Bear’s Souper Sunday Cookbook: Recipes for Hungry Animals

Originally published on OLY ARTS on August 4th, 2025

Bear’s Souper Sunday Cookbook: Recipes for Hungry Animals is a charming cookbook for the whole family with stories and soup recipes that could warm even the coldest of hearts. In more ways than one, the narrative of this cookbook mirrors Olympia author Chris Hyde’s own story in creating the Souper Sunday movement. With stories and recipes written by Hyde and illustrations by Olympia artist Roxanna Groves, this book is full of unique qualities and love.

Detail of the front cover of Bear’s Souper Sunday Cookbook

What is Souper Sunday?

To fully appreciate this communal collection of soup recipes, you have to know about the Souper Sunday movement. The movement began with Hyde and an idea that came to him as a means of fostering community, feeding his neighbors, and bringing togetherness in a world isolated after the Covid pandemic. What started out as a Facebook group that offered free soup to community members soon flourished into something bigger. As described on the website:

“Souper Sunday is a community-driven initiative of the Food Source Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to addressing food insecurity in the greater Olympia, Wash. area and beyond. With a mission to ensure equitable access to nourishing food, the foundation fosters local partnerships and innovative solutions to support individuals and families facing food insecurity. It caters to those who are low income, disabled and homeless, as well as to a growing class of fully-employed community members who are getting priced out of their basic needs by ever-increasing rent, utilities, insurance and all the other basic costs that we all need to survive. The Food Source Foundation serves anyone who is food insecure without question.”

Souper Sunday gained international recognition after being featured on KOMO News. “That (news story) going viral put us on the map.” Hyde continued, “I get messages all the time from people across the country and sometimes from around the world talking about how that story impacted them.”

Hyde shared stories with Oly Arts about how food generosity transforms lives. One story included a woman who was once addicted to methamphetamines, who lived in her car. This woman was very grateful to receive a healthy meal from Hyde, and she ended up turning her life around. She is now sober and getting married. Reflecting on this story, Hyde commented:

“Making her a healthy soup was part of what gave her hope … enough hope for her to begin to take care of herself. Of course, I cannot take any credit for her story, but I feel grateful to have been a part of it. Everybody deserves to eat. Regardless of lifestyle or whether you choose to do drugs, you deserve to eat just as much as anybody else.”

As the movement has developed and grown, it has taken on a sort of “stone soup” mindset where people will drop off ingredients and do whatever they can to be part of creating something wonderful for everyone.

“Bear wanted to do something for his woodland neighbors. He considered them all family. It didn’t matter if they were old, young, rich, poor, if they lived in a house or in a tent or in a burrow. Bear just wanted to make his corner of the world a better place. He thought to himself, ‘but what can one bear do?’ He thought about it as he harvested the vegetables from his garden, he thought about it when he prepared his vegetables for winter, he thought about it every time he made soup. … Bear would share grace, cleverly disguised as soup, with any animal that needs or wants a nourishing home-made meal.”

Sound familiar? Bear represents Chris Hyde. Readers can look forward to seeing how his story carries on from there in the cookbook.

Anyone can bring Souper Sunday to their neighborhood. Learn more here. You can watch the famous KOMO News story here.

The Cookbook

The cookbook is filled with recipes, stories, and characters that marry the two. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but it is unimaginable that this book would be the same without Groves’ illustrations. Her illustrations bring these characters to life and give them qualities that are beyond what words can describe. Groves has also been a part of the Souper Sunday movement since the beginning and volunteered to provide whatever illustration Hyde needed to help put this together.

Creating the characters was a collaborative process where Groves looked at the recipes, would occasionally bounce back and forth with Hyde, and then Groves would create. “For the most part, he just said go for it, and then he tied the stories to the animals. Like the badger and garlic because both are rough and tough.” Groves, described, “there’s a recipe for peanut soup that’s East African, but the connection is the squirrels have relatives all over the world, and his squirrel relative in East Africa sent him this recipe.”

The illustrations themselves are colorful, bright, whimsical, and add a timeless sense of merriment to the book, and it is fun to see which character contributes what recipe. Just as each animal is different, we as people have different tastes. As such, there is something for everybody in this book.

Just like any art piece, there is an invitation for the viewer to interpret the character in whatever way they desire, allowing themselves to feel whatever emotion follows. When you read the cookbook, if you find a character that particularly resonates with you or makes you smile, you can purchase a postcard of them or their doppelgänger from Running Rabbit Studios.

At the end of the day, Groves’ heart reflects a truly generous mindset: “The reason I was involved was because I wanted to be part of this organic, fabulous thing that looks at the needs of our community and helps people.”

Souper Sunday, Chris Hyde, and Roxanna Groves remind us all that, just like in Stone Soup or in Souper Sunday, by bringing who we are, our talents, and what we have to offer to the table to work together with and support our community, we can make this world a better place.

What:
Bear’s Souper Sunday Cookbook: Recipes for Hungary Animals, cookbook with recipes and stories by Chris Hyde, illustrations by Roxanna Groves.

Available at:
https://mudflatpress.com/bears-souper-sunday-cookbook/

Cost:
$24

https://olyarts.org/bears-souper-sunday-cookbook-recipes-for-hungry-animals/