When the weather turns frigid, there is only one thing to do: make a pot of chicken-noodle soup. On the first cold afternoon in early December, I simmered a whole rotisserie chicken with fennel, dill, and orzo, then ladled it into bowls for a cozy family meal. Just as I thought we’d reached peak hygge, my five-month-old son suddenly grabbed my steaming bowl and tipped the soup all over himself. Piercing screams and a frenzied taxi ride to the pediatric emergency room ensued.
My husband and I waited in the ER with our pantsless, crying child, racked with guilt. But when we told doctors and nurses what had happened, they seemed unperturbed. As they bandaged my son’s blistering skin, they explained that children get burned by soup—especially noodle soup—all the time. “Welcome to parenthood,” a nurse said, as we boarded an ambulance that transferred us to a nearby burn unit. That children are frequently scalded by hot liquids makes perfect sense. But soup? Indeed, soup burns “are very common,” James Gallagher, the director of the Burn Center at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork–Presbyterian, where I’d brought my son, told me. After hot tap water, soup is a leading cause of burn-related visits to the hospital among young children in the United States. An estimated 100,000 American children are scalded by spilled food and beverages each year—and in many cases, soup is the culprit. Pediatric soup injuries happen so frequently that an astonishing amount of scientific literature is dedicated to it, generating terms such as meal-time morbidity, starch scalds, and the cooling curve of broth. Anyone can get burned by soup, yet kids can’t help but knock things over. Infants have minimal control over their grabby little hands, and older children still lack balance and coordination. Give them a bowl of soup, or even put one near them, and you have a recipe for disaster. Consider instant noodle soup—the kind prepared by pouring boiling water into a Styrofoam container with dried noodles, or filling it with water and microwaving it. In one small study from 2020, 21 children ages 4 to 12 carried foam cups of blue paint—meant to mimic containers of instant noodles—from a microwave toward a table. Blue splashes on their white shirts revealed that nearly one in five children spilled the “soup,” most commonly on their arms.