Customer Reviews

The World of Soy (The Food Series)

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This is a fascinating collection of papers about soybeans and soyfoods round the world. It includes chapters on the prehistory of beans in general (by the world's expert, Lawrence Kaplan); on soybeans in east Asian food; on industrial agriculture, genetic engineering, and the fate of soy today; and other related issues. All the papers are extremely authoritative, written by leading experts.
All I can add is that we have to get very used to soybeans, and draw on humanity's experience in making them edible, because they are taking over. The Brazilian forests are being replaced by soybeans, the crops of the US midwest and south are narrowing down to just maize and soybeans, and so it goes, worldwide. At present, soybeans are fed to cars (as biodiesel) and livestock more than to people, but that will change as world resources run out and the luxury of cars and meat becomes unaffordable for most. Also, soybeans love heat, and will do well in global warming--which may drive cold-loving crops like wheat to the wall, or at least to expensiveness. There will be little beyond soybeans left in a few decades--unless we do something very fast about global warming and population.
The best hope for the future, then, may be Jianhua Mao's chapter on soybean gourmetship in Sichuan Province, China. The recipes are so incredibly good that they make a future of worldwide soy monocrop almost desirable.
My one criticism is that the lack of mention of soybeans in Vietnam before the 18th century is taken as evidence they weren't there. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Conversely, the existence of several good recipes in the 18th-century texts implies that soybeans were long known there, which, indeed, they must have been, given Vietnam's cultural connections with China.
This is an important book, worth the time of anyone caught up in the current fascination with food and its production and future.