Winter: leaves have fallen from their branches, temperatures have reached their lowest and the sun seems to set before it has the chance to fully rise. Many would say it’s the perfect weather to curl up and slurp on a nice, warm bowl of soup. There’s just one problem with this, which is that soup is a scam. Soup is a liar, desperately trying to give itself a home in your aesthetic Pinterest-girl winter, regardless of the fact that it doesn’t belong there. Actually, it doesn’t belong anywhere.
Soup’s first red flag is that it doesn’t even accomplish what it’s trying to do. People eat soup as a meal, yet they have to add actual food to it to gain any sense of nourishment, because the reality is soup isn’t even a food. Soup advocates will try to claim that soup is a meal, but when asked which part of chicken noodle soup is actually considered soup, the answer is always the chicken broth. Tell me, if you had a bowl of chicken broth for a meal, would you actually be satisfied? Obviously not, because there’s no actual substance in that sad excuse for a meal. Instead, you have to add noodles and chunks of chicken to your soup for it to be worth anything. Now, once you’ve added actual food, you can finally say you have a meal.
Inadequacy isn’t soup’s only sin. Not only can soup not do the one thing you ask of it, but it’ll turn around after failing you and rely on you to solve its identity crisis over the course of your meal. We’ve already discussed how in the dish “Chicken Noodle Soup,” a staple meal in many homes, the only parts of actual substance are the solid components added to the liquid soup. But what about soups like tomato soup, where the line between solid and liquid is so blurred that you can’t even tell them apart? Here, the dish stands with one foot in both camps, not knowing which form of matter it belongs to. If soup doesn’t even know which version of itself it wants to be, what does it do? It dances across that abstract line that has lost all meaning. First it parades itself around as a liquid, knowing deep down that’s not who it is, before going back and declaring itself a solid, even though it still won’t truly belong there. This kind of soup leaves you confused, disoriented and dazed, as you shovel spoonful after spoonful of lukewarm, slightly chunky mush into more mouth. It forces you to choke down each bite as you contemplate the nature of your so-called “meal.”
Honestly, this just isn’t fair. To find comfort during this chilly, transitional period of the year, you turned to soup. But instead of getting support and companionship from your “friend,” you are lied to and forced to handle someone else’s emotional baggage on top of your own. You find your sacred meal time trampled on by a sad, confused individual that doesn’t know what it is or why it exists. Even worse, it expects you to reaffirm it and make it feel better, when the reality is, you’re just as disgusted by soup as it is by itself. Save yourself some trouble this winter, and retire soup before it can do more harm than good. Although it may seem hard now, you’ll be saving yourself from a season of disappointment and broken trust in the long run.
Camden Lauver
