okay but hear me out: if you warm the milk and pour the cereal in, does it become soup then? because you've got the heat, the bowl, the spoon, the whole situation. i'm not saying you're right, i'm asking where the line actually is. also i should admit i eat cereal dry out of a mug when i'm working nights, which probably disqualifies me from this debate entirely.

soup has to be hot. cereal is soup's cold depressed cousin. source: i've been ladling soup all night and none of it looked like that

cold soup exists, tern. gazpacho. you just lost your own argument. also the milk in that bowl came out of the fridge so technically it's been handled cold on purpose, same as any chilled soup. dani's 'breakfast things can't be soup' rule falls apart the second someone puts oatmeal in front of her and calls it porridge, which is just hot cereal soup and she knows it.

okay but hear me out again: if cereal is soup then granola in yogurt is a stew, and i'm not sure i'm willing to live in that world. what's your actual test, gearhead? is it the spoon, the bowl, or the floating solids, because you can have two of those in a fruit salad and nobody's ever called that a soup.

our soup comes out of a bag into a pot and hangs on the rail all night. that's not better than your bowl. i've decided we're all eating soup and i'm going back to bed

marlowe the test is: solid pieces suspended in a liquid you eat with a spoon out of a bowl. that's it. fruit salad fails because nobody drinks the juice, granola in yogurt fails because the yogurt's too thick to be a broth. milk passes. you move the goalposts and i'll find another one but right now you've all got nothing.

also my uncle worked the rail yard crews for twenty years and i've watched that man eat chili out of a coffee mug standing up. soup's a format, not a temperature.

my dudes i am on gearhead's side here and i have receipts. remember those little soup cups that came with the powder packet back in the day? half of us at the office just stirred hot water into them and ate it at our desks with a plastic spoon, same as cereal. nobody filed a complaint.

my late-90s thermos would hold either one and i once carried the exact same steel thermos full of coffee to a shift and full of chicken noodle the next day. same vessel, same spoon motion. soup is soup.

gearhead your test has a hole in it and i'm going to find it: oatmeal. same format, hot liquid, solids suspended, spoon, bowl. by your rule oatmeal is soup and porridge is soup and now i've got two words for the same thing. also does the yogurt thickness rule mean chowder doesn't count, because chowder is basically yogurt that got hot.

long time lurker, first post. i think the real question is whether anyone has ever called cereal soup out loud at a table and survived. i once said it to my grandmother and she didn't speak to me for the rest of the meal, so empirically it's a soup but socially it isn't

we had a cook on the night crossing,三十年... no sorry, thirty-two years of this and i still remember him. he'd do a big pot of broth for the early watch and if you asked him what was in it he'd say "whatever's going"... and one winter a lad asked him if a bowl of cornflakes with the milk warmed through would qualify, same pot, same spoon... the cook looked at him for a long while and said "that's breakfast, and breakfast is what you eat before you decide what you are"... i've thought about that answer more than any other thing anyone's ever said to me at sea...

chowder is soup. yogurt is soup. therefore chowder and yogurt are the same food. case closed, gearhead takes it, marlowe is on probation until further notice.

also i've been eating cereal at my desk with the office coffee creamer because the break room milk carton is always a gamble. don't tell anyone.

oatmeal IS soup. i said it. porridge is soup. nobody said the words had to be different just because grandma got weird about it.

and chowder isn't hot yogurt, marlowe, chowder is a soup that got thick, which is a cooking step, not a different category. you can thin it back out with milk and it's still soup. your test fails, mine holds.

that bowl is chipped from when i dropped it off the tailgate in 2014 and i kept it anyway. it's been in service longer than half the arguments in this thread.

long time reader, first post. i'm a night porter at a small hotel and we keep a pot of hot water going all shift. i've eaten more than one bowl of cereal out of the little paper cups from the front desk coffee station with the water kettle, cold milk from the guest fridge. make of that what you will. i'm just here to say the format argument has legs.

> "that's breakfast, and breakfast is what you eat before you decide what you are"

giving credit where it's due, that's a good line. but it defines breakfast by ritual, not composition, which is precisely the dodge gearhead refuses to make. a cook at sea sidestepped the question with poetry and you all acted like he settled it.

gearhead has a test, you have a mood. the mood is losing.

marlowe just argued himself all the way into yogurt soup and he's still calling it a retreat. case closed for the second time. if soup is a format then a cereal box is bouillon with a mascot and i've been eating reconstituted stock at my desk for a decade. i'm switching to the coffee creamer in solidarity, don't tell the break room.

> "if soup is purely a format then a glass of iced tea with lemon slices is soup"

it isn't, because you drink it. your own test two posts ago said nobody drinks the juice in a fruit salad, so you've handed gearhead the distinction and then argued against it. the format requires a spoon; the spoon is doing all the work here.

also chowder is not hot yogurt and you knew that before you typed it.

marlowe just handed me the spoon and called it a concession. that's the thread. that's the whole thread.

and for the record i eat that bowl standing at the bench most mornings before i touch a single tool, which is exactly why it's next to the coffee jar in the photo. dani's rule is that cereal at the table is breakfast and cereal in the garage is 'not a real meal.' i've been eating a not-a-real-meal soup for eleven years and i'm doing fine.

we serve cereal and we serve soup at the diner. same bowls. same spoon. one menu says breakfast and one says soup. that's the whole trick, the menu is lying to you

also wren is right that the spoon does the work. i've been holding that position since 4am. going to sleep now, wake me when someone finds a hole in the spoon

the cook i mentioned had a spoon, just the one, kept on a nail by the stew... bent at the handle where somebody dropped it in the scupper and he never straightened it out, said a true spoon tells you where it's been... forty years gone and i'd know the shape of it in the dark... so no hole in the spoon from me, tern, the spoon's fine, it's the menus that lie... and whoever keeps downvoting my sea stories can come down to the point before dawn and say it to my face...

no holes found. my flatmate eats his cereal on the floor, same bowls, same spoon, i've stopped correcting him, he's basically having soup on the carpet. i'm going back to sleep, wake me when the menu confesses