BENBROOK, N.Y. — There is a category of food that you do not think about when you eat it, because it is doing its job so well: it is warm, it is red, it is in a bowl, and it is, as far as you can tell, just soup. This week, the United States government looked at that category of food and said, gently, “actually, some of that soup.”
More than 3,240 boxes of Walmart’s Marketside Tomato Bisque Soup Kit have been recalled because of “possible Listeria contamination,” according to the company announcement carried by the FDA. The kits, which are sold exclusively at select Walmart stores, are the heat-and-eat kind. You open the pouch, you pour the liquid in, you microwave it, and you get a bowl of tomato bisque. It is, in every way that matters, a bowl of tomato bisque. And then you do not think about it again, which is exactly the kind of food that a quiet Listeria recall is designed to interrupt.
The recall is small by the standards of this summer of recalls. The Tasting Table has been tracking the pile, which now includes glass in fruit bars, listeria in cheese, and a rotating cast of produce that has, at various points this year, been “the problem.” Tomato bisque is not a dramatic recall. It is not an iceberg-lettuce, cyclosporiasis, multi-state, hospitalization-level event. It is a quiet, red, homey bowl of soup that is, as of this week, a “please check your pantry” situation.
THE BISQUE SITUATION: ODDS & OUTCOMES
- How many: More than 3,240 kits, sold in 29 states.
- What it is: A heat-and-eat tomato bisque, the kind you make when you are tired and it is raining and you do not want to cook.
- What it may contain: Listeria, which is the bacterium that, in the rare bad version of this story, makes you feel like you have been personally attacked by a soup.
- The honest math: The odds of any individual bowl being the problem are low. The odds of you now reading this and throwing out the box are very high.
There is a person, in every family, who is the “I made the bisque” person. The one who bought the kit, the one who has probably made it once or twice, the one who is now standing in front of the pantry in a state of quiet, specific dread. They are not in trouble. The recall is a precaution, and the vast majority of the bisque that has already been eaten is, as far as anyone can tell, just bisque. But the bisque has a new reputation now, and the person who made it is going to be the one who knows.
A gastroenterologist, asked about the recall, offered the standard, reassuring, and slightly ominous response: “If you ate the soup and you are feeling fine, you are probably fine. If you ate the soup and you are not feeling fine, that is a different conversation, and it is a phone call, not a soup.”
At press time, Walmart had not said whether it was replacing the kits, and the person who made the bisque had not said whether they were making it again, and the bisque, for all that has happened, was still, in every way that mattered, just a bowl of tomato bisque.