Tinned soup is going down the pan – here's how to save it

Campbell’s soup cans wrapped around the columns of the National Gallery of Scotland to mark an Andy Warhol exhibition. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Canned soups are in crisis. Sales fell by 8.2% in the UK last year, and Heinz alone saw a decline of more than £29m. It seems millennials no longer want trusty tins of plain old mushroom or tomato soup, and now prefer more expensive chilled soups: Thai pumpkin; blue cheese vichyssoise; pork, lentil and kale (with a splash of white wine). How ridiculous. I grew up on Heinz tomato soup, and loved it. Ditto Heinz tinned spaghetti – perfect on toast while watching the telly (as opposed to the tagliatelle) at midnight. I feel the need to do my bit to save tinned soups from the foodies, so here are a few uses that should ensure this much-loved culinary institution survives.

Objets d’art

What Andy Warhol did for Campbell’s soup tins can surely be replicated by a British artist. What about an Antony Gormley installation at Tate Modern constructed entirely of tins of soup? That should be a Turner prize contender, and at the very least would provide a companion piece for Carl Andre’s much-loved bricks.

Dumb-bells

Conventional dumb-bells are expensive, but a couple of large tins of soup can be just as effective – with the added advantage that you can eat them afterwards.

Heinz soups. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Wartime re-enactment

Add mushy, tasteless wholemeal bread, spam, fishpaste, spam, potatoes, spam, the occasional biscuit, spam and some Glenn Miller records, and you have a recipe for the perfect evening for all your friends – and ex-friends.

Hangover cure

Soup is a well-known cure for hangovers. Admittedly, spicy Asian soups are usually recommended, but the prospect of having to eat a tin of cream of chicken soup first thing in the morning will almost certainly stop you getting drunk in the first place.

Apocalypse planning

All the signs from 2016 are that the end is near, and where will your organic, vine-ripened tomato and lentil soup get you when the bomb drops? Some of us will be snug inside our shelters with specially laid-in supplies of tins – sober, fit and humming along to In the Mood – while all those smug, heavily bearded, food-obsessed millennial software developers will be … well, in the soup.