Cereal, like all foods, deserves to be treated equally. For far too long now, Cereal has been an outcast from the soup family due to unjust reasons that discriminate against Cereal. I aim to show why Cereal is a soup and bring it the justice it deserves while simultaneously bringing all the arguments against it crashing and burning to the ground. I will preface this argument by saying that whenever I refer to Cereal, I am referring to Cereal being mixed with milk the way it’s traditionally eaten. I am not talking about dry Cereal.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, soup is defined as follows: “a liquid dish, typically made by boiling meat, fish, or vegetables, etc., in stock or water.” However, there are issues with this definition. For example, soup does not need to be made with meat, vegetables, or fish. Tomato soup exists; tomatoes are a fruit; Mushroom soup exists, and mushrooms are a fungus. Soups also do not have to be boiled and hot; for example, they can be cold, such as Gazpacho. There is also the issue of the stock or water needed for the broth; however, there are many cold and desert soups that use dairy in their broths, such as Carrot-Zucchini Soup, so there is no reason milk itself cannot be a broth.

Now that we have established that a soup does not have to contain meat and vegetables, it does not have to be warm, and it can have dairy as a broth, the issue now is the combination of the ingredients and what counts as soup. For hot soups, you would have to boil your ingredients in a pot until the flavor has been extracted; however, Cereal is not hot soup, so it just had to be blended or combined in some manner. It also does not have to be blended as with chicken noodle soup. You put the noodles, chicken, and whatever else into the broth and mix in a bowl the same as Cereal.  But where is the line here? How blended does something have to be to be considered combined? Say, for example, you’re trying to make a carrot soup, and it’s not entirely blended and still a little chunky; it is still a soup, perhaps just poorly made. However, poorly made soups are still soups. Even if you try to make a soup but it comes out poorly, it should still count as soup, as the intent of the meal matters. That is why I believe if you combine two or more ingredients in some fashion, whatever that may be, it could be blending, boiling, or even putting those two things together in a bowl and stirring. It still counts as combined as long as it takes a new form after the combination. This means that Cereal has been combined thoroughly enough to be considered a new and different meal; even if it isn’t as involved as other methods, it is still a new thing as the consistency of the dry cereal changes and the flavor of the Cereal is transferred to the milk making a new meal. 

After proving that the current definition of soup is not broad enough and that it would exclude other already accepted soups, I propose a new and more all-encompassing definition of soup: any food with a liquid base primarily served in a bowl and eaten with a spoon. So, Cereal and all soups mentioned in the article and on this planet fall under this new definition. To everyone who disagrees and says that it’s still not a soup, just because it’s new, different, and scary to you does not mean it isn’t soup, and just because you may not like it does not make it untrue.