The orange things in your soup

Now I’m sure all that read this are culinary experts in the kitchen gathering and slicing and dicing produce to place in a large metal container with secret ingredients and spices to slow cook to perfection, but I’m not one of them.

I buy the soup cans off the shelf.

Someone somewhere must have done the process and then poured the mixture in a can, slapped a label on it, and placed it on a shelf giving me the opportunity to take home, warm up and consume as food.

Most of it seems fairly familiar to mom’s cooking but some parts just don’t make sense.

The chicken noodle soup seems to taste like chicken broth (let’s not go there) and the noodles are sort of pasta tasting but the chunks of stuff that is suppose to be ‘chicken’ could be tofu.

Being the season of considering making a homemade stew or chili or some concoction on the stove I think about ingredients.

The only cookbook I have left is “The Joy of Cooking” circa 1783 with recipes using lard and road kill. Butter was probably churned and don’t want to think about where milk came from.

So I slice the top off a tin can with a label declaring ‘soup’ and pour the contents into a ceramic cup, punch in 5 minutes on the microwave and wait for the bell.

It looks like soup. It smells like soup.

A quick stir and the warm meal fill me up for another day.

Yet, I wonder about the ingredients I’m chugging down my gullet.

I don’t check the side of the can for calories or sodium but wonder what is chicken broth, cooked white chicken meat, carrots, egg noodles (semolina wheat, wheat flour, egg*), celery. contains less than 2% of: modified food starch, corn protein (hydrolyzed), water, chicken fat, salt, potassium chloride, egg white*, carrot puree, onion powder, sugar, soy protein isolate, sodium phosphate, tomato extract, garlic powder, parsley*, chives*, maltodextrin, spice, natural flavor, beta carotene (color), flavoring. *dried contains egg, soy and wheat ingredients.

My question is about these orange things floating in the broth. They are supposed to look like carrots but they are not hard like the little carrots I eat with ranch dip. These taste more like mush.

Occasionally a piece of green thing looks like a celery but the white chunks are not potatoes but they are filling.

Still these orange chunks fascinate me. Are they supposed to make me believe I’m eating healthy? Are they rabbit food that didn’t make the salad bar?