Last week, as Winter expelled its icy breath across the campus for (hopefully) one of the last times before Spring extends its dewy fingers, the gale-force winds carried with them the vestiges of a fleeting premature summer: bronzed bodies — skin baked pleasantly crisp by tropical suns — filled lectures, ambled across the Arts Quad wearing dissonantly copious amounts of clothing, and unintentionally tripled the ethnic diversity of Cornell.

I was not one of these tanned, refreshed travelers. Instead of voyaging to some small, equatorial island, I went to Denmark — which means that I returned to Cornell with a Scandinavian pallor, not to mention a hacking cough that still clears a three-seat radius around me in every lecture.

Though I’m ashamed to admit it, this was my first time ever leaving the country, and I had relatively high expectations for how much I would grow as a result of the experience. In my mind, one’s first trip to a foreign land was supposed to be life-changing, the sort of experience that forever alters the way you think about the world, making you question all of your cultural assumptions and stereotypes. Up is down! Black is white! Pickled herring is delicious!

What I discovered, however, is that if you’re looking for culture shock, Copenhagen is not the place to go. Beautiful, 18th-century architecture? Sure, they’ve got that. Great museums? Got that, too. A 7-11 on every corner? Yep, there to meet all your microwaved-burrito needs. They drive on the right side of the street, they all speak English, and they’ve got a healthy dose of Western xenophobia; if not for the ubiquity of signs with bizarre letters like Ã¥ and ø, you’d mistake it for some seaside metropolis in the U.S.

I’m being unfair, of course. The Scandinavian lifestyle is rather different from the American one. It’s more leisurely, for one thing; the workweek is fewer hours and people ride bicycles everywhere instead of driving. The average quality of life is higher, which would explain why it’s impossible to get a cup of coffee for less than three dollars. The crime rate is extremely low, and parents leave their babies in carriages outside of stores while they go in to shop (they lock up their bicycles, however).

But by far the most jarring difference between life in Denmark and life in the United States is one that I observed while doing the most menial of tasks, grocery shopping. You can tell a lot about a culture by looking at its supermarkets: the size, the organization, the relative varieties of products all speak volumes about cultural values.
And here’s the thing about Danish culture that most surprised me: all the food is small. You can’t buy in bulk. You’re expected go shopping several times a week, each time purchasing only enough food for the next few days, and packages are sized accordingly; the largest container of milk is a liter, and the “economy size” box of cereal is about the size of a standard American cereal box. One imagines the Danish equivalent of Price Club, where shoppers can buy half-gallons of milk and butter by the pound.

The result is a comparatively tiny grocery store with very little variety — the antithesis of the American shopping experience, central to which is a vast selection, both of product types and of brands. I can’t even fathom what a Dane would think upon entering Wegmans and seeing endless aisles of gargantuan food: two-gallon vats of mayonnaise, three-foot bags of enriched white bread, 19 different varieties of olives. (In my mind it’s like the level in Super Mario 3 where everything except for Mario has become mysteriously huge, pipes becoming insurmountable and goombas towering overhead.)

So which system is better? The answer seems obvious: variety is good. Few people would disagree that having a choice is better than being dictated to, both from an ethical perspective (democracy is superior to authoritarianism) and a personal one (I like apple pie; I don’t want to be given blueberry). It just seems rational that having more options would be better than having fewer.

Unfortunately, humans are rarely rational, and research has shown that having more choices doesn’t always make us happier. An article in The New York Times on March 27th described the results of a study in which subjects were asked to choose a chocolate from a selection of either 30 or six; those who were given a choice of 30 experienced more regret afterwards and were less certain of their choice. People who were given a selection of six jams in a grocery store were ten times more likely to buy one than were people exposed to a selection of 24.

To a certain extent, it makes sense. In The Paradox of Choice, Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz explains that, the more options we’re given, the more likely we are to strive to make the perfect choice — whereas when we’re given a limited selection, our goal is simply to be satisfied. Offered a scoop from a carton of Neapolitan ice cream, I can easily and without regret choose chocolate, but in a Thai restaurant I usually spend 15 minutes deciding between “chicken with broccoli and peanuts in red curry sauce,” “broccoli with chicken and peanuts in green curry sauce” and “curried chicken and broccoli in peanut sauce.”

The paradoxical nature of choice poses a vital ethical dilemma, because it pits one fundamental value, liberty, against another, happiness. If freedom’s value is only a function of the happiness it provides — that is, if the value of happiness is more basic — and it turns out that having more freedom doesn’t actually equate to being happier, does that mean that expanding someone’s options isn’t always a good thing? Or is there some intrinsic value to liberty, separate from and possibly superseding that of happiness?

The question’s potential influence is massive and far-reaching, affecting public policy and ethical theory alike.

And the answer, of course, is your call.