Begin with the flavor, which is not rank but insipid.
Made with water it tastes of a rusty farmyard pump,
made with milk it resembles melted vinyl in a pan
yet veers too closely toward its cousin, tomato sauce,
in all its richer culinary regalia, to say nothing
of that lordly fruit disguised as a vegetable,
the selfsame tomato in its myriad shapely tropes.
The larger question is existential: why soup?
As a snack it’s too much, too fussy, a hassle.
As a meal it leaves you hanging, perplexed.
Certainly, I have sampled delicious soups in my day—
split pea in Les Halles in the autumn of 1985,
a tureen of Tibetan lentil-and-potato chowder
after escaping a blizzard in Durango, Colorado—
but when I summon the flavor of Campbell’s soup
I am propped on pillows with a terrible cough,
home from school watching game shows on TV.
Soup is a peasant artifact steadily vanishing
from our lives, as illustrated in the financial section
by the travails of the Campbell Soup Company,
their offerings rejected by the modern marketplace
as drab, old-school, too salty, out of touch,
though for me the problem remains the name.
Despite its ubiquity Campbell poses a phonetic puzzle,
mysteriously pronounced, hard to spell,
derived from Scots Gaelic, meaning crooked mouth.
Hmm, why crooked—was it the soup?
The only compensatory value I’ve received
for sharing a moniker with its iconic red-and-white can
is when ordering takeout food over the phone,
at which time I invariably give my name as
“Campbell—like the soup.”
For decades a foolproof formula, a passkey,
a universal monad like Elvis or Shakira,
but now it elicits a head shake. Cannonball? Chimbu?
Once, I arrived to pick up spring rolls and pad Thai
to find myself mislabelled Gumbo—like the soup!
Better, these days, to be christened Goya, or Warhol.
But time marches onward, tastes change,
corporate empires rise and fall and each passing year
more of us live in happy ignorance
of this paradigmatic meme of twentieth-century Americana,
blossoming generations for whom tomato soup
might as well be tomato aspic,
while I continue torn between gauzy
cinematic phantoms of the past
and live-streamed promises for the future.
One last story: the other Wednesday
I stopped on the way to work
to pick up a sandwich from a vintage delicatessen
where the ancient woman at the counter,
her skin translucent as parchment paper,
stapled the receipt to a bag
and asked me,
“Campbell—like the soup?”
Yes indeed! “Are you related?” Sadly not.
“You know,” she said, “I grew up in Camden, New Jersey,
and the farmers used to line up day and night
all summer long
in trucks full of tomatoes
at the gates of the Campbell’s factory
with those big brick smokestacks gushing steam—
it was a long, long time ago
but I still remember the delicious smell
of tomato soup on every block in the neighborhood.”