Cereal is soup, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise. As inconsequential as this suggestion seems, I’ve gotten into passionate debates about it, and I think it’s time to lay out all the facts and put the argument to rest once and for all.
If your gut reaction is to disagree with me, I challenge you to describe cereal without using the names of its ingredients. It has a liquid base, filled with medium sized solid objects. Sounds an awful lot like soup to me.
“But wait,” you might say. “Cereal is traditionally a breakfast food! Soups are meant to be eaten around lunch or dinner time.”
While this is generally true in the US, it’s not the case everywhere. In Japan, miso soup is commonly eaten before noon. Changua is a Colombian soup, eaten for breakfast, with eggs, scallions, and bread, that uses milk as part of its base. Soup being excluded from the morning meal is basically just an American thing. Therefore, cereal can’t be “not a soup” on the basis of being a breakfast food.
Another argument is that cereal is too grain based. But this is easily disproven, because so many soups include grains. Rice, farro, millet, quinoa—the list goes on.
“But cereal is only grains,” you could say. “Soups need other ingredients too!”
Does this mean that cereal suddenly becomes a soup if you add blueberries? Surely this argument would make Raisin Bran a soup by default, since it already contains dried fruit.
I think the reason so many people resist cereal being soup might be because they’re afraid of change. According to Google Trends, the question “is cereal a soup” only picked up popularity in 2015. Even in the early 2010s, cereal and soup were separate, just like they’d been for most of history. Now, a movement comes along and tries to take that away?
The real problem isn’t about how people classify their meals, but that some people dismiss new viewpoints because it’s not what they grew up hearing. But just like Pluto’s status as a planet, familiar things are allowed to change.
By informing yourself about issues, you guard yourself from manipulative appeals to emotion. Then you can say cereal is/isn’t soup because of x,y,z, not because “it doesn’t sound right.”
If you think long and hard about this issue, and you come out disagreeing with me, I will (probably) still respect you. But still, no matter what anyone else says, I believe cereal is a soup.
