Written by: Rylee Sturgis, Staff Writer
CATEGORIZE: Poly students debate whether or not cereal is a soup.
Cereal is a grain made into a food substance and put into a bowl with milk for breakfast food. Soup is a liquid food with some sort of base (typically stock) with solid foods. Using the most basic definition of soup would one qualify cereal and milk as soup?
Soup comes in many different forms, there is tomato soup, chicken noodle soup, French onion soup, etc. Cereal in milk would meet the basic requirements of having solid food in liquid. However, as pointed out by Micah Chandler (10), cereal does not have many of the necessary ingredients to be any sort of soup, it has no herbs, vegetables, meat, or fruit. Chandler brought up that most cereal only has one or two ingredients found, and even with the different aspects “that really [doesn’t] help because it is encased in sugar.” Though tomato soup is sweet through natural sugars, it is a hot soup. One may refer to cold cucumber soup to counter that, seeing as like cereal it is cold, but not sweet.
Jacob Knox (11) pointed out that “you don’t actually make cereal but you do make soup.” Due to soup being cooked and mixed together, it is different from cereal. You can throw cereal in a bowl and pour some milk on top and you would suddenly have breakfast food. However, the same cannot be done for soup. Pouring stock, whether it be vegetable or chicken, on some vegetables in a bowl would not be soup, it would be vegetables in more vegetable stock for the sake of it. To really have a soup you have to put in the work and time to make it a soup. With cereal, it could take at most three minutes to prepare.
So why ask the question at all? If it’s so obvious with a little thought to conclude that cereal and milk are not soup, why present the idea of it? The answer may be found in asking oneself “why not?.” We all accept certain ideas as facts, things we would never think to challenge because that’s just the way things work. Like the question “Is a hotdog a sandwich,” we know that realistically it’s a dumb question that causes more problems than solutions in a room. The reality is if you never ask you’d never think of it. The most clever solutions come from looking outside the box, challenging what is known, and seeking the unknown. This question wasn’t about providing cereal as a soup, but rather showing that what we know as right all the time could be wrong sometimes. Questions that appear obvious present some of the best opportunities for being thought-provoking, giving the opportunity to look at the world in a new light. So with that in mind, under the right circumstances, could cereal be soup?
