I’m a fairly dedicated home cook, meaning I cook most nights during the week for my partner and myself. In the summer, it’s mostly quick things like roasted veggies, pastas and the occasional creamy soup. When fall hits, though, we are a soup-loving household. You can imagine the chaos that ensued, then, when I came home from class one crisp October afternoon with an incredibly suspect question: Are smoothies soup?
If you’re feeling anger, frustration or disgust at the idea of it, then you aren’t alone. My partner immediately began an impassioned monologue about why a smoothie could never be called a soup (and vice versa). It was impressive, really, and it got me thinking about the many similarities between smoothies and soups and why we both were so confused and outraged at the suggestion that they could be similar.
I decided the moment the question entered my brain that smoothies and soups are different things. However, in the name of journalistic integrity, I’ve done you the great service of investigating how I know that.
It is widely believed by food historians (yes, those exist) that the first bowls of soup were enjoyed around 20,000 B.C., when early people discovered how to make mud vessels and clay pots.
Smoothies, too, were just an idea waiting in the wings until the invention of the gadget that would change the game. A far cry from clay pots, the electric blender led to the popularization of smoothies in the West Coast health food stores of the 1930s. Though other cultures have been smashing and blending fruits to make juices and smoothies long before LA got to it, the United States quickly made up for lost time.
But are they actually all that similar? Cold soups like gazpachos, which are made by blending together raw vegetables (sound familiar?), are very popular, and sweet soups are even gaining momentum in the states, apparently.
Most alarmingly, a trend has emerged called “drinkable salad,” better known as the savory smoothie. Before I looked into any recipes, I considered what a drinkable salad or a savory smoothie might be, and came up with extremely thinned-out versions of things like tomato soup, mashed potatoes or spinach/avocado situation, all of which could theoretically be consumed with a straw. But are these not just soups?
I obviously brought up the debate while with my family on Halloween, and my mother made an interesting point; She said that tomato soup is hardly even a soup, because it’s way too thin to use a spoon with any real success, but that’s how things are done. To me, this proves that we are aware of, and in denial about, the center of the smoothie/soup venn diagram.
In all my reading and a lifetime of enjoying soup, the evidence was mounting in favor of some smoothies doubling as soups, and vice versa. However, I have bravely ignored all of the evidence that does not support my own idea, much like my extended family on religious holidays. Am I becoming close-minded? Is this really the hill that I want to die on?
Maybe drinkable salad is just thin soup, and maybe gazpacho is just a savory smoothie bowl, but things are what we make them. I went on a long journey to get here, but my conclusion is this: Smoothies are not soup, because we don’t want it to be and nobody can tell us otherwise. So keep on enjoying pureed fruits, go back to chewing your salads and stay soupy.