Stone Soup is a Grimm Brothers tale about returning soliers and their guise to get a selfish, starving town to learn the lesson of cooperation and its benefits. As with all Grimm Brother tales, it offers a lesson to those willing to read between the lines. The fable of the stone soup is about co-operation amid scarcity. In varying traditions, stone has been replaced with other common inedible objects, and therefore the fable is also known as button soup, wood soup, nail soup, and axe soup.