I made my friend soup. Why did she share it with her dog?

A friend was isolating with COVID, so I dropped off some homemade pea and ham soup. She sent me a photo of her dog enjoying a bowl of it. Did she mistake my soup for dog food?
J.H., Beaconsfield, NSW

Illustration: Simon Letch

A: Your first mistake: a gift of soup. Yes, it was very nice of you to help out a sick, housebound friend, but soup’s not everybody’s favourite food format. It’s not a meal, it’s not a drink, it’s just something that most of us avoid for the first three-quarters of our lives, then suddenly we can’t get enough of it, slurping it down for dinner at 5.08pm in front of Millionaire Hot Seat.

Your second mistake? A gift of soup with ham in it. Lots of people don’t eat ham: vegetarians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs – pretty much half the world’s population – which means you’ve got a 50-50 chance of your friend thinking you’re a thoughtful, generous food provider or thinking you’re an ignorant, culture-disrespecting animal murderer.

Your final mistake was a gift of soup made out of peas. Because pea soup is the most aesthetically repulsive of all soups (a big call: it’s up against gazpacho and Campbell’s Condensed Cream of Chicken and Corn). Pea soup is so nauseatingly green and disgustingly viscous, it’s sometimes used as a special effect in horror movies, projectile-gushing out of mouths, open wounds and exploding tumours.

So there’s every possibility your friend thought your soup was a tub of green, sloppy dog food. But there’s the more likely possibility that she knew the soup was people food and wanted to share a nice meal with her furry iso-companion, the two of them happily slurping down soup at 5.08pm in front of The Doghouse Australia on catch-up.

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