History Main / SoupOfPoverty

* ''VideoGame/CultOfTheLamb'': Grassy Gruel is a one-star dish with the description "Better than nothing." It has a 25% chance of causing illness when eaten.

** In the ''Historical Mysteries'' book ''The Strange Case of Baby H'', shortly after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, soldiers set up relief stations and hand out bowls of oatmeal and slices of bread to survivors.

* Lentil or barley stew is one of the meals that can be included in a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_daily_ration humanitarian daily ration]], which are packages of non-perishable food intended for civilians during a humanitarian crisis or other disaster.

* Lentil or barley stew is one of the meals that can be included in a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_daily_ration humanitarian daily ration]], which are packages of food intended for civilians during a humanitarian crisis or other disaster.

* ''VideoGame/CultOfTheLamb'': Grassy Gruel is a one-star dish with the description "Better than nothing." It has a 25% chance to cause illness.

* Parodied in ''WesternAnimation/TrollsBandTogether''. When Veneer is expressing reservations about draining the talent out of trolls to fuel their popstar careers, Velvet asks, "Do you wanna lose all this and go back to the dark place where we had ''nothing?"'', followed by a flashback of Velvet and Veneer as small orphan children holding empty soup bowls and begging for more food. Then Veneer reminds his sister that they actually grew up in the suburbs and their parents were dentists.

** A low-quality stew called the "bowl o' brown" is the staple food of peasants living in Flea Bottom, simmering for years inside huge tubs and always getting new ingredients added to it. Any edible ingredient can be tossed into a bowl o' brown: barley, carrot, turnip, apple, fish, rat, cat, pigeon, horse, and... well, when a bard named Symon Silver-Tongue tries to blackmail Tyrion Lannister for better career prospects, let's just say a certain pot-shop ends up getting a surprise donation of "long pork".

* Parodied in ''WesternAnimation/TrollsBandTogether''. When Veneer is expressing reservations about draining the talent out of trolls to fuel their popstar careers, Velvet asks, "Do you wanna lose all this and go back to the dark place where we had ''nothing?"'', followed by a flashback of Velvet and Veneer as small orphan children holding empty soup bowls and begging for more food. Then Veneer reminds her that they grew up in the suburbs and their parents were dentists.

* ''Literature/TheOnesWhoWalkAwayFromOmelas'': The tortured child is fed nothing but a half-bowl of cornmeal and grease a day.

* In the short story ''The Yellow Slippers'', featured in ''Cricket'' magazine, the main character's older sister is getting married, but they do not have enough money to throw the lavish wedding they planned. The mother cannot bear the thought of removing anyone from the guest list, and mournfully says that they will have to serve only ''harira'' (Moroccan lentil soup) and pomegranate slices at the wedding.

** ''Literature/AmericanGirlsAddy'': When Addy lives on Master Stevens' plantation, the only thing she and the other slave children eat is cornmeal mush.

* ''Literature/AmericanGirlsKit'': When the Great Depression hits, Kit's family has to take in boarders in order to make ends meet. With so many people living at the house, Kit's mother has to find creative ways to stretch the food so that it lasts, including cutting toast in triangles to make it look like there's more and topping the oatmeal with peach slices to distract the boarders from noticing that they've eaten it four times in one week.

* ''Theatre/{{Oliver!}}'' features the same workhouse gruel as its source novel, ''Literature/OliverTwist''

When you're poor and subsisting on PovertyFood, more often than not your food of choice will be soup (or stew, broth, ramen, gruel, or porridge). It's easy to make and cheap to produce, whether it's being sold in 99-cent cans or produced in big batches and ladled out into bowls to feed a line of hungry people. If you're making it yourself, why, practically anything edible can go into a soup -- just throw it in the pot, add water, boil it up and you're done. You can even keep it going indefinitely by adding new ingredients whenever it runs low, making a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew perpetual stew]]. Needless to say, there's a reason why a place that serves food to the hungry is called a "soup kitchen". Regular patrons of the Soup Kitchen of Poverty include poor people, homeless people, prisoners, soldiers, traveling vagrants, wilderness survivors, and {{Starving Student}}s.

* ''Literature/OliverTwist'': Oliver is stuck in an OrphanageOfFear that keeps its charges just north of starvation on a bowl of thin gruel three times a day. In the book's signature scene, Oliver is moved by desperation to request a second bowl, outraging the attendants.

** Residents of the Seam, poorest part of District 12, regularly buy bowls of hot soup from an old woman named Greasy Sae who throws whatever ingredients she can find into her kettle. When Katniss and Gale bring her the carcasses of wild dogs, she winks at them and says, "Once it's in the soup, I call it beef." In the winter, she makes a stew out of mice meat, tree bark, and pig entrails.

-->'''Lon:''' What is it?
-->'''John:''' It's better than hardtack and gruel, that's for sure.

-->'''Manny:''' You think the kitchen'll still be open on Third?
-->'''Ann:''' Soup and biscuits. Perfect.

[[quoteright:350:[[Literature/OliverTwist https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/soup_of_poverty.png]]]]

[[caption-width-right:350:Same clothes, same gruel. The orphanage had NoBudget.]]