Debate: Cereal is for sure a soup
These arguments will exhaust you into conceding and then agreeing with me
Read the other half of this debate here.
If you cut me, will I not bleed? If you show me pictures of extremely cute ducks, will I not cry? If you put Froot Loops in a crockpot for four to six hours until it’s no longer a discernible colour, flavour, or texture, is it not soup?
Webster’s dictionary defines cereal as “a prepared foodstuff of grain (such as oatmeal or cornflakes)” and soup as “something you slurp” or “an unfortunate predicament.”
Sound familiar? If you consider cereal a breakfast food, I think we would all agree that breakfast is “something” and the morning, A.K.A. breakfast time is “an unfortunate predicament” indeed.
Now, I could try to argue my point the way non-believers do, just by listing a bunch of controversial dishes that blur the line between being cereal and being technically food, and I will do that.
Alphaghettis: alphabet-shaped foodstuff grains in a sugary-sweet, mostly ketchup tomato base. Yummy.
Cheerios: a form of Alphaghettis but with all O’s. Now you may be thinking, “Hey! But Cheerios don’t have a tomato base,” and to this I say, “I hope not.”
But honestly, if you wanted to fill a bowl right up to the brim with ketchup, and pick out all the Cheerios that look like letters (the O’s not the 0’s) and microwave your disgusting meal for two minutes at medium-high heat — there are no explicit instructions on the box telling you not to do that.
Oatmeal is hot, and gazpacho is cold. Split pea is sweet, and Special K has salty almonds in it. Cream of mushroom and cream of wheat are literally the same thing.
I know you’re going to tell me that cereal is sweet and soup is savoury and that trying to mess with the balance of nature by mixing up that status quo is “gross.” And you would be mostly correct.
However, if you ask any chef they will tell you that peas, corn, carrots, and tomatoes are all fundamentally sweet foods that are the basis of many soups. They will also tell you that adding salt to your Wheaties is not technically illegal.
Though cuisine is one of the central factors of defining culture, maybe this debate is frivolous, and there are better uses for our time and energy. Or maybe, just maybe, I’m on another level of wokeness that you can’t even fathom bro, and this view is hard to digest for you because it opens up a floodgate of other miscellaneous food parallels that you may not be lonely enough to ponder right now.
