Ten More Things You Didn't Know About Soup

1. Donald John Eric Richard Kevin Trump has promised to ban Potage de Crecy 'for being too French.' You can find good in everyone.
2. According to a non-existant law not passed in 1143 it is legal to shoot a Welshman eating Cawl in Chester on Mayday, provided you use an 1143 bow - the arrow can be manufactured anytime up to noon.
3. Similarly in Berwick you may of an evening bludgeon a Scot eating Cullen Skink while playing the bagpipes and doing Scottish country dancing. This is not legal, but no jury in the land would convict you.
4. The extreme flatulence from eating a traditional Mayan soup made from chick peas, haricot beans, garlic, butter beans, string beans, chili and more garlic is said to kill one in seven European travellers who try it. But on the plus side, it gets two in seven American tourists.
5. It is a little known fact that there is actually no word for soup in English.
6. Hillary Clinton once mispoke about eating soup while under sniper fire in Bosnia. It was avocado dip in Atlanta at a formal ball, a mistake any of us could make.
7. Bill Clinton was telling the truth when he said 'I did not have soup with that woman.' It was sex.
8. The Chinese serve several soups during a banquet. At Mao's 50th birthday celebrations so many were presented to the guests that six foreign diplomats drowned trying to maintain protocol.
9. Stalin once tried to solve the USSR's food crisis by planting soup in the frozen tundra. It failed, but he invented Vichysoise.
10. In 1964 Elizabeth Taylor enjoyed a bowl of mushroom soup so much that she married it. The marriage lasted longer than any of her other 17.

Ten Things You Didn't Know About Soup

1. The Incas worshipped a god of soup.
2. Marie-Antoinette's famous dictum should rightly be translated as 'let them eat Bouillabaisse.'
3. The authentic Sicilian recipe for tomato soup includes no tomatoes.
4. Winston Churchill famously never once ate soup as an adult, saying life was too short to do so.
5. The greatest soup tragedy in history occurred in Belgium in 1834, when 17 people died eating particularly hot asparagus soup.
6. In Germany it is still illegal according to a 14th century law to put croutons in soup. This law is believed to have been brought in to protect the German dumpling industry.
7. As Dan Brown showed in his novel The Ninth Potage, the word soup is derived from an Aramaic term meaning endless dross, and that an ancient brotherhood dedicated to protecting the secret of the perfect broth is said to exist to this day in Penge.
8. The higher slopes of Everest are now littered with more than five million empty tins of beef bouillon, piled so high in certain places that they actually reach higher than the mountain peak itself.
9. For a bet the great sportsman CB Fry once ice skated for a week on a frozen plate of clam chowder. He won the bet, but lost his frost-bitten testicles in doing so.
10. Andy Warhol wished to sue Batchelors for infringement of his soup tin design until it was pointed out that he was being a self-regarding prat again.

New Miracle Diet (Honest)

I am, I confess, fascinated by the stream of often contradictory advice that nutritionists provide. Red meat is bad for you, but on the other hand red meat is good for you. Fat is the root of all evil, but perhaps fat is quite good for us. Coffee kills us, but coffee can be quite beneficial. It is I'm sure completely coincidental that the good for you side often comes from studies sponsored by those marketing an item. [Ha, a couple of years later and the experts who told us eggs are bad for us now say the opposite. Soft-boiled best, both eggs and (perhaps?) nutritional experts]

Elsewhere here I've put forward the very simple idea (and I don't pretend to be the first to do this) that diversity in what we consume is the likeliest way to eat healthily. Now I want to put forward the Pilkington Diet, not suggesting we all eat Pilkingtons, but expanding on the idea of range.

The government's 5-a-day regime (apparently the professional advice was 7, but they bottled it) is clearly short term. If we were to eat just a portion every day of the same five, say carrot, apple, rhubarb, lentils and lettuce, we would meet those guidelines, but it doesn't take a genius (thankfully) to see that it would be a very limited diet indeed, and we'd be missing out on lots of complicated things with big long names.

My solution is to use a number as arbitrary as the 10000 steps a day target about which my wife is obsessed. Why stop there? Let's make it two arbitrary numbers.

Arbitrary number the first: I aim to eat 30 different fruits, vegetables and nuts (30 combined, not of each) a week). Arbitrary number the second, I aim to eat 100 different f, v and n over the year.

In my book (unpublished, indeed unwritten) 'The Pilkington Diet - My Way to a Richer Lifestyle' (ambiguity of richer intended) I will set out the rules for combining the foods, and most importantly for establishing what a portion is. Here's an extract about portions: 'The amount of a portion varies according to numerous factors, but in most cases it can be taken as 2.7 tads, or in Imperial a smidge and a bit.' If I recall the official guidelines a portion is to do with spoonfuls of some sort. Heaped or level I can't remember.

Other than people with allergies foolish enough to ignore them, following the Pilkington Diet is unlikely to kill anybody, give them foul breath, or bore them rigid, except in counting and logging the different produce eaten.