Soup of Poverty

Same clothes, same gruel.

Melisandre: When I was your age, I lived on one bowl of stew a day, and "stew" is a kind word for it.
Gendry: In Flea Bottom, we called them "bowls of brown". We'd pretend that the meat in them was chicken — we knew it wasn't chicken.

— Game of Thrones, "Second Sons"

When you're poor and subsisting on Poverty Food, 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 in big batches, whether it's being sold in 99-cent cans or ladled out into bowls to feed a line of hungry people. If you're making it yourself, why, practically anything edible (and even some things that aren't...shhh!) 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 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 Students.

However, while this particular soup will keep your belly full, it probably doesn't taste that great. It may be a thin, watery broth or gruel. It may be a murky shade of brown, thick enough for a spoon to stand up in it, and have unidentifiable lumps floating on the surface. It may not even taste that bad, but just makes you tired of living on it day after day. And in the worst case, it may be filled with chunks of "mystery meat" that aren't really pork...

Specific types of "poverty soup" are, in fiction, associated with certain time periods or genres.

• Medieval times: A thick, meaty brown stew and a hunk of stale bread.
• 18th-19th century: A bowl of watery, tasteless white porridge. (Pea soup and oatmeal gruel were considered the iconic Poverty Foods in 19th-century English literature.)
• Modern times: Cheap canned soup or instant ramen, which comes with a little foil packet of flavored powder that makes soup when added to hot water.
• Futuristic times or science fiction: An artificially formulated nutritional paste that meets all the necessary vitamin and mineral requirements but tastes like absolutely nothing.

Related tropes:

• Poverty Food: The Souper-Trope.
• I Ate WHAT?!: That meaty chunk in your bowl probably wasn't chicken.
• Lethal Chef: Even lousy soup made by an indifferent cook is better than starving.
• Mystery Meat: "Once it's in the soup, I'll call it beef!"
• Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious: Oatmeal, watery broth or any other tasteless but filling version of the Soup of Poverty qualifies.
• Reduced to Ratburgers: Rats have meat on them, so into the soup they go.
• Soup Is Medicine: Soup cures hunger and sniffles? Truly, it's the wonder food!
• Starving Student: Instant ramen is the food of choice for many poor college students.
• Stock Medieval Meal: This soup may be part of the standard peasant diet.
• Too Desperate to Be Picky: If it's edible, it's going in the soup.

Not to be confused with Stone Soup.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Cowboy Bebop: In one episode, the crew has so little money that all they have to eat is self-cooking instant ramen.
• The Demon Girl Next Door: At the beginning of the series, the Yoshida family is cursed to subsist on 40,000 yen a month (400 USD, based on the exchange rate of the time). On the day when Yuko sprouted horns and a tail, they also ran out of the rice they could afford for the month, with her mother saying they'd have to make do with miso soup for the rest of the month.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: In the second arc, while Yusei, Jack, and Crow (and later Bruno) are living in a rented garage, they have financial issues so the food they're seen eating most often is instant ramen. The thing is, it actually tastes really good and Jack is absolutely obsessed with the stuff, which becomes a plot point when another character who currently lives on Poverty Food breaks in, said character being Yeager, who steals a cup because he really likes it. Half of that particular mini-arc is Jack and Yeagar crying over their love of instant ramen.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: The refugee camp in the war-torn Xyz Dimension only serves soup. Otherwise the locals can only depend on the water from whatever water fountain is still working and whatever little canned food is left.

Fan Works

• Asylum of Doom: Oatmeal is seemingly the only thing the inmates at the Burke Lunatic Asylum get served for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Film — Animated

• Cats Don't Dance: As Danny glumly rides the bus back to Kokomo, Indiana, he sees many Funny Animal extras on the street. A few are warming themselves by an open fire in a grease bucket, while many more are lined up, bowls in hand, for a ladling of soup from a large steel pot. Before Danny arrived in Hollywood, these folks could at least be cast as extras or "atmosphere" people, and enjoy sit-down meals. His fiasco at Mammoth Studios made all animal extras pariahs, so seeing this poverty soup line makes Danny feel even worse.
• The Last Unicorn: Molly's group complains about being served rat soup for three nights in a row, and laments that at least she could have used a different rat.
• Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol: The family of Bob Cratchit is so poor that the only thing they're shown eating on Christmas Eve is thin broth. This happens while the kids begin to lament their poverty and sing about how much they want expensive, filling meals (and presents).
• Pocahontas: Discussed. When John Smith is trying to convince the settlers that they can benefit from cooperating with the Native Americans instead of fighting them, he shows them an ear of corn.
  Lon: What is it?
  John: It's better than hardtack and gruel, that's for sure.
• Parodied in Trolls Band Together. 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 had a normal middle-class upbringing and their parents were dentists.

