Tomato soup with grilled cheese croutons sent me down a rabbit hole

Last night I was scrolling old cookbooks at my grandma's place in Des Moines and found a 1972 Betty Crocker that listed tomato soup as a 'breakfast soup' for hangovers. That got me looking up how the FDA technically defines soup versus cereal, and turns out the official rule is about being cooked and served in a bowl, which technically makes lucky charms a cold soup. So where do we draw the line, is it temperature, or is it just that we grow up calling one breakfast and one lunch?

1 comments

1 Comment

murray.spencer13d ago

The FDA rule about being cooked and served in a bowl is so loose it basically means anything goes, which is kind of funny but also useless. Temperature seems like the easy line to draw, but then you got gazpacho sitting there cold and nobody calls that cereal. Maybe the real split is the social script, like we eat certain things in the morning because that's what our parents put in front of us, not because of any food science. That Betty Crocker thing about tomato soup for hangovers is wild though, it's basically admitting breakfast is just whatever you can stomach before noon. So the line moves depending on how bad your night was, which makes the whole soup versus cereal thing more about survival than rules. Honestly, if someone handed me a bowl of Lucky Charms and called it soup, I'd laugh but I'd still eat it, so maybe the label just doesn't matter that much.