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Soup in the News

(Archive Dateline: December 1998)

Date	Item
12/31/98 Agence France Presse	Khmer Rouge mass murderers Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan followed up their recent pardon by vacationing seaside in Sihanoukville, Cambodia--dining on sour chicken soup at a top luxury hotel...and leaving no tip.
12/31/98 Japan Times	Philip Brasor reports on a Japanese soup slurping trend. Nagatanien's tv commercial for instant miso soup features a young man slurping down a bowl of soup in extreme closeup and full Sensurround Sound. Although older viewers find the ad disgusting, the soup is "flying off the shelves." As a result, other soup brands are following suit--with a cacaphony of demure but slurping young women shilling for them.
12/30/98 San Francisco Chronicle	Jake Curtis reports that Arthur Lee, star point guard for Stanford, looked unlikely to play in the ugly Stanford vs. Temple basketball confrontation in Oakland, after catching an intestinal flu on Christmas morning. But after 5 days of chicken soup and crackers, he ended up scoring a third of the points, to take his team to victory.
12/30/98 Washington Post	Candy Sagon reports that Lespinasse--top-rated New York City restaurant--charges $35. for a bowl of leek and potato soup. Yep, you read it right: thirty-five dollars.
12/29/98 Washington Post	Helen Dewar reports that Senator Alan Simpson's translation from the Hill to the hallowed halls of Harvard happened over two bowls of soup. Marvin Kalb, director of the Kennedy School of Government's Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, popped the first question at a lunch--asking Senator Simpson (R-WY) to join the center's senior advisory board...at which Simpson "dropped his spoon in his soup and asked, 'Me? Harvard? Are you kidding?" Then, when Kalb heard rumors of Simpson's plans to retire in early 97, he "pounced again over soup at a Washington restaurant."
12/29/98 Newsday	Madeline Bodin, in an article profiling internationally recognized marine conservationist Carl Safida (a native of Long Island, New York), notes that nearly all of the six types of sharks common to the Long Island area have disappeared. She cites Safina as saying, "Now most of them have been wiped out to supply the Asian market for shark fins for soup. Only the blue shark--whose fin is not a choice soup ingredient--is still common, but even the blue shark's numbers are down by 80%."
12/29/98 St. Pete (FL) Times	Curtis Krueger reports that Tampa Bay area citizens are helping the people of Guanaja rebuild their lives and their island by sending much needed food supplies--including cans of soup as well as Span, Kool-Aid, juice, and cornflakes. Guanaja, a small island off Honduras, was devastated by Hurricane Mitch in late October.
12/28/98 Washington Post	David Ignatius reports on the remarkable espionage efforts of French girl Jeannie Rousseau in 1944 against the Third Reich--particularly her precise reports on Germany's secret military plans, and especially the development of the V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets. Finally captured--but not until Churchill successfully set back German plans by bombing Peenemunde--Mme. Rousseau endured terrible punishment in the Ravensbruck concentration camp--then worse at the Konigsberg punishment camp. Now 78 years old, she describes this latter as "a very bad place": "The women worked outdoors in the freezing snow, hauling rocks and gravel to build an airstrip. They would stumble back to the camp after dark, bitterly cold, for a hot meal of soup. The soup was kept in great vats policed by the head guard--a fat beast of a woman the French called 'La Vachére,' or the cowgirl. She would taunt the hungry prisoners by kicking the vat of soup until it spilled into the snow and then watching them scavenge in the slush for bits of food."
12/27/98 New York Times	New chi-chi food trend in the Big Apple: frothed soups. Molly O'Neill reports that top restaurants are "whipping up" extravaganzas like Frothed Celery-Root soup with Truffles; Lobster Cappuccino; Foamed Corn Chowder with Oysters; and Cappuccino of White Beans with Morels"--all deceptively light, all packed with cream and butter, all very very bad for you. I'll have two of each, please.
12/27/98 Toronto Star	Allan Levine, Winnipeg author, has published Fugitives of the Forest: The Heroic Story of Jewish Resistance During The Second World War. How did these 25,000 Eastern European and Baltic Jews stay alive to sabotage the Nazi war effort? "The partisans, in groups of 50 to 200, had food only by what they stole in villages or killed in the forest. Their principal meal was potatoes which went, unsalted, into a communal pot for stew or soup."
12/23/98 Orlando Sentinel	Undercover law enforcement agents in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, snapped the bracelates on The Champion House Restaurant for serving them an order of bear paw soup, thereby violating protected-species laws. The restaurant was fined $2,600 and its owner's son, $650.
12/23/98 Chicago Tribune	Michael McGuire reports that Colonel Kenneth Baillie, Salvation Army, has a dream. As head of the Salvation Army's Russia/CIS Command HQ, he's looking for a $2 million donation to set up a true needs mission in Moscow. In the meantime, he and his 40 Russians and 40 foreign staff workers (on site as the Salvation Army since 1991, for the first time since expelled by secret police in 1923) work the dumps, work the streets, and "go out there once a week and take a big pot of soup and bread and serve food, listen to their stories and try to get them registered (with the authorities)."
12/22/98 New York Times	Senior Presbyterian Minister Joseph Gilmour, of Dobbs Ferry, NY, has created and fostered Midnight Run, a "takeout soup kitchen" that combines the generosity of donors with the generosity of the homeless themselves. The organization grew when Mr. Gilmore realized "it wasn't enough to put soup down in front of people, and I started to sit down and say some version of 'How are you?' That was the awakening."
12/21/98, Chicago Tribune	When President and Mrs. Clinton volunteered at a soup kitchen in Washington, D.C., 3 days before Christmas, the President said, "I think I can't leave the microphone without saying that in 1993, in January, D.C. Central Kitchen baked 28,000 saxophone-shaped butter almond cookies for my first inaugural. And it's about time I came here to pay them back."
12/18/98 Associated Press	Vince Cochetel, 37-year-old French U.N. aid worker, lost 44 pounds while held for 11 months in chained captivity in Southern Russia. Each day he was given a bucket of water for drinking and washing and was given just 15 minutes of candle light to eat a meager bowl of soup and some bread. His good humored comment: "It doesn't matter. I was too heavy before anyway"
12/17/98 Chicago Tribune	Guy Dinmore reports that Serbian citizens have been placed on a waiting list for eligibility to the Red Cross soup kitchen on Lomina Street in Belgrade. Waitlisted candidates meet daily to read obituary columns, hoping to move up on the list.
12/17/98 Washington Post	Kevin Merida reports that U.S. Capitol Bean Soup WAS NOT ON THE MENU IN THE HOUSE MEMBERS' DINING ROOM on Wednesday, 12/16. This was the day that President Clinton called airstrikes on Iraq--and the day before the scheduled vote in the House on impeaching the President. Mr. Merida comments, "Yesterday was weird. The bean soup was gone"--referring to Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon requiring bean soup to be on Capitol dining room lunch menus every day in perpetuity.
12/1/98 Washington Post	Representative Bob Inglis (R-South Carolina) says of the Judiciary Committee's goals in the impeachment inquiry: "If the House chooses less than soup to nuts, that's the House's prerogative. But I think the committee should present the full menu."