Let us speak plainly: soup has become far too confident. Once it knew its place—an introverted liquid, content to lurk in bowls and nourish the sickly. Now it strides about restaurant menus as if it were the emperor of cuisine. “Artisan bisque,” it declares. “Wildcrafted broth,” it preens. Soup was never meant to peacock. It should sit quietly under a crust of film, scalding the unwary and smelling faintly of Tuesday.
Do not misunderstand me; I believe soup has every right to exist. I myself have consumed gallons in my long tenure on this weary planet, mostly under duress. But modern soup demands applause. It arrives garnished, drizzled, crowned with herbs like a contestant in a suburban beauty pageant. The server places it before you with reverence, as though this bowl of hot vegetable water has cured disease and negotiated peace. I stare back, betrayed, wishing only for something simple, like a gray potato floating in defeat.
And what, I ask, has become of spoons? A gentleman once ladled from the side, delicately, allowing soup to approach the mouth as one approaches a skittish cat. Now these enormous, concave ladles shovel soup with the subtlety of a coal miner. You take one mouthful and the bowl is half gone, leaving you to contemplate your mortality over a slick of garnish clinging to the rim like seaweed on a doomed tanker. Efficiency is not refinement.
Worse still, society insists soup is a meal. A meal! A liquid pretending to be solid. A culinary con artist. One cannot dine on broth alone unless one is a monk or a ghost. Yet try refusing it and see how quickly the waitstaff looks at you as if you’ve rejected civilization itself. I told a young man last week I preferred a sandwich, and he gasped as though I’d proposed abolishing chairs.
If the world insists on elevating soup, the least it could do is admit it is merely stew that lost its nerve. But no, we march forward, ladle in hand, slurping our destiny. So be it. I will take my watery lunch like a patriot—disgruntled, and loudly so.
