Ten Facts About Soup and the EU Referendum

1. According to the Leave campaign, the EU soup lake now contains enough garlic consomme to fill 12,000,000,000 olympic sized swimming pools, and costs each British family (sorry, hard-working family) £4756 a year.
2. According to the Remain campaign, if we quit the EU our children will all be forcibly drowned in soup.
3. If we leave the EU the price of tomato soup will more than double overnight.
4. If we leave the EU we will be free to import cheap tomato soup from Peru, halving its price.
5. UKIP has pledged to make Brown Windsor Soup great again if we leave.
6. It was an accident during testing of the Euro-soup working party's proposed recipe that gave Nick Clegg his superhuman powers of shinniness.
7. The European Central Bank recently announced that the value of British stocks for soup would fall by at least 25 per cent in the event of Brexit.
8. Soup farmers reliant on EU subsidies predict leaving the EU will lead to envirnomental disaster, with soup fields left unpicked for generations to come.
9. France and Spain have both indicated that they will place an immediate ban on Cullen Skink in the event of Brexit.
10. Creme de Jacob Rees-Mogg or Veloute George Osborne. Can you spot the difference?

Ten Things They Don't Want You to Know About Soup

1. In the 1950s government instructions in case of nuclear attack included 'prepare some soup - soup makes everything feel better.'
2. The brief advertising career of Franz Kafka ended after he suggested the slogan 'Brotschka's soup - endless misery and pointless longing.'
3. In the 1930s engineer Dwayne Q. Snetterton devised a car engine that ran on chicken stock, clocking 2500mpg, but Big Oil murdered him and supressed his invention.
4. The Duke of Windsor believed he could cure his syphilis by dipping his gentleman's sausage in a bowl of piping hot cock-a-leekie. He was misinformed.
5. America lost the Vietnam War because their troops ran out of those little crackers they serve with soup for no obvious reason.
6. Shortly before Ronald Reagan was elected President the CIA is known to have carried out experiments on mind-altering soups. 
7. Sir Walter Raleigh brought the first soup back to England from the New World.
8. There is more potential energy in a litre of cabbage soup than a kilo of plutonium.
9. It is rumoured that Prince Charles has a man to blow on his soup for him.
10. It is rumoured that Prince Edward has a man to explain what soup is to him.

Ten Facts About Soup That Will Change Your Life

1. Jason Statham's favourite soup is Kalashnikov.
2. As an exercise before a university drama production Hugh Grant was asked to pretend to be a bowl of soup. It is feared nobody ever told him to stop.
3. Nigel Farage MEP is rumoured to be the secret architect of the groundbreaking European Directive on Tinned Soup (Safety in Transit Regulations - Interim Agreement 17.5 part 4(c)).  It has saved countless thousands of lives. 
4. During the reign of Henry VII a tax was imposed on ladles, but poor drafting meant that if used left-handed owners avoided the need to pay. A treasury team is still working on the re-draft.
5. After a five year programme of study researchers at an American University found that if spilt on exposed flesh boiling soup may cause burns.
6. For perfectly legitimate tax reasons David Cameron's father could only eat soup in Belize.
7. Only a few close friends of Boris Johnson are aware that his great-great-grandfather was a bowl of vegetable soup.
8. Elvis once had his private plane fly Heinz tomato soup, heated up by his chef in Graceland, to Las Vegas. It arrived cold, and he is thus credited with inventing gazpacho.
9. Tins of Scotch Broth more than four years past their sell-by-date are so explosive that they feature in the UN's list of items that may not be exported to North Korea.
10. It is estimated that House of Lords debates on soup cost UK taxpayers more than £12 million last year alone.

Ten Things You Should Know About Croutons

1. Edward VII's personal coat of arms included three croutons on a field of lobster bisque and a courtesan rampant.
2. Worldwide there are more than 500 deaths every year caused by poorly prepared croutons - if the poison sack is not carefully removed the residue is potentially fatal.
3. No two croutons are ever alike, thanks to their unique crystal structure.
4. Al Capone is once said to have killed a rival by bludgeoning him with a particularly large crouton.
5. If you are ever lost, and have a crouton on you, point it at the sun and the greasy side is due west.
6. During the Parliamentary expenses scandal three MPs were found to have claimed simultaneously for croutons in London and at their constituency addresses.
7. Crouton is derived from the Ancient Greek root Crotos, meaning soggy and pointless.
8. During the French Revolution loyalty to the King was secretly signalled by keeping a small crouton in ones ear.
9. A crouton was found by Howard Carter in King Tut's tomb, and it was still edible. But Carter was very hungry with all that digging.
10. It was once rumoured that the EU crouton mountain was so big and dense that Brussels reputedly feared creating a man-made black hole. But then some people will believe any rubbish they are told if it's brazen and bigoted enough. 

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.