I get why things like hot dogs or bratwurst are readily available as streetfood, it's logistically easy - but so is soup! You need like a pot, maybe two if you're getting crazy with it, maybe some bread rolls and that's it. It's cheap to make, cheap to buy, you could get hot soup on a cold day to warm you up or something like a gazpach or okroshka on a cold day to have a chilling meal. They're stupidly easy to make, all the ingredients basically cost zilch, very easy to adjust for all kinds of different dietary needs if you offer some sort of toppings optionally instead of throwing it all in there.

So why isn't there more soup? It's a style of meal you can find in basically any cuisine yet in all my travels I remember like two instances where I could just get a soup. What drives streetfood and why is soup shafted?

  • glans [it/its]
    ·
    30 days ago

    Soup is mostly water. Water is big and heavy. It can spill. Burns can be devastating. If you have a big pot you need a very flat stable surface to heat it.

    Sausages can be cooked as you need them but you can't keep topping up your soup all day. You need to make the correct quantity to begin with. Which means waste is likely.

    • ItsPequod [he/him]
      ·
      30 days ago

      Yeah, there's logistical problems with, say, a soup stand: How do you deliver the soup to people? Reusable ceramic bowls? Those are gonna break eventually, needing replacement, and they're also heavy as shit. Plastic? That's not super good for environments, people will toss them in the trash, and plastic isn't reusable in the long run on such a small scale. The ideal bowl would be like what Tim Hortons had for a while, bread bowls, but that itself is another logistical problem of producing your own bread bowls. Edit: Fuck me was this back in 2001? I'm turning to dust by the day

      There's logistical reasoning as to why you typically get soup at kitchens.

    • 7bicycles [he/him]
      ·
      30 days ago

      Half these criticisms feel odd. I can't manufacture new hotdogs in my street food stand, they're coming from somewhere offsite anyways, seems easy enough to replicate with soup.

      Cooking is just sort of dangerous to begin with, I feel like "Stable surface, possibly a cage, for big pot" is rather more a solved issue

      I think you might be on to something with the water thing though, that could be a problem. 800 hotdogs seems a lot easier to transport than 400L of soup.