Papitas crujientes.

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The time has come to determine the superior soup. Prepare yourself.

The Stop and Shop super-market features two distinct generic store brand soups with the same flavors.

Even the hypey promotional copy on the can posteriors that’s suppossed to make me super excited about eating out of a can is essentially the same, and you’d know that if I’d taken a better picture of it.

So which is better?

Select, the left soup, obviously, for while Homestyle boasts the more appetizing image of actual soup, only Select comes in a GOLD can.

It was my assumption that I had merely acquired generic soup on both ends of a needlessly overdone packaging change; select’s food photography gives the impression of a thing that’s been hanging around since the 1980s; either just from label decay or because it was more feasible to find a depiction of a containers’ actual contents, rather than an idealized color-enhanced mockup, printed on one back then. The reality only becomes clear in the context of the store from which it takes its name:

The two leading / only evident to exist brands of canned soup come in red & gold and blue & grey cans. In its natural habitat a store brand’s survival instinct leads it to disguise itself as best as is legally permissable as a major multinational company’s brand, despite few competent people likely to be fooled by this for long enough to actually make a purchase. In a situation where there is no unquestionably dominant producer of a thing, and that there is no longterm risk in producing an excess amount of, it makes perfect sense to imitate them both. If Stop & Shop sells just as much soup as before, only with sales divided between its two colors, it won’t have been a total waste of effort because they can keep that stuff on the shelves for essentially ever. For as long as it takes for Progresso or Campbell to significantly alter their own label colors and layouts, which probably won’t happen. You might have noticed that the red cans shown are not “Select” but “Chunky,” which is apparently a word that makes people think of things other than vomit. That is because Stop and Shop actually has three identical generic soup brands.

Select is paired with, sure enough, Campbell’s “Select Harvest,” and while that comes in a primarily white, rather than red, container, the somewhat sickly depictions of the regular Select cans’ contents creates a whitish impression at a great enough distance.
I do not intend to criticize stop and shop for its curious multiplicity; I can’t tell the difference between Campbell’s identical soup brands, either. I merely wish these sorts of label shenanigans weren’t necessary to get people to buy less overpriced soup. Some years ago I would never have considered purchasing Stop & Shop anything. But it had really ugly, bland labels then. The sort that make you question the standards of the overall production. The labels are better now. I just don’t like that they’re playing along with the myth that there are three distinct styles of soup being peddled here, each worth being imitated individually.

Mmmm, yes… fascinating…

Oh, I know. Also of great potential interest: I wrote most of this entry while eating about 1/3 of a can of raisins. I had become aware of the 82% sodium rate in a full can of soup, any one of those, and thought I should eat something boring as punishment. No cereal, though; too much iron. I’m worried I’ll be walking past a junkyard, because I got lost in a cartoon from the 80s, and I’ll get stuck to one of those big car magnets. So I ate a lot of raisins. And then I felt diabetic for a bit. It can be hard coming to terms with the fact that eating fruit can make you just as sick as cookies. You might not get as fat, but you’ll feel like you ought to be. So if I’ve conquered dehydrated grapes and passed the test of soup, what, then, remains to be addressed by my can agenda?

GRAPE SOUP.