With all due respect to those hard-working cafeteria ladies, the smell of one of their industrial batches of chicken soup sounded a death knell in some delicate, secret chamber of my soul. Of course, most of us can, and would, testify to the healing, comforting potential of even the smell of a homemade batch of chicken soup. Whether made by your mother, your grandmother, your father, your spouse, or your kind neighbor, homemade chicken soup has the power to throw a fleece blanket around the soul, and then to envelop that soul in a warm, gentle hug. Homemade chicken soup represents the pinnacle of comfort food’s alchemical power. Take that same basic premise, however, and dress down its ingredients, blow up its quantity several hundred-fold, and set it in the context of an industrial kitchen (and, perhaps, a rainy school day), and you’ve got a recipe for deep existential dread – at least, according my palette.
Somewhere between the oversized #10 cans of generic chicken stock, the bulk sautéing of (likely frozen, pre-cut) carrot-circles and celery half-moons, and the simmering twine of chicken flesh (also likely frozen and pre-shredded), an aroma is conjured that bears unexpected undertones of sour mop water. This aroma lacks the kinetic pith of a small batch of such soup – lacks the herbal vibrancy of freshly-chopped celery or the boisterous smolder of copious black pepper, or the earthy sweetness of the beloved carrot. Instead, on an institutional scale, and as pumped through the ductwork of an institutional kitchen’s ventilation system, chicken soup takes on the fragrance of flaccid mediocrity, foreshadowing a near-future in which its ingestion will demand a willful suspension of one’s disgust and indignation.
Soon, this institutional olfactory tidal wave signals, you will have to swallow that which kills you. You will have to smile and allow to become part of you something to which everything in you vehemently objects – something whose weight silently crushes a delicate yet vital structure somewhere deep within you. You won’t be able to explain it to anyone – not even yourself. It will take you decades to even dare attempt to put words to it. But the knowledge of the grey death the smell of this institutional chicken soup signifies will be undeniable to you, even at age 7, as you step off the bus and toward the school’s brown double-doors with an increasing sensation of lead in your legs. That smell is telling you to run – to get back on that bus and be carried away from here, far away, until the zombie-like tendrils of this fragrance can no longer creep up your nose, down your throat, through your lungs, and into your soul.
You will be shocked back into recollection of this sense memory many times in your life, and most recently, on a rainy morning as you walk across the parking lot and open the heavy glass door of your workplace, which includes a cafeteria where, you suddenly realize, they are cooking chicken soup today. It will all come back to you so clearly, it will almost knock you out: the view from your window seat on the bus as it lumbers toward the school’s entrance, the catch in your chest as the first whiff of the dreaded contents of those industrial cauldrons invades your nostrils, the acrid undertones of sour mop water, the visceral oppression that overtakes you as the smell fills your senses, the sensation of some hidden, essential trap door spitting open deep beneath you while something essential within you slides through it, down…down…away, and beyond your grasp. You hear the “thud” of the glass door behind you and feel your steps moving toward the time clock, toward the source of the smell. You are acquiescent. You have succumbed. This secret, soul-erasing grayness is a hidden loop repeating itself across time.
To Be Continued...Till then, there's this gem.