Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Chicken Soup for the doppelganger

It's mildly disturbing how often we pass over menu items in the Dining Hall without pausing to take in their implications. For instance, how many of us stop to think about what makes "Double Chicken Soup" double? Whence derives its duplex- dare I say duplicitous- nature? Does it simply refer to an increased chicken content relative to normal chicken soup- analagous to Raisin Bran's "Two Scoops"? Perhaps it means that the soup contains both dark and white meat, in which case it would be more properly described as "dualist"- light and darkness, equal and opposite, locked in a microcosmic struggle; Zoroastrianism in a bowl... in which case, renouncing the heresy of the Manichees, we ought of course to demand Triple or Trinitarian Soup- one broth, three chickens. This may put us on firmer theological ground, though it might ignite an arms race of sorts among the dining halls as they compete to offer more chicken than their rivals. Already, we have a scenario in which one dining hall can offer twice as much chicken in their soup as another- and you can bet that no student in their right mind is going to settle for the lesser of the two. But it won't stop at double or triple or even quadruple chicken soup. No, unless an upper limit of chicken content can be fixed, there's no telling where this will end. And so we are faced with a terrible choice: we must renounce double chicken soup, or face culinary Armageddon.

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