If you've got the inclination to cook and have gone to the trouble of having home-made croutons on hand, the old-fashioned vegetable soup recipe in the Joy of Cooking gives a very similar (and superior) flavor, without the corn syrup and MSG.

Someone from freecycle-seattle group posted this on Friday:

Offered: half a family sized can of Campbell's aphabet soup. (Ballard) Got all the letters I needed from half a can and refrigerated the rest. Still totally good!

Possibly as a snark-response to this:

OFFERED: Flavor packets from ramen noodles (Capitol Hill)
6 flavor/seasoning packets from ramen noodles - 3 chicken, 3 beef. In your reply, please tell me when you'd like to pick up. I am fairly flexible with day or evening pick ups.

Sorry for cross-posting.

chicken and beef ramen flavor packets = crack and heroin

so ---- this what we have come to ----- I think I am wasting daylight

for canned soup, go Progresso, buy on sale in only your fav. kinds

Good cheese in shitty soup - god - what a cook

(sour cream on sale, better use, don't need the milk either)

Does this "eating letters makes you smarter" concept extend to Alpha-Bits with Marshmallows? Oh dear god I hope so.

booo for chicken fat

bethany:

what??!?

All right, I'll 'fess: I'm a communist. Now will someone please tell me if there is, say, the same quantity of the letter z produced as the letter e? Or does Campbell's take a more Scrabble-like approach and only produce a few z's and a boatload of e's?

Oh, just whining about no veggie alphabet soup options. Pay no mind.

Marcie, Amy's makes a vegan alphabet soup. I think I remember seeing it at Madison Market but I'm not 100% sure. It's got to be about a billion times better than Campbell's - gross.

Oh yeah - and veganism isn't gross at all. Not if you're into nasty, stinky people with flat asses and skanky hair.

@8. No, they do not, which was a constant source of frustration for me when I was a kid. My last name starts with a "z", and I always had trouble spelling it with any food product that contained letters.

My first name has a "y" in it, too - another tough one to find in alphabet-related food.

MSG under no circumstances.

@9:

Chop: 1 onion, 2 carrots, 2 stalks celery. Sautee onion in olive oil in large pot. Add small spoonful of garlic. Add carrots and celery and cook for 1-2 minutes. I like barley instead of alphabet pasta, so add 1/3 cup of pearl barley and lightly toast. Add 1 small can of organic no-sugar-added tomato paste and lightly caramelize. Add 1 can veggie broth and 3-4 cups hot water, plus any other vegetables you like (I add mushrooms, frozen peas, chopped green beans diced tomatoes, sometimes some zucchini or finely chopped kale). Salt and pepper to taste. Cook on low boil for about an hour or until barley is done. I tend to boil it longer to reduce the water and get a more concentrated flavor. I eat this soup all the time - it makes quite a bit that you can refrigerate or freeze. Totally veggie, nutritious, delicious.

Sure, you COULD spend twice as much on all that crap to make some soup that takes a few hours to cook, or you could just buy a can, open it up, and heat it. Yum!

Whatever you do, you're gonna die. Why worry about dumb stuff like this?

@15, sure we're all going to die, but why be bloated by MSG and corn syrup in the meantime?