Harder than you might think
It’s a miserable, soup-eating kind of day. Uncle B cracked open a can of Waitrose Pea and Ham soup, only to discover it wasn’t pea and ham. It was a mislabelled can of…something.
I volunteered to eat it. I’m the family waste disposal. But I found it oddly difficult to eat something unidentified. I didn’t know how it was supposed to taste, if that makes any sense.
There’s definitely carrot in there. And potato. But the real clue – you can probably spot it in the picture – are what looks like very small black-eyes peas. Tiny beige beans with a dark spot on its belly.
Grok told me no Waitrose own-brand soup has black-eyed peas in it. It further suggested they might be adzuki beans. No Waitrose soup has adzuki beans in it and adzuki beans look like this. Grok is stupid.
I finally decided it was Waitrose Lentil and Vegetable soup. And, sure enough, the ingredients
INGREDIENTS: Vegetables (38%) (carrots, onions, swede, potato, sweetcorn, peas), cooked red lentils (36%) (water, red lentils), water, cooked green lentils (7%) (water, green lentils), maize starch, wheat flour (wheat flour, calcium carbonate, iron, niacin, thiamin), salt, yeast extract, tomato paste, parsley, garlic purée, ground black pepper
Peas. Just peas. But there surely are not green peas in this, these must be tiny baby black-eyed peas. I don’t suppose anybody suffers from pea allergies, but there is a huge culinary gap between black-eyed peas and green peas. Seems it would be worth spelling it out.
What? Yes I did spend the afternoon researching a can of soup.
Posted: November 19th, 2025 under personal.
Comments: 9
Comments
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: November 19, 2025, 6:07 pm
Lordy, food looks unappetizing in black and white.
Comment from Deborah HH
Time: November 19, 2025, 10:13 pm
I love black-eyes peas, but never have I ever put them in soup.
Comment from Uncle AL
Time: November 19, 2025, 10:52 pm
It never occurred to me that wheat flour might have wheat flour in it.
Also noteworthy: the soup contains (water), water, and (water).
Comment from Ea
Time: November 19, 2025, 11:29 pm
Carlin peas maybe? They are english. I think.
Comment from Armybrat
Time: November 20, 2025, 2:40 am
Canned soup?
Comment from Uncle AL
Time: November 20, 2025, 3:11 am
@S. Weasel:
Lordy, food looks unappetizing in black and white.
Painfully true!
There is at least one exception, though: caviar and sour cream!
Comment from Carl
Time: November 20, 2025, 1:57 pm
@Uncle Al. Clumsy grammatical structure on the label. “The soup contains (water), water, and (water)”.
They are saying that it is cooked red lentils (36%, some of which is water) cooked green lentils (7% some of which is water) then added water.
Comment from Uncle AL
Time: November 20, 2025, 2:11 pm
Good golly! @Carl takes things even more literally than I do. Hard to imagine.
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: November 20, 2025, 4:32 pm
Never mind all that: I looked those ingredients and I have questions:
How and why is a Swede in among us vegetables? I mean I may have accused some squarehead of being a vegetable, but I’ve never called a vegetable a Swede!
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