Can Lake Michigan Be Classified as a Soup?
Hello Chicagoans, and Great Lakes residents as a whole. Like a lot of you, I, too, have been spending a lot of time at the concrete beach now that the weather has warmed up a bit. I love to ponder, and the vast expanse of open water makes me feel grounded and calm. On one of my most recent meditative visits to Lake Michigan, I stared at the blue water for at least two hours, just completely emptying my head of any thoughts. This is definitely the most healthy way to cope with anything.
While lost in the beauty of our beautiful freshwater sea, my mind palace was suddenly infiltrated with a thought: “Damn, I’m hungry. I could really go for some soup right now. You might think it is morally and ethically wrong to want soup when it is over 80 degrees out, but I am just built differently. In my world, any season and any temperature are perfect conditions to get spoon-deep into some hot broth.
Anyways, since I was at the lakefront, there was no soup. There were hot dogs at the little stand down the way, but a hot dog is not soup. And I wanted soup! Then it hit me—could the very lake before me be considered a soup?
The Great Lakes are called lakes, but that word diminishes how grand they truly are. A more apt name would be a freshwater sea, but lake is just easier to say. Though it is truly a massive body of water, it is a body of water (broth) containing a fish (a protein), some seaweed (vegetable), and various minerals (flavoring). Sound familiar? It sounds just like a miso, a bouillabaisse, or that one seafood stew I found on the New York Times website. If you were to think about it for no more than two seconds, you would realize that this massive body of water that serves as our water supply and brings endless joy to the citizens of the area could very well be classified as one giant, raw soup.
“But soup has to be hot and Lake Michigan is super cold!” a hater would probably shout at this new revelation. That is wrong! While most soups are enjoyed hot—like chicken tortilla, Italian wedding, and minestrone—there are plenty of soups that are meant to be enjoyed ice cold. Like a gazpacho, or more controversially, a cold cucumber soup. Do people actually like these cold soups? That is up for debate, but there is precedent that some people do, in fact, like guzzling down cold, savory liquids. Even for those who are weary of this concept, a piece of crusty bread would most likely help both a gazpacho-style soup and a Lake Michigan one.
For seemingly an endless amount of time, I stared at the lake wondering if I could eat it with a soup spoon. My back was starting to burn from the sun. I thought about how many dead bodies were found in the lake each year, or how many shipwrecks were just leaking all their cargo to the bottom of the lake’s floor. There are a billion zebra mussels down there. A perfect ingredient to the largest freshwater seafood stew on Earth…except they’re basically inedible and taste like sand. Also, despite all of the nasty stuff, like e-bikes and dead bodies, would be diluted, there’s no way the FDA would approve of this Lake Michigan soup being safe to eat! Coming to my senses, I walked away to find my nearest Panera To Go location for a quality broccoli cheddar in a bread bowl.
Lake Michigan soup may be a no-go, but the ocean? Now that’s still on the table.