Film — Live-Action

• King Kong: To really sell the feeling of the Great Depression at the time this story takes place, long lines of poor people can be seen eating soup in the streets, and following an evening's Vaudeville act, Ann Darrow takes her elderly friend Manny to dinner.
  Manny: You think the kitchen'll still be open on Third?
  Ann: Soup and biscuits. Perfect.

Folklore

• The Stone Soup tale features a village visited by one or more travelers who ask for small bits of food, but are turned down. They then start boiling water and place a stone into the pot (a "soupstone"). After a while, villagers add a few vegetables, a meatbone, some crusts of bread, and there is enough stone soup to feed everyone.

Literature

• The 8th Son? Are You Kidding Me?: A Japanese salaryman falls asleep one night and wakes up to find himself the eighth son of a dirt-poor noble family. The first night after he wakes up they're celebrating the wedding of the eldest son with a lavish feast, but the night after that they're stuck eating soup that's barely got anything beyond water in it. This motivates him to become rich so that he doesn't have to eat like that anymore.
• American Girls Collection:
  • American Girls: Addy: When Addy lives on Master Stevens' plantation, the only thing she and the other slave children are fed is cornmeal mush.
  • American Girls: Kit: 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.
  • In the History 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.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Bucket family lives in extreme poverty with Mr. Bucket working as a toothpaste-cap screwer at a factory to provide for himself, his wife, his son Charlie, and the four grandparents. All they can afford to eat is cabbage soup, bread, margarine, and boiled potatoes (and every year on Charlie's birthday, a single chocolate bar which they have to scrimp and save for). Things get even worse in the winter when Mr. Bucket loses his job and even cabbage soup becomes unaffordable for them.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Invoked in Old School, when Greg's class goes on a field trip to Hardscrabble Farms, a wilderness survival camp. The people running it don't believe in wasting food, so at the end of each meal, everyone's leftovers are dumped into a giant stew pot. Mr. Healey tells Greg that they did the same thing when he went to the camp 30 years ago as a kid, and they're still using the same pot. One girl eats three servings of the stew to make herself sick so she can get sent home early, which Greg finds a bit extreme.
• The Hunger Games:
  • 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 they've killed while hunting, 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.
  • When Katniss is tending to Peeta's injured leg, she makes a soup out of mashed groosling meat and roots. She admits to herself that she's not much of a cook, but even she can make soup because it mainly involves tossing everything in a pot and waiting.
  • In Mockingjay, after District 12 is destroyed by firebombs, the survivors are evacuated to District 13, where everything is tightly controlled to conserve resources, down to each citizen's individual portion of food during scheduled mealtimes. One of the meals is fish stew, which doesn't taste bad, but the slimy texture makes it hard to swallow. Gale advises Flavius, "I wouldn't let that get cold. It doesn't improve the consistency."
• Mistborn: The Final Empire: The scene when Vin is introduced Soothing by Breeze is set in a "soup kitchen", where skaa, especially the poorest ones, eat cheap and really bad soup.
• Moving Pictures: Holy Wood is a Boom Town; there aren't enough jobs to go around, so most people have only pennies to spend on food. One entrepreneur opens up an eatery that sells disgusting stew at thirty pence a bowl. If you have to ask what kind of stew, you aren't hungry enough. They eventually settle on calling it fish stew, "on the principle that if you find it in water, it's a fish."
• Oliver Twist: Oliver is stuck in an Orphanage of Fear 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 bullied into requesting a second bowl, outraging the attendants.
• The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas: Through unexplained means, the utopia of Omelas is maintained by keeping a child in a tormented state for its entire life, locked in a dark basement and fed nothing but a half-bowl of cornmeal and grease a day.
• Princess Academy: Even though the villagers of Mount Eskel are the only miners of linder (a valuable type of stone) in the world, they remain poor because the lowlander traders take advantage of their lack of knowledge to not pay them fairly for their linder. Sometimes they have to water down their gruel to stretch it thin enough to get through the winter. They have a little song about it that goes, "Water in the porridge / And more salt in the gruel / Doesn't make a belly / Full, not a bellyful."
• Runaway: Holly can't get into most homeless shelters because they have a rule about children having to be accompanied by their parents, so she pretends that a Crazy Homeless Person named Louise is her mother to be let in. Their dinner for the night is split pea and ham soup, and Holly is surprised by how good it tastes because soup at most homeless shelters is watery.
• She Who Became The Sun: Zhu's last meal with her famine-stricken family before everyone but her dies is a soup of water, some beans, and their last winter melon. They don't even let her have any melon.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • 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".^note Or not. Tyrion does tell his henchman to kill the bard, and to stuff him into the stew, but he was mostly joking about the last part, and there're way easier ways to dispose of the body.
  • When House Bolton's forces and allies are snowed in at Winterfell by a massive blizzard, the common men and soldiers are served watery grey porridge and plain bread while the lords and knights eat the good food like ham, bacon, and butter, which causes some grumbles of discontent among the former.
• St. Joseph in the Forest: When the youngest daughter comes across the cottage of St. Joseph, he allows her to stay the night, but the only food he has to offer is a few roots, which she has to scrape and cook into a soup. Despite being hungry herself, she gives him the bigger portion of the soup and is rewarded with a sack of gold in the morning. After that, her two elder sisters try their luck. The middle sister gives him a portion of the soup equal to hers and gets a small bag of money. The eldest sister eats almost all the soup and leaves him the scrapings, and for her selfishness, gets a second nose stuck to her face.
• In the Grimms' fairy tale The Sweet Soup (also translated as The Sweet Porridge), a poor girl receives a magical pot from an old woman that produces soup (or porridge) when the words "Boil, little pot!" are said, and the only way to turn it off is to say, "Stop, little pot!" One day, when the girl is out of town, her mother decides to make some soup/porridge and says, "Boil, little pot!" but doesn't know the words to make it stop, so it keeps making more and more soup/porridge until it overflows the house and then the whole village. Eventually the girl returns and stops the flooding pot, but whoever now visits the village has to eat his way through the porridge or soup.
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Tess' ancestors were once nobility, but they have fallen so far that they now live in poverty. She remarks that they have a silver spoon with the family's coat of arms on it, but it is so worn that her mother uses it to stir the pea soup.
• The Julian Chapter of Wonder (2012) features his grandmother speaking about her experience as a young Jewish girl during the Holocaust, hiding out in a barn that belonged to her disabled classmate and his family. She even mentioned near the end that the 'soup' was just some bread and vegetables in water, and that both she and the disabled boy had lost so much weight.
• 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, and it is believed that this will cause bad luck in the couple's marriage. 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.

