Souperism

Souperism was a phenomenon of the Irish Potato Famine. Protestant Bible societies set up schools in which starving children were fed, on the condition of receiving Protestant based religious instruction at the same time. Its practitioners were reviled by the Catholic families who had to choose between their faith and starvation. People who converted for food were known as soupers, a derogatory epithet that continued to be applied and featured in the press well into the 1870s. In the words of their peers: they "took the soup".