Soup

I wonder how many people realize how ridiculous canned soup is?

Soup has been sold for hundreds of years. It's amazing to me that an idea that stupid could persist for so long.

Let's examine the origins of soup. Hundreds of years ago, not starving was the first thing on most people's minds. Even the wealthy put considerable effort in to whipping the slaves to ensure they had enough food.

Inevitably, food became scarce at some point in the year. Probably in late winter, when the stores were nearly exhausted and game was tough to come by (mainly because you risked frostbite if you went out hunting!). The skilled cook of a household would have been planning for this all winter. She or he would be stripping every little scrap of leftover food from each meal and boiling it in a pot of water until it resembled soup. This practice would ensure that no food was ever wasted, and give the members of the household the best possible chance of not starving.

In most parts of the world, we now have easy access to all the food we could ever need. In fact, in the USA, we have so much food that we don't stop eating until we're three or four times heavier than we've any need to be, and that's after throwing tremendous amounts of edible food in the trash. I mean, what's the big deal if the milk is a few days too old? It's probably still safe to drink. Seriously, the milk doesn't go bad the moment the printed date is past.

To a degree, this is good. Honestly, being a little overweight (while not ideal) is certainly preferable to starving. And throwing suspect food away instead of risking food poisoning is probably a good thing.

So, why are we still eating soup? It boggles the mind. I mean, you even see commercials where soup companies brag about the "choice chunks of meat" in their ingredients. Choice? Don't these people get it? Soup is about stuff that would otherwise be thrown out. If you've got choice pieces of meat, why are you wasting them on soup? Make a roast or some Buffalo wings!

Somewhere in history, between nearly starving and having too much food for our own good, canned soup was an effective method of distributing food to the masses and played a part in bridging that historical gap.

But we're still eating it and I'm not sure why. Perhaps we're all more old-fashioned than we realize. Perhaps there's some advantage to soup that I'm not seeing that keeps it popular. I think it's most likely that the soup companies are just really good at marketing their product, and the purchasing public is terribly uninformed.

From a writing standpoint, I keep trying to figure out what will be soup in 2100. What do we do now that we'll still be doing in 2100, despite the fact that there's no reason for it anymore? When we all have brain implants and communicate just by thinking, will we still carry cell phones because the cell companies are just that good at marketing? Will we continue to drive wheeled vehicles around in spite of the fact that there are much better forms of transportation?

I expect we'll still be eating soup at any rate.