Cereal belongs to the genus Granum and the family Lactoi but indeed they belong to the same order as soup, or Pulmenti. And while these taxonomies don't always line up with food evolution theory, we at least believe oatmeal and cereal are cousins from a similar ancestral food. Soup just happens to be a common, perfect form, like crabs.
For guaranteed suicide in Chicago ... ask for ketchup on your hot dog
I've never been to Chicago but a friend of mine just went there and while he went wandering around, he asked me to research as much as I could about the city to see what he should or shouldn't do.
It's definitely pre-cooked. But I think the precursor to modern boxed cereal is not gruel but rather breaking up something like a biscuit, cornbread, etc into a bowl of milk.
Cookie Crisp and Oreo O's cereals complicate the question in context. If drowning little cookies in milk is cereal and cereal (for the sake of this argument) is soup, then yes.
What is a soup? A broth? Some vegetables? Using a bean stock, mixed with a little sugar and maybe another bean for flavor, like vanilla, and a splash of cream you can see a latte is a bean broth bisque.
Whenever people complain about "legalese" or technical language, I always think of the hotdog/sandwich thing. Abstruse nomenclature exists for a reason!
Cereal is only soup if you boil the cereal in the milk.
So oatmeal is soup, a bowl of cold Cheerios isn't.
And before anyone comes up with "but borscht is cold" it is still boiled to create the soup and then chilled before serving. You're not just tossing cold beets and water together and calling it soup.
Milk can be pasteurized before consumption. The process varies but can be as long as 30 minutes at 63c.
I'd say a bowl of Cheerios with Raw Milk isn't a soup.
It's still a chicken noodle soup if I mix the premade ingredients with a broth and don't cook it.