Instead, when it’s time to eat, a child might go home, stay in the friend’s room and play or sit at the table with the family and not eat.

The custom was the subject of much conversation (and a little concern) online after a recent Reddit post circulated widely. The post asked “what is the weirdest thing you had to do at someone else’s house because of their culture/religion?” and in one of the more popular replies, someone described going to their Swedish friend’s house and being told to wait in a room while the family ate. “I wish my abuela were still around,” Lynda Carter, the actress who played Wonder Woman, said on Twitter. “She’d be trying to airlift tamales to Sweden.”

The people of Sweden, a country UNICEF ranked as the most family friendly in 2019, were left to explain why there did not seem to be enough pickled herring to go around.