SOUP, GOOD, EVIL

“Duck soup,” “soup’s on,”  “primordial soup,” “pea soup.”  None of these expressions is literally about liquid food. O.k. “pea soup” can refer to an actual heated broth-and-vegetable concoction. But, where I live, on the coast of Maine, it mostly refers to an especially thick fog. Similarly,“duck soup” indicates something is easy, “soup’s on” means there is food (not specifically soup) on the table, and “primordial soup” is a scientific expression for the mixture out of which came all life.

As far as the liquid food goes, its prominence translated into a

widespread folk tale, “stone soup.”  Hungry strangers set up a pot over a fire and place a stone in it. Curious villagers are told that a soup, ample enough for sharing, is being prepared.  It is, however, lacking in ingredients. The villagers then add vegetables and seasoning. The result: a hearty product enjoyed by both hungry travellers and villagers.

Soup’s prominence alse played a role in the development of restaurants.  Sold on the streets, it was marketed as a “restoratif,” that which would restore

 tired bodies. Eventually, sit-down places adopted the name. They became places for energy restoration, “restaurants.”

Under a New England name, “chowder,” soup made its way into Moby Dick. Hungry Ahab and Queequeg enter an inn. The owner utters only two words: clam,

cod.  They are codes for the meal choices, chowder with clams or chowder with cod. The inn was an all-chowder-all-the-time kind of place:  “chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish bones coming through your clothes.”

The word ‘chowder,’ from chaudière, heat-allowing pot,  signals an important aspect of soups. They are “needy,”  i.e, they can’t exist without mixtures, combinations inventions.  It’s not just a recipe's mingling of ingredients. Without technology, initially pottery, there can be no soup.

Anthropologists, whose name means ¨those who speak intelligently about human beings,” have come to realize that speaking intelligently about humans is impossible if humans, alone, are the focus of attention.  Something like “ontological anthropology,” dealing with humans in interaction with their surroundings, is needed. Intelligent speaking about humans, for example, should include discussions of clay, fire and the arts that led to pottery .  Once developed,some 20,000 years ago, pottery offered a great advantage: new ways prepare edibles.  Without cooking, as Richard Wrangham has reminded us, humans would have to spend most of their time, as our simian congeners do, eating.

We might also spend that time eating alone or, at best, side by side. This is not the same as the more typically human experiences of shared dining (formal name: “commensality.”) The pot of soup now signals another dimension neediness, positively understood, as interconnection.  What is inside the pot results from mixing and blending. The table, with its guests, is also a place of blending and mixing. The setting is like a little galaxy, with the pot serving as a solar center around which all else revolves.

Soup is important philosophically precisely because it exemplifies intermingling and interdependence. Without earth, fire, and the artisans who produced pottery, soup could not have come into being. Once it comes into being it requires, as “Stone Soup” indicates, combinations and mixtures.  Once those combinations come to fruition, the interminglings are those of hungry individuals congregating around the central food source.

Despite false dreams of isolation and autonomy, living is a matter of fostering interconnections. Creation and goodness depend on constructions that are fragile and easily endangered.  Evil, as anti-creation, moves toward what John Milton

appropriately called "pan-demonium." The demonic dimension is always that of dividing, breaking down, disrupting, in a word, de-creating.  

A good soup moves in a different direction. It gathers, brings together, combines elements in a tasty, nutritious way. That combination, in turn, can foster human connections, collaborations and harmonizations. In that regard a good bowl of soup is often  a bowl that fosters good.