Question

Is cereal a soup?

i have pondered this for a while now and i feel the need to ask the question to the public to gain new insight. here is my argument.

cereal, which i mean to refer to as the combination of cereal and milk, is a food group which fits into the more expansive food group known as “soup.” my reasoning for this is obvious. cereal is a liquid-based food which contains a solid component. soup, as the merriam-webster dictionary agrees, is the same. granted, the definition notes that soups usually have meat, fish or vegetable stock as a base, but as this predicate is not absolute, this should not deter potential new followers of the Cereal-Soup subgroup theory. this theory is so convincing that the workers at the caf, whether or not they realize it, support it unequivocally. next time you visit it, look at the spoons placed next to the cereal station. they will be soup spoons. what else do customers eat with a soup spoon? hint: it starts with “s” and ends with “oup.” that's right folks. it's SOUP.

but.. i feel like when one thinks of the word 'soup', the last thing they think about is cereal. can someone weigh in here? thanks.

Answer 1

In my opinion, NO.

Step-by-step explanation:

would say no, cereal in milk is more simply comparable to a food in sauce - there's very little interaction between the cereal and the milk to make it a single dish, it is not a cohesive whole - and in fact it is considered the same dish (cereal) if eaten dry. It might work as a simple sweet pudding if allowed to soak and meld a bit, perhaps, instead of being eaten crunchy (which is where I was getting the food-in-sauce likeness).Hot cereals might count a (sweet) soup, especially if there are other ingredients (like a gruel with grain and milk, and spices, dried fruits, and egg yolks to thicken) - though I think it would depend on consistency. Something thicker, like a gummy oatmeal, would probably be more closely related to a pudding, but a thin one might well be soup. Even cold cereal might work as a (sweet) soup if there was more going on with the milk, some other ingredients and flavorings - then it would be a cold, sweet milk soup with the cereal bits acting like dumplings.The dictionary definition of soup is basically a savory definition, citing a combination of liquids, or meat and vegetables in broth or water (with other ingredients for flavor and texture), though there is a secondary definition that covers mixtures or substances resembling soup - which is how sweet soups, cold soups, and other more unusual sorts of soups earn the name. I think (cold) cereal is just too far removed to earn that label, being cold instead of hot and sweet instead of savory and separable into its parts instead of married into a single dish and only having two ingredients, that is, not being a complex mixture or a greater-than-its-parts whole, and having other words which are better definition matches (cereals, puddings, foods with sauce, etc). A soup can still be a soup with a couple of these alterations, I think having all of them is too many for it to fit that category.