Them boxes of soup are hard to pack (Was: Don't never order soup)

[Jeff Wrangler]

So the Basque tells Ennis never to order soup, because the boxes of soup are hard to pack.

Has it occurred to anyone else besides me to wonder how come boxes of (presumably canned) soup could be harder to pack than boxes of (definitely) canned beans?

 

[nakymaton]

Could it be dried soup mix? I don't know from horse-camping, I'm afraid, and I wasn't alive in 1963. Would dried soup mixes have been a possibility, even?

I also sometimes wonder about Ennis not eating soup. I mean, that's a lot of different sorts of food not to like. Tomato soup, chicken noodle soup, cream of X soup...

[Front-Ranger]

This is a good question, Jeff. I already started this topic. "Don't Never Order Soup" is over on Chez Tremblay at

http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php?topic=3330.0

but if you'd like to have your own never order soup topic here, that's fine with me too.

[ednbarby]

It's probably already been covered on Lee's thread, but I'll chime in here:

Don't never order soup - them soup boxes are hard to pack = Don't ever go against the status quo - them "alternative lifestyles" are hard for society to accept.

[Front-Ranger]

Mel, U make me sick!! "I wasn't alive in 1963"   Well, I was definitely around then so I will give U the soup scoop. Yes, dehydrated soup was around in 1963. U see, there was this guy, name of John F. Kennedy, and one day in the early '60s he came on TV (yes we had TV then) and said "We will put a man on the moon by the end of this decade." And thereupon started the space race. Tang and dehydrated soup followed quickly behind, thus dooming a whole bunch of late-issue baby boomers to eat and drink such drivel on camping trips and such. Only thing is, they didn't have such things as asceptic packaging then, and the packaging left something to be desired, so I'm thinking maybe that would give a very flimsy reason for the Basque to say, "Them soup boxes is hard to pack." The real reason, we know, is that soup is a liquid and Ennis is not ready to dive into Jack yet!!

[nakymaton]

Mel, U make me sick!! "I wasn't alive in 1963"  Well, I was definitely around then so I will give U the soup scoop. Yes, dehydrated soup was around in 1963.

ROTFL. Fair enough. (But I was alive by the time they actually landed on the moon, see, and I figured that maybe they just couldn't make it to the moon because they kept trying to pack cans of soup and those cans of soup are real hard to pack? No? Hey, I'm just trying to confess that I'm a clueless rugrat here, that's all.)

I confess I was thinking about the dehydrated soup that I've packed on the closest thing I ever did to spending a summer herding sheep. We bought it at Whole Foods. I couldn't picture Ennis sending the Basque to Whole Foods.

I probably shouldn't ask about ziplock bags either, huh.

[Front-Ranger]

Can I shuffle back to my trailer now, hun? 

[Jeff Wrangler]

This is a good question, Jeff. I already started this topic. "Don't Never Order Soup" is over on Chez Tremblay at

http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php?topic=3330.0

but if you'd like to have your own never order soup topic here, that's fine with me too.

Mea culpa. Sorry for the inadvertent duplication of thread title. As you can see, it's been changed.

While I was being a bit of a smarty-pants when I wrote the original post, I also have genuinely wondered about packing boxes of soup compared to cans of beans. Have to say, I still don't get how squarish boxes of powdered/dehydrated soup could be more difficult to pack than cans of beans. 

[delalluvia]

It could be simply the shape of the box.  Some boxes (cases) of canned goods come in easily totable boxes - the number of cans in the box is small - others can come in high numbers in a case and thus are heavy and largish and would be more difficult to pack.

[Andrew]

I always thought the the soup boxes were hard to pack because the cardboard was probably flimsy. The sides of the saddlebags and the ropes squeeze against boxes like that and split the cardboard.  This is from the viewpoint of someone who has brought home food in backpacks oftener than I like to think for the last thirty years! And has the disasters to show for it, including a scene much like the one in the movie where the flour goes up in clouds.

[Andrew]

...though the one I remember most fondly was when I set a dozen oranges, loose in an untied bag, on the bus floor and they went bowling.  Getting my oranges back to their rightful owner, hand over hand,  became a community project which engrossed every person on that bus, and man was the bus packed.

[Front-Ranger]

Thank you Andrew, for coming to my aid and for saying it more eloquently than I could. Are you littledarlin by any chance?

[Andrew]

I am a little darlin, not the littledarlin.  More of a big one I guess.

[Andrew]

"Big darlin'".  There's something profoundly wrong with that.

[Front-Ranger]

No, not at all. Welcome bigdarlin Andrew!!

[Jeff Wrangler]

So do we have a consensus here that the soup in question was probably dried/dehydrated, in cardboard boxes, and this is what made them hard to pack?

Unlike someone else on this thread (ahem), I, too, was alive in 1963, and the only soup I remember from my early childhood was Campbell's, in cans; thus I was assuming that for some reason the Basque was claiming that it was difficult to pack cans of soup in boxes like the one we see on the side of one of the mules when the bear spooks them and they run off. And it made no sense to me that canned soup would be any more difficult to pack than canned beans.

[Front-Ranger]

Are U trying to bring this subject to a conclusion, just when I get to flirting??   

[Jeff Wrangler]

Are U trying to bring this subject to a conclusion, just when I get to flirting??   

Nope, just askin' if others are understanding this the way I'm understanding it. 

[delalluvia]

So do we have a consensus here that the soup in question was probably dried/dehydrated, in cardboard boxes, and this is what made them hard to pack?

Nope, I'm in the 'big/heavy cans in thin boxes hard to pack' camp. 

[Jeff Wrangler]

Nope, I'm in the 'big/heavy cans in thin boxes hard to pack' camp. 

That's precisely why I never believed the Basque. See, I figure they take the heavy cans out of the thin boxes and put them in something like that box on the side of the mule. So what's the big deal about transporting cans of soup compared to cans of beans?  I can't believe the cans of beans came in cartons any sturdier than soup would.

Is this starting to sound circular? 

[Front-Ranger]

Cylindrical, actually 

[twistedude]

Been around since '35, and "boxes of soup," to me, would mean dehydrated soup, not boxes of cans.

In case anyone wondered, the dehydrated soups can be better, because they need SO mcuh more fixens added to them to maske them decent, whereas with the cans--it's sort of: what you get is what you serve. Dry soup cries out for imaginatrion, whereas canned soup says take it easy and serve what you bought.

As for En nis, I don't think he would be much of a gourmet cook, so dried soup would probably be pretty dull. Back in '63, there were few if any interesti9ng casnned soups either--if you ask me, there were damnerd few interesting canned ANYTHINGS...