and sugary snacks and drinks only one day a week: the Candy Day. This is often a Friday, but choose whatever day works for you. I can’t recommend this hack enough, because now my kids eat so much better and the whining for treats has completely stopped. Instead, we have so much fun planning what treat we will have, go get or make on Candy Day. It’s literally the sweetest thing.