Starting to Fret

First check out this video from lunch today (profanity). It is many firsts, and hopefully the first of many. Hopefully it’s working now–it wasn’t earlier. Then read my first blog post ever. Crazy right?

I posted on Facebook earlier tonight that I couldn’t believe that we are actually going through with this ridiculous stunt. Up until now, I’ve sort of just been enjoying the conversation, laughs, and just all around good times that Soup for a Year talk has been facilitating. Now that we are four tiny little days away from a diet utterly devoid of crunchiness, the reality is finally starting to set in.

It really hit me when I was perusing my cupboards for dinner earlier tonight. I came upon my relatively enormous stash of Ramen noodle packages, and I recalled one of many lunch conversations based on the legality of foods in S365 (that’s my cool, new, alphanumeric meme for Soup for a Year). I asked the group if they thought Ramen should be legal. As David pointed out on Facebook, I certainly am the boundary-pusher. Even so, I thought that Ramen, like chili or stew, would have support from both camps (the purist camp, i.e. Rachel and David; and the “If you can eat it with a spoon, it’s soup” camp, i.e. Mike and Brie).

How wrong I was. Even Brie, who I would consider at least somewhat of a liberal ally, was adamantly against classifying Ramen as soup.

My point is that Soup for Year really hit me when I realized how much food I’m not going to be able to eat. If I was feeling those pangs of jealousy from RAMEN, of all things, 4 days before the competition starts, imagine how I’ll feel around people eating sandwiches! Or burrito bols! Or STEAK! Shit.

Despite my apprehension, I’m pretty excited to get this thing underway. I think it’s going to inspire some creativity in the kitchen, as well as at the computer.

On another note, which I’ll save for another post, I told my mom about S365–needless to say, she wasn’t happy when I told her I’d need soup at Thanksgiving.

The beginning

“Would you eat nothing but soup for a year for $50,000?”

It was an innocent enough question that Mike put to me at lunch this past Wednesday. Naturally, I said that, sure I could do that for $50,000. Heck, I’d do it for $20,000 or $5,000. Or for as little as $2,000.

You see, I didn’t see the task as being that challenging. Eating soup isnt’ that hard, right? Given that fact, I thought that eating soup every meal would be like getting free money. And I didn’t want to be greedy? So $2,000 seemed like a reasonable reward.

As soon as I said this, everyone else at the lunch table reacted very strongly. Nobody thought that I could do such a thing. Everyone started saying that I wouldn’t even last a month. Heck, some people said that I couldn’t make it a week. “Eating soup for breakfast?” they wondered. “Surely you wouldn’t want to do that?”

And then there are all the concerns about health and too much salt and  class=”mceItemHidden”> class=”hiddenSpellError” pre=”and “>yada, yada, yada. But I maintain that I could do a much better job of it than they seem to think I could. The idea of it seem tantalizingly simple. There are lots of different soups out there (as the video at the top of the page attests). As soon as I got done with one kind, I’d just move on to another. It would actually be fun to try different kinds of soup. And, of course, I would also be making my own–most likely on the weekends. And I’ve always liked to experiment with new types of recipes. So, that would help address the (supposed) health concerns . . . making my own and gaining new skills at the same time. What could be bad about that?

Of course, now I’m seriously thinking about the idea of this. Could I do it? Certainly I would not expect any sort of payment at the end of it. Even if all of my lunch mates chipped in (and why would they, really?) we’d never get to $1,000 and that money would be better served in other places anyway. So . . . if I’m doing it, I’m doing it just for the experience of doing it.

Naturally, I’d have to blog about it. (Because that is what I do.) And, given that I’ve spent so much time watching Brotherhood 2.0 videos over the past year, I’m envisioning a similar public experiment of writing about my soup journey and also making videos about the trip toward souptastic glory.

As we talked about it more, the challenge became more complicated. What IS a soup? Is chili a soup? It seemed that most people felt stew to be out of the question, but chili was up for debate. And (most pernicious, I thought) there was a contingent of people who felt that simply blending regular food into a souplike consistency could qualify. I am against this, as I think it is simultaneously disgusting and against the simplistic spirit of the challenge. But, if I am going to pursue this, there are important details that need to be worked about by me and those who will be judging the affair. As those items are worked out, I’ll be posting the details here.