Live-Action TV

• The Chosen TV Series: Ramah's father mentions this trope when she abandons her job to follow Jesus Christ along with Thomas.
  "Porridge; soon you will know every way to make it. Because that is what you eat when you don't have a job or live with your family."
• Doctor Who: Dan Lewis worked at a food pantry where he and his coworkers supply the poor with cans of soup. His coworker suggests he take one home and he refuses because he wants others to have it instead, before he goes home and it's revealed to the audience that he is also poor and has nothing in his fridge. He quietly berates himself for not just taking the soup that he was offered.
• Good Eats: In the episode The Big Chili, Alton Brown notes that all the claimed originators of chili shared one thing in common: poverty.
• In Son of a Critch, the Critch family is lower-middle class, getting by on Mike Sr.'s earnings as a small-town radio presenter, and consequently, much of their dinner fare consists of things that have been boiled to death in a pot.
• Yellowjackets: The group has been stranded for months in the Canadian wilderness and they have trouble finding food. In "It Chooses" Van offers a leather belt to Mari, suggesting they add it to the meager soup as a source of protein. With a sarcastic "Belt soup. Yum," Mari drops it in the pot. This is the episode where the group holds a Lottery of Doom to pick out who will be sacrificed to the Wilderness and eaten.
• The Walking Dead: Played With in Season 9's "Who Are You Now?". Luke, who is trying to help his group gain membership with the Alexandrians they've just encountered, offers to make a fancy meal out of the deer they've killed. Eugene shoots him down, stating they primarily make stew since it will feed more people. At this time, Alexandria, though isolationist, is doing reasonably well in terms of food and survival, so the stew isn't out of desperation but just them still being smart considering the many times they have suffered food shortages. Later in Season 10's "Diverged", Carol struggles to put together ingredients for a soup in the aftermath of the Whisperer War that destroyed most of their food supplies just as the town was forced to accept the combined peoples of Hilltop and the Kingdom.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Poor-quality food costs only pennies per day and keeps people reasonably healthy, but generally consists of rough bread with thin soup or a Mess on a Plate.
• Exaggerated in The Dark Eye. Serfs in the Bornland are expected to reserve one plate of their poverty soup for their lord, in case they show up^note They won't; why would they? as a token of hospitality, no matter how dire the times are.

