Soup, Seeds & Midterm Survival: The SOF Soup Festival
Midterm week at the University of Minnesota has a particular texture: cool mornings, too much coffee, and a lot of people walking around with the slightly glazed look of someone who has been rereading the same lecture slides since Sunday. So when the UMN Student Organic Farm turned a campus classroom into a soup hall this week, it felt less like an event and more like a rescue mission.
The soup festival was a fundraiser for the farm, and it was everything a good fall gathering should be: slow cookers lined up along the wall, baskets of bread, a raffle, a table covered in dried flowers and seeds making seed art, and long tables full of students who, for an hour or two, got to talk about something other than classes.
From the field to the pot
The Student Organic Farm is a student-driven organic farm on the St. Paul campus, and nearly everything on the soup table traced back to it. Each pot came with a handwritten or printed ingredient card, and reading them was half the fun.
three-squash ginger soup
I helped fundraise for the event by making one of the soups. SOF donated squash to me specifically for this, which meant the soup started its life in the same fields as everything else on the table. There is something satisfying about closing that loop: squash grown by students, cooked by a student, and eaten by students, with the money going back into the farm that grew it.
What I will remember most is not any one soup. It is how many conversations happened across those tables. People who had never met compared exam schedules, traded opinions on which soup was best, asked how the farm works and how to get involved, and generally reminded each other that midterms are survivable.
