Never underestimate the power of soup.

I did. There are people who love soup, who crave soup, who specifically go out in search of the holy cream of grail.

I was not one of them. I have never craved soup. There have been only three soups I have had what might be called a thing for.

Campbell's Bean with Bacon - with soy sauce. A childhood favorite. Because only a child wouldn't realize that contains slightly less sodium than a bag of rock salt.

Bookbinder's Snapper Soup. It's a Philly thing. Yeah, it's got snapping turtle and veal knuckle in it, and it's dynamite with extra sherry on top. How many teenagers would eat that? Not on a dare.

And I do love a nice New England clam chowdah. I liked it even before I lived in Connecticut for 10 years, and during that decade, my blood chowder content hovered around 0.15, nearly twice the legal limit anywhere south of the Mass Pike.

But other than those favorites, soup left me cold. My image of it was of a watery broth with a few mushy noodles, flavorless scraps of spinach and meat molecules suspended listlessly in it, boiled and drowned.

I stand corrected.

I went to school last weekend, thanks to the South Side Soup Contest. I had 17 compostable ramekins of soup in 17 blocks and a little under three hours, and by the end of it, I was souped up.

This was the sixth annual slurpathon, and it sold out with 1,200 registered tasters. ("The Soup Tasters" is a great name for either a band or a Philip Roth novel.) The word on the street was that the event had become so popular in the past year or two that things had gotten ugly: Crashers were elbowing in on the "free" soup, the soup ran out, and someone may have been viciously spooned in an alley off Carson Street.

More order was imposed this year to prevent another puree melee.

Tasters had to register and were issued a punch-card for easy identification and to prevent double-ladling.

Each station had an official soup captain with a hole punch.

"Have you ever served in the military?"

"Not exactly, but I achieved the rank of Soup Captain, Seagal Company."

Recession or no recession, some of us were amused to think we had paid to stand in a soup line, but many of the stations were in boutiques full of tempting wares, and sometimes the chefs had put some effort into entertaining us while we waited. Café du Jour set up a TV in the Silver Eye Center for Photography (as if there was nothing to look at there) showing a DVD of the Steven Seagal flick in which he's a Navy cook who defeats a small army of terrorists on a ship. The lovely featured soup was Stewin' Seagal's White Bean and Pork Soup Under Siege by Arugula Pesto.

The Smiling Moose's presence in the First National Bank building made me think the soup crawl could incorporate features of an event in Toronto called Doors Open, where people are invited inside the architectural treasures (bank buildings, churches, flamboyantly designed museums and schools) that they drive or walk past every day without really noticing. Also, the Sweet Potato and Apple Bisque was like liquid pumpkin pie. Unusually sweet for a soup, but there's nothing wrong with being, as my boyfriend said, a bisque separatist.

Alas, we could neither walk nor eat fast enough to sample 23 soups in three hours, but picking a winner was still nearly impossible. Mario's Chicken Artichoke Chowder? Double Wide Grill's African Sweet Potato and Peanut Stew? I had to talk my companions into venturing all the way to 27th Street, but the hike was worth it for Claddagh's Tomato Bisque, Hofbrauhaus's Haxen and Green Bean Soup, Caffe Davio's Lobster Risotto Soup and the contest runner-up, OTB Bicycle Café's garlicky Magic Mushroom Soup.

The worthy winner was Yo Rita's Roasted Chestnut Bisque, which left tasters standing stunned in the sunshine, sucking their spoons and making inarticulate sounds of delight.

All 1,200 of us were winners.

As for me, I have become highly bowl-oriented.

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