Should Minnesota Have a State Soup? One Minnesota Lawmaker Jokingly Proposed the Idea

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A Minnesota lawmaker, Rep. Jim Nash, recently proposed adding an official Minnesota state soup. He proposed the idea jokingly to get a point across, which I'll touch on later, but it has sparked a state-wide debate about what our state soup would be if we did have one. (The correct answer is wild rice soup, by the way.)

Rep. Nash proposed a 'State Soup Study Group', meaning a group of people would be selected to do research and be the ones who select the state soup. In other words, the lawmakers would not be the ones making the decision. That's the part that Rep. Nash wanted to focus on and the point he wanted to get across with his proposal. He told the Minnesota Reformer that “'[there] have been so many advisory commissions and councils and different things that I believe ultimately are outsourcing decisions that legislators need to be making'". He also said that his proposal for a state soup study group is "'not serious in the least.'"

I think now that he has brought it up, though, Minnesotans want it to happen! Even Rep. Nash has an opinion of what the state soup should be, which he says is cream of mushroom soup.

The other popular suggestions for the state soup are wild rice soup and French onion soup. I'd have to go with wild rice soup, for sure!

There was one other time that a state soup was proposed, but it never went through. The Minnesota Legislative Reference Library says in 1998 wild rice soup was proposed as the official state soup.

While we're trying to figure out what the Minnesota state soup should be, do you know just how many official (and 'unofficial') state symbols there are here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes? Keep scrolling to see how many of these symbols look familiar!