I'm a Chickarina Recidivist

I generally eat canned soup only when I have a cold. And when I do heat up a can of soup to feed my cold it's often Progresso's Chickarina. This was a favorite soup of my childhood, and for some reason I keep going back to it as my sick-bed comfort food. I'm not sure when the product was introduced, but I think it was new when I started seeing the commercial, when I was five or six, in the early '60s, the one with the little boy singing, "Chick-Chick-Chickarina soup, Chick-Chick-Chickarina soup, it's got chicken so nutritious, and meatballs so delicious." Or did the meatballs precede the chicken in the lyric? I made my mother buy a can the next time she went shopping, at the local Key Food, which she called Seymour's, after the man who ran the store. If I remember correctly Seymour always had a big, fat cigar in his mouth, which is neither here nor there. I believe the consistency of the Chickarina meatballs changed somewhere along the line. They're softer now; they used to have more bounce. I'm nostalgic for the firmer meatballs of my youth.

Years later a similar soup started showing up at soup joints, corporate cafeterias, and cans by Campbell's, called Italian wedding soup. Apparently a traditional soup for Italian weddings was the inspiration for Chickarina. For some reason it took over thirty years for chicken soup with meatballs to become popular in the U.S. outside the confines of a Progresso can. I wonder who was responsible.

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Do I believe chicken soup helps one fight a cold? Well, Marvin Sackner told me it does. Dr. Sackner, a pulmonary specialist, conducted the pioneering study in 1978, which he published in the journal Chest (which is not shelved next to Juggs). It suggested that chicken soup was more effective than other hot liquids for alleviating congestion. I got it straight from the Doc's mouth maybe ten years later, when fiction writer Richard Grayson and I visited Marvin and his wife Ruth in their South Florida home to see their amazing collection of art and books, The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. With over 45,000 items (including several by yours truly), the Sackners' collection is surely the largest archive devoted specifically to creative work that integrates text and image (and it has grown well beyond its original concrete poetry focus). There's even a film about the archive. Marvin's work on chicken soup was later amplified by the research of Doctors Ziment and Rennard, but I'll bet their art collections and personal libraries aren't nearly as interesting.