"Now we have Nancy Pelosi's gazpacho police spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work we do, spying on our staff and spying on American citizens.”
-Marjorie Taylor Greene, February 9, 2022
Twenty-seven years ago, in the basement of a Washington, D.C. soup kitchen, I took an oath. I didn’t swear on a Bible to uphold the Constitution like many of my civic-minded peers. Instead, I let a busboy I just met prick my finger with a rusty metal skewer and cover my screams with a piece of well-worn cheese cloth. I then placed the very same digit over a simmering stovetop, watching as a rolling blue flame engulfed this throbbing extremity, leaving a massive scar still visible today. While a torn, tomato-stained page of James Beard’s American Cookery burned up in my hands, I repeated the following words, “This soup comes before everything else. Before your friends, your family, your mother, your governor, your president. It's a thing of honor and a matter of taste.”
On that day, I willingly decided to devote my life to defending the supremacy of gazpacho. I risked everything to prevent other soups from entering the District of Columbia – no matter the cost or the smell. I wanted to stop people who thought tomato soup left out on the counter to cool and then quickly sprinkled with a little garlic powder somehow counted as the same thing. I wanted to make a difference.
So I raided senior citizens’ book groups hoarding bootleg chowder for homesick massholes in the reference section of a municipal library. I handcuffed French teachers serving their students illicit bowls of bouillabaisse in between grammar lessons. I locked up people leaking consommé from their cargo shorts. Try spelling consommé without first misspelling communist. It can’t be done. But I was just following orders – which, as any line cook knows, can come without warning or explanation.
Yet I lapped up everything the department said. How could I not? Gazpacho is extremely crisp, positively refreshing, and garlicky beyond compare. I honestly believed I was on the right side of history. The very idea that restaurants offer a rotating soup of the day was, in my view, an atrocity. I was one of the good guys. Or so I thought.
Because in the beginning, it was truly exciting work. I was interviewed in Gourmet Magazine and appeared on Arsenio Hall. This was long before health fads and celebrity chefs changed the way ordinary people thought about soup. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were having any effect on society. I’d arrest some borscht dealer at noon and by 3 o’clock he’d be out on bail, slinging mulligatawny to a group of hungry coeds. We couldn’t keep up with the demand. That’s when I really started to question things. I figured Eliot Ness must’ve had a similar crisis of conscience somewhere between the sixth and seven thousandth keg he smashed apart with a pickaxe.
With the help of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, I’ve come to understand that the War on Soups, while perhaps noble at first, was a colossal mistake and an utter failure. I’m not proud of my role in it either. I planted bisque on people and stole parsley from the evidence room. I engaged in the notorious technique of “stop and whisk,” whereby I would attempt to improve the consistency of a suspect’s dinner by force. I ladled without asking, garnished by surprise and was always the one to take the first taste.
Gazpacho Police have no place in a free society. We can no longer incarcerate our fellow citizens whose only crime was untying a bouquet garni not quietly enough. What kind of person waits for hours in the bushes of a well-known senator simply to catch him in the act of preparing bone broth? Me, apparently.
Look, people are going to consume whatever soups they want, whether we outlaw them or not. On the black market or at the farmer’s market, they will always find a way to get their fix. Imagine having to legally start every sushi dinner with gazpacho despite miso being so readily available. Thanks to Marjorie Taylor Greene, you won’t have to.
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