Theatre

• Annie has a variation on the gruel/porridge variant: in Miss Hannigan's Orphanage of Fear, the girls live on mush ^note  cornmeal porridge, a Great Depression staple . At one point Miss Hannigan excites them by remarking that they're not having hot mush for a change, but then reveals that they're having cold mush instead.
• Oliver! features the same workhouse gruel as its source novel, Oliver Twist.

Video Games

• Baldur's Gate III: The Tiefling refugees in the Druid Grove have a pot of gruel on the boil. It's described as "watery sludge" and "gray goo", but is as good for you as a Healing Potion.
• Cult of the Lamb: Some of the one-star dishes are soups that are cheap to make, but have a small chance of making your followers sick after eating them.
  • Grassy Gruel has the description "Better than nothing." It has a 25% chance of causing illness.
  • Stringy Meat Gruel is "made from scraps" and has a 10% chance to cause exhaustion.
  • Pungent Fish Stew "tastes better than it looks" and has a 10% chance to cause illness.
  • Paltry Pumpkin Soup has a 5% chance to cause illness and diarrhea.
• Dead by Daylight: When The Twins/Charlotte and Victor Deshayes were born with conjoined and deformed bodies, their mother Madeleine was accused of being a witch and had to flee with them into the wilderness to escape being executed. They had to survive by eating whatever they could find, including a stew of foraged vegetables mixed with moss and bark, which was said to "create a false sense of fullness."
  Madeleine: Eat... eat, child. You'll feel better when it's down.
• In Frostpunk, the Soup law gives you the option to turn 2 units of raw food into 5 units of food rations rather than the standard 4, which can be a blessing if you have a potential famine on your hands. The downside is that consuming the slurry causes your citizens to become more Discontent little by little. It's negligible at first, but if you don't switch back to standard rations in due time, the meter will keep ticking up.
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance: Stew pots can be found at campfires and kitchens, and can be used as free food sources by the player.
• Robot Alchemic Drive: The protagonist's best friend Nanao offers to make you a bowl of bread soup early on in the storyline. This is the first of many indications of just how poverty-stricken she is, but she always tries to stay in good spirits, even when the protagonist calls her out for not taking care of herself for the sake of saving what little money she can get.
• Stardew Valley: Algae Soup is a food item that can be made using four Green Algae, which are fairly common. It is said to be "a little slimy", but restores +75 energy and +33 health, so players are often reliant on it in the early game, especially to get through the caves.

Web Original

• Neopets:
  • If you have less than 3,000 Neopoints to your name, you can feed your Neopets for free at the Soup Kitchen, which is run by the kindly Soup Faerie. Unlike most examples of poverty soup, her soup is so delicious that rich Neopians sometimes come to the Soup Kitchen and pretend to be poor just to get a bowl.
  • Several food items have gruel in them, which appears as an unappetizing greyish-brown slop. The description of the Zafara Gruel is "This cute bowl might just help you forget that you are eating gruel." Meanwhile, the Gruel Ice Lolly is said to be "for those that want a cold refreshing treat without breaking the bank," and the Gruel Cake is "perfect for those planning parties on a tight budget!"

Web Video

• B. Dylan Hollis: Invoked in his video for "Hoover Stew", a stew consisting solely of macaroni, stewed tomatoes, corn, and hot dogs cut into medallions. As a recipe of The Great Depression, he notes that it came from a time when "people were pinching pennies until Lincoln wept", and remarks that the recipe makes an enormous amount of bland but filling food and only costs him $6.00. He also lampshades the lack of any spices or seasonings beyond the salt in the water used to cook the macaroni.
  "Dylan", you say, "did people not have spices in the Great Depression?!" [Beat] No...they didn't! Refer to "Depression"!

