Alphabet Soup

The label was quite clear - Campbell's Vegetarian Vegetable Soup, supported by an image of beans, peas, potato chunks and carrot cubes nestled in a spoonful of reddish stock. It was only once the soup had been prepared, and poured out, that it was clear the soup was an alphabet soup, concealed behind the thin veneer of sophistication of a vegetarian preparation.

The first time I ever had alphabet soup is one of those memories not worth retaining. There was a birthday party at McDonald's - that was popular then, so I got to know the King Albert Park outlet only too well. There was the typical lunch, either burger or nuggets, there was the ice-cream which would be drawn up from the kitchens by a mysterious-looking food elevator, and after the games there was the cake, intense with a chocolate flavour and covered in stiff, colourful icing. And at the end of it all there was the bag of party favours. I've had several items from those - a green plastic straw bent into a knot, a little car which could be transformed into a train, a cup with a transparent chamber wrapped around the sides containing glitter and little shapes which flitted whenever the cup was shaken. And once, there was a package of alphabet soup.

It was a very ordinary soup. A thin tomato base, and not much of that either, packed with little alphabet-shaped pasta. That was a true alphabet soup, nothing like the alphanumeric vegetarian version Campbell's favoured. It was alphabets, and it was soup, and I was disappointed that the shaped pasta didn't taste particularly different.

The Campbell's alphabet soup was far richer than that memory from long ago. There were vegetables, for one thing, and the distinct flavourful saltiness of MSG, and then there were numbers. The pasta was dense, so dense that they did not float and could not be made to form sentences on the surface of the fluid.

Ever considered the alphabets in alphabet soup? They are far from haphazard, and are indeed carefully crafted. Even under the influence of boiling soup base, the L never softens into a J, and even when bent inwards lacks the slight kink present in the 7. C looks nothing like U. Q, even when damaged, is never mistaken for O. Most surprisingly, 6 is clearly distinct from 9; the tail of the 9 slants out like that of the 7, while the 6's tail curves protectively around it. If alphabet soup is meant only for children, then clearly we take our children very seriously.

Then consider who came up with alphabet soup. Is it obvious to you to shape pasta into currency signs and form a soup with them? How about the basic shapes? Flags of countries? Mathematical operators? Why alphabets, and why soup? Are letters so important, and is soup so accessible? Is that why there is also alphabet cereal? Why are numbers only an afterthought to the alphabet? Are they not more important, since they are far more universal than Latin characters?

It is neither childish nor simple, is alphabet soup.