Love Bite: Soup Season and Changing Relationships with Eating

Words: Lauren O’Neill

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Content note: disordered eating

September is here which means that one of the best bits of the whole year is just around the corner: soup season. 

It is rare that I agree with the bread-swirling, bean-loving Instagram crowd, but having seen a bit of soup content start to rear its head over the last week or so, I am, I must say, delighted. 

Because – and not to be a white woman with a food blog about it – the fact is that I fucking love soup. I am a creature of habit, and I feel like I mark the passing of time a bit with reference to what I’m eating. Christmas is the time for party food and mini chocolates, in the summer I want picky bits, and as autumn starts to creep in and I get my jumpers back out, it’s soup I crave. 

As such, I love all soups – I do not discriminate. I love sugary Heinz Cream of Tomato canned soup firstly because it is delicious, but also because eating it with white bread reminds me of being a child, my legs dangling from a dining table chair at my nan’s house after school. On the other hand, I love fresh, rich vegetable soup because it tastes so good for you in every single way. It’s nutritious, obviously, but more than that, the feeling you get when you come in from the cold weather, warm up a dense, viscous soup you made yourself on the hob so it’s scorching, and then physically sense it heating your body as you eat it, is a unique and lovely one.
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While now I look forward to a piping hot bowl of soup with a hunk of bread, my relationship with this food has not always been so enriching. Like a lot of people, I’ve struggled with various issues around eating throughout my life, and in one particular period of poor mental health, I leaned on soup quite heavily, not for reasons of pleasure but actually kind of the opposite. 

I was studying at the time, struggling through an MA plagued by big, horrible life events – a bad breakup, a death. Every day I would drag myself to the library and when the time came to 1PM, I would buy a wretched pot of Pret Souper Tomato soup, and eat it at my desk as I wrote a middling dissertation. Partly this was because it was easy and I was depressed and couldn’t countenance actually having to make a choice about what I wanted (about food, but to be honest you can probably scale that up to all of the other parts of my life, too), and partly it was because the soup was one of the lowest calorie menu items you could feasibly pass off as an actual lunch.

My relationship with food in general improved in tandem with my mental health, but even then, for a long time, then, soup for me equalled restriction – and I’m not the only one; recommending soups for meals is as much a mainstay of the dark corners of the pro-ana internet as it is the Weight Watchers meetings our mums go to. It’s only in the last few years, really, that soup has come to mean something different to me – something about nourishment and fun rather than restriction. 

“Once it was a food that I associated with feeling isolated and ashamed, and now it’s something I like sharing with my pals – and I think that sharing element is crucial really.” 

During the pandemic, my housemate Joey was an amazing cook, and she’d make job-lots of smooth, thick soups to keep us going when it was cold. And a few years later, once I’d started to work at the Polyester studio, soup basically became a social activity. Last autumn, any day that threatened greyness or rain would be declared by all of us a “soup day”. By 1PM on these days, the kitchen hob would be bubbling with different pots – or sometimes one big one if everyone decided they wanted the same flavour. If it was a particularly soupy day, Bridget might make us all toasties to go along with our bowls, the bread fused together with the cheese making for an infinitely better eating receptacle than a spoon could ever be. My personal enthusiasm for soup days was so well-known that for my Secret Santa gift, I received a recipe book called “The Soup Bible”, which I still read keenly – and will, of course, be revisiting for the official onset of Soup Season 2024. 

I know it’s only soup, but when I do really think about it, it is nice to consider how differently I’ve come to approach it over the years. Once it was a food that I associated with feeling isolated and ashamed, and now it’s something I like sharing with my pals – and I think that sharing element is crucial really. 

Food is a special bonding tool, and, probably, if you think about it, the food you’re most fond of will have a memory tied to it, because of the person who prepared or bought it for you, or because of who you ate it with, or when you ate it, or where. That is how I’ve come to feel about soup, of all things – the heat, the substance, a toastie dipped in, the liquid settling into the creases from the toastie maker. All great, and all made even better by the fact that I'm not eating it alone anymore.