Western Animation

• American Dad!: In "A Jones for a Smith", Francine is sentenced to community service at a soup kitchen for driving drunk, and Stan, who had just sworn to never help anyone (or let anyone be helped), attempts to steal the soup barrel and eat it all. At the end, after Stan finally swallows his pride and realizes help is good, he returns to Francine at the kitchen and politely asks for some soup.
• BC The First Thanksgiving from 1973 has the menfolk attempt to capture a turkey for the holiday, but fail miserably. As a consequence, the Fat Broad ladles out rock soup to them, plunking a cabbage-sized, warm, wet rock onto their plates. It made for one grim meal.
• Subverted in Cans Without Labels. When George Liquor has his nephews Slab and Ernie over for lunch, he serves them cheap canned food without labels and chooses a can containing what he thinks is beef stew, but it ends up having a human face in it. The boys spend the rest of the short trying to get out of eating it.
• Futurama:
  • Parodied in "Xmas Story", in which homeless robots go to a kitchen for booze (as robots run on alcohol in the future).
  • Leela grew up in an impoverished orphanage, where the thing she looked forward to the most was Double-Soup Tuesdays.
• The Simpsons: In "Homer Loves Flanders", Homer and Ned volunteer together at a soup kitchen, feeding soup to homeless people.
• In the VeggieTales episode "Duke and the Great Pie War" (a retelling of the Book of Ruth), Nona and Petunia, both formerly well-off, have fallen on hard times. One evening, Petunia, trying to put on a cheerful attitude, announces that they have "water soup" for dinner. After Duke offers them whatever they can pick from his orchard, she instead makes apple fricassee.

Real Life

• Raymond Chandler, when commenting on his life as a writer before hitting it big, once said, "I never slept in the park; but I came damn close to it. I went five days without anything to eat but soup once."
• A cookbook from The Great Depression contains a recipe for Depression Soup that consists of 1/3 cup of ketchup and 2/3 cup of boiling water. One Tumblr user commented, "It took me a moment to realize they meant 'Depression' as in the era of depression and not the emotional state of being."
• In 1913 in Scotland, the corpses of two little boys were found floating in the Hopetoun Quarry. They were dressed in cheap clothing from the Dysart poorhouse and their stomachs contained the remains of peas, potatoes, barley, and leeks, the ingredients of traditional Scotch broth. It was determined that the vegetables had been eaten in late summer or fall, and this information was used to determine when the boys had died. They were identified as William and John Higgins, murdered by their father Patrick.
• Rumford's Soup, also known as economy soup, was made to feed people at minimum expense as a first attempt at scientifically balanced food. Made using pearl barley, dried peas, vegetables, salt, sour beer, and potatoes, it was noted to be nutritious, if not particularly tasty. It was mainly used for feeding soldiers or for public soup kitchens. Today, the Salvation Army still uses variants.
• In ancient Sparta, one of the most memetic symbols of their equality and asceticism was the so-called Black Soup, a very nutritious and allegedly very disgusting dish that made the most important part of their cuisine.
• The Automat was a public cafeteria with prepared foods served in portions. Patrons would add coins beside a compartment until the purchase price was attained, then the compartment would be unlocked and the serving made accessible. Those without a penny to their name made do with Automat Soup: both ketchup and hot water were available at no charge, so mixing the two made a cost-free, counterfeit tomato soup.
• Lentil or barley stew is one of the meals that can be included in a humanitarian daily ration, which are packages of non-perishable food intended to be distributed to civilians during a humanitarian crisis or other disaster.
• At one point during the Lewis and Clark expedition, all the Corps had left for food was a disgusting portable soup mix. While normally it would be mixed with things like meat, spices, and vegetables to make it more palatable, they didn't even have those.
  Sergeant Patrick Gass's journal: None of the hunters killed any thing except 2 or 3 pheasants; on which, without a miracle it was impossible to feed 30 hungry men and upwards, besides some Indians. So Capt. Lewis gave out some portable soup, which he had along, to be used in cases of necessity. Some of the men did not relish this soup, and agreed to kill a colt; which they immediately did, and set about roasting it; and which appeared to me to be good eating.

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