Originally published by The Clifton Courier, June 30, 2021

I think we need another word for the consumption of soup. 

A week or so ago I was writing about a soupy experience when I had a thought. I was about to type that I had been “eating soup” and I realised that was kind of a lie. I wasn’t doing any chewing when I was ingesting the soup, so I felt like “eating” was the wrong verb. 

But then to say that I was “drinking soup” sounded weird.

That conjures up an image of me chugging a glass of soup like it was a cold glass of milk after a long run on a hot summer’s day (it’s like a workout recovery shake… but plain. Would recommend).

I almost unpacked this thought using 28 words in a set of brackets within that column but I decided that, rather than making a concise point, I could ramble on about it for more than 600 words.

The next day at work, I noticed someone with a container of soup at their desk and hit them with the big questions. Here’s a rough outline of what I accosted my colleague with:

“Do you say that you’re eating soup? Because technically you’re not really chewing the soup, you’re drinking it.”

She raised the counter point that you can chew the soup chunks, so you’re doing some actual eating there.

“Hmm yeah, I guess, but would you say you drink the soup and eat the chunks? Like, are the soup chunks the actual soup itself or are they just chunks? Like, is the soup just the liquid around the chunks? What is a soup, really?”

Pretty deep, huh?

The point my learned colleague about the chunks was an interesting one. Does that mean you can truthfully say you’re eating soup so long as it has chunks? What does that mean for chunk-less soups like, say, a creamy pumpkin? Do we need to have different words for soups based on their chunkiness? 

Personally, I don’t think we say “eating soup” because of the way the soup goes down our gullets. I think it’s more abstract. In fact, I think it’s something to do with our unconscious food biases. 

I’m wondering if the reason we say we’re eating soup is because it’s savoury and mostly vegetable-based. That’s not to say that we only associate the word “eat” with savoury and “drink” with sweet. But you have to admit, we have many more sweet drinks – Milo, juice, Enos… – than we do savoury drinks. Like, I wouldn’t say a dry white wine or a beer is sweet, but I wouldn’t call them savoury. I’d put the more in a neutral category. 

When you think about it, a smoothie is much like a soup. It’s liquefied plant matter. It is a blend of multiple ingredients. It’s thicker than water and, often can be thicker and therefore heartier than of some of the more broth-y soups on dining tables around the country. A smoothie is like a desert soup.

And yet we don’t say that we’re eating a smoothie, but we do say that we’re eating soup. 

It’s not because soups are hot and smoothies are cold. Because as we all know from that BOYBB episode of The Simpsons where Lisa tries to get people not to eat meat by offering up gazpacho, soup can be served ice cold.

So perhaps it’s something to do with the mode of ingestion. A smoothie typically makes its way into your body via a straw, while the soup gets there by individual spoonfuls.  

Instead of saying “eating soup” or “drinking soup” you could say “spooning soup into your mouth” but it sounds like you’re binging on soup with concerning gusto. And you could also say “slurping soup” but that sounds more like you’re being a slob rather than daintily consuming a liquefied savoury concoction in an extremely polite manner. 

So what’s the answer? Do we just skirt around the issue forever? Do we abolish soup from our diets so we never have to address the issue again? Or do we just carry on with our lives because it doesn’t really matter that much, in the grand scheme of things?

Tough to say.