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 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 spent my spring break in 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 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 xenophobia; if not for the ubiquity of signs with bizarre letters like � and �, you’d mistake it for some seaside metropolis in the U.S.

I’m being unfair, of course. The Scandinavian lifestyle does differ from the American one. It’s more leisurely; the workweek is shorter 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 stores while they shop (they lock up their bicycles, however).

But what surprised me most about Denmark was the grocery stores. 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. Danes 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 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 little variety — the antithesis of the American shopping experience, which revolves around a vast selection of product types, sizes and 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. (I bet 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. A March 27 article in The New York Times 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 confidently choose chocolate, but in a Thai restaurant I usually spend 15 minutes deliberating 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. In doing so, it calls into question some of our most essential assumptions about what constitutes “public good” and how we should go about pursuing it. 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? If so, how can we reconcile the two competing principles?

These questions have far-reaching implications, affecting public policy and ethical theory alike.

And their answers, of course, are your choice.