Soupelina’s Soup Cleanse:
Plant-Based Soups and Broths to Heal Your Body, Calm Your Mind, and Transform
Your Life. By Elina Fuhrman. Da Capo. $24.99.
“Transform Your Life?”
Really? Those who believe that celebrity-endorsed one-size-fits-all food and
nutrition fads have significance and staying power will surely want this guide
to a new one so they can make use of Elina Fuhrman’s approach and admonitions
diligently, even religiously, with full faith in their permanent value until
the next “in” thing comes along. Very big, very important, very soon to be
forgotten celebrities and other fad leaders have pushed the “cleanse” concept
for a while, with the result that Fuhrman actually created her own “cleanse”
idea in part as a response to the most-common existing one: “I was so tired of
scrolling through Instagram photos of just about everyone in LA ‘juice
cleansing’ that I wanted to shake things up. Don’t get me wrong; I love juicing
but you know what goes on during juice cleansing: You feel tired, you feel
dizzy, you feel hungry, your blood sugar goes up and down because of all the
sugary fruits mixed in with the greens. And by the time you are done, you are
so ready for a juicy cheeseburger.”
Well, with an endorsement
like that, who wouldn’t want to try a
cleanse? But Fuhrman’s, to give it and her some credit beyond the “wow, it’s
trendy” type, hits on something in this intense focus on soups. Soup is, or can
be, a hearty meal in itself, and many people – even the non-trendy – turn to it
as a comfort food as well as a bulwark against cold, rainy, snowy and generally
unpleasant weather. Soup can be nutrient-packed (although it isn’t always), and
anyone who really does want to build his or her diet around soup can do so in
comparatively straightforward and uncomplicated ways.
Of course, “straightforward
and uncomplicated” would not be hyper-trendy, so Soupelina’s Soup Cleanse is careful not to take an overly forthright approach. “All of [the soups in
the book] are made from scratch, using the freshest organic ingredients. …All
the soups are vegan, made from some familiar ingredients and some exotic ones,
too. …[Some] have medicinal and healing properties, too.” Well, hold on a moment:
now we are getting into the “nutraceutical” craze, the notion that just eating
certain things in certain ways will remove toxins from the body (the basic
“cleanse” idea) and will, as a positive side effect, eliminate the necessity of
dealing with the messiness of modern medicine and all the ills it allegedly
brings along with the cures it allegedly doles out in grudging fashion. It is
understandable that Fuhrman would take this approach, since she credits soups
with helping her recover from breast cancer, and she says directly that “soups
became a form of self-love and comfort as I changed the way I ate, gave up all
meat and dairy, and turned to plant-based foods.” So this book is built in part
on a foundation of extreme plant focus, a “wellness revolution that I believe
will transform the world and our health.” Well, it is fine that Fuhrman
believes soups transformed her
health, but that is a far cry from saying they will transform everyone’s health, and her ardent vegan
advocacy will certainly turn off people who may stumble upon this book but who
are more inclined to believe in “everything in moderation” than in “this is the
one and only way to eat and live and behave.”
So Fuhrman self-limits the
audience for Soupelina’s Soup Cleanse
through a kind of stridency that couples unattractively with self-assured complete
certainty. That is a recipe for a cult, not a soup. Nevertheless, the point is
worth making again: soups are, or
certainly can be, highly nutritious and the foundation of a healthful eating
regimen. Whether they are a useful “cleansing” tool is a matter of opinion, and
whether “cleanses” themselves are good or bad for health is also by no means
definite. But even people who refuse to swallow Fuhrman’s rhetoric and opinions
along with her soups may at least want to consider some of the recipes here,
because Fuhrman has come up with some good and interesting ones – provided that
people have the time to make the soups and the inclination to do vegan-style
shopping if they do not already practice that particular type of eating.
Oh – one more thing – the
recipe titles, like the book’s underlying philosophy, may or may not be widely
appealing. Fuhrman goes for the cutesy, and she likes names that end in
question marks or exclamation points: “Oh Dhal-ing!” “What the Hemp?” “I Can’t
Believe It’s Butternut!” “Oh Snap!” “You’re My Fava-rite!” “That’s Just Dandy!”
“Cauliflower Me, Maybe?!” Even the non-questioning, non-exclamatory names are
intended to be oh-so-adorable: “And the Beet Goes On,” “I Yam Who I Yam,” “Cure
for the Common Kohlrabi,” “I Don’t Carrot All What They Say,” “Lentil Me
Entertain You,” “Pho Sho,” “Don’t Kvass Me Any More Questions,” and so on. And
on. The soups themselves are, thankfully, better than their names: some are
hearty, some are spicy, some offer intriguing mixtures of vegetables, and some
are particularly interestingly spiced (although you have to be willing to spend
Whole Foods prices for some of those spices: this is emphatically not a book for the budget-sensitive).
The soups that take off from Oriental recipes and include plenty of ginger,
lemongrass, coconut, turmeric and similar ingredients are especially appealing.
Other recipes may be more of a hard sell, such as “Beet the Heat,” which
includes “raw organic beet kombucha,” sauerkraut, unpasteurized pickles and
more. Soupelina’s Soup Cleanse is a
“cause” book and a “California cool” book; it even contains a soup called
“Kale-ifornia Dreamin’.” Those not already committed to the “cleanse cause” and
those who are insufficiently with-it in California terms will scarcely be drawn
in by Fuhrman’s ideas and foods. But the book is not quite as limited in appeal
as it seems to be at first – although it is certainly not as universally useful
as it claims to be, and its assertions are best taken with a soupçon or two of the Himalayan pink salt
that Fuhrman includes in so many of her recipes.
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