Duluth TV reporter lutefisk hazing continues

Mustachioed king of Northland TV anchors Dennis Anderson looks on as former WDIO reporter Cassie Limpert chokes down lutefisk on live television. (WDIO screenshot)

Mustachioed king of Northland TV anchors Dennis Anderson looks on as former WDIO reporter Cassie Limpert chokes down lutefisk on live television. (WDIO screenshot)

Used to be, no one had refrigerators.

From this simple truth emerged many methods of preparing and storing food across the cultures of the world. In the Scandinavian countries of Norway and Sweden, that included soaking white fish in lye until it formed a gel. Then, months later, you could “reconstitute” the floppy former fish in hot water. You could eat it and it wouldn’t kill you. And so baby Scandinavians were born and grew strong.

And they called it lutefisk.

Now, for most Norwegians and Swedes, the advent of refrigerators and the introduction of many far superior methods of preparing fish made the consumption of lutefisk unnecessary. You might find some old fashioned older folks in the north who still eat it, but it’s a completely archaic dish everywhere else.

But the tradition lives on here in Northern Minnesota, where so many Scandinavian and Finnish immigrants settled 100 years ago. As I’ve already written, modern Swedes think their distant American relatives are nuts. Between this obsession with lye-soaked cod and the practice of putting eggs in coffee, contemporary Nordics consider themselves lucky to have moved away from these traditions.

That brings us to Duluth. Duluth is a midsized TV market. That means it often becomes a farm system for local TV news reporters hungry to catch on in Minneapolis, Cleveland or Chicago. But to pass safely through the Duluth market,chock full of old Swedes and Norwegians, reporters at one local station must face a crucible.

On WDIO, coverage of the First Lutheran Church’s annual lutefisk dinner always includes the hazing of a new reporter. Each must consume lutefisk live on the air and pretend to like it.

Some succeed. Some are never heard from again.

Anyway, if you’d like to see several years worth of rookie TV reporters who grew up in the suburbs choking down a type of fish that even most modern Scandinavians view as inedible, here you go.

Comments

  1. David Gray says

    It is a sad thing that the great Lutefisk Dinners are gradually disappearing. I have great memories of the one that used to be held in Deerwood. They even had great swedish meatballs for those who didn’t appreciate the greatness of lutefisk. Sad times.

  2. Lutefisk is something the old timers make us eat once a year to remind us how bad things were in the old country and why they left there.

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