By Tara Narayan

SOMETIME BACK I’d waxed eloquent about soybean products and the renewed efforts to promote them in India and soymilk tetrapacks in the market. And my gentle friend Dr. Francisco Colaco had expressed his doubts about all the hype surrounding soy products vis-à-vis the medical fraternity recommending them as a superior health alternative to dairy products. Cautionary notes notwithstanding I still think soybean products are a better option to dairy products (which have become such big business that we really no longer get genuinely fresh dairy milk i.e. unpasteurised, unprocessed in some hi-tech manner) quite simply because soybean milk and products are as vegetarian as you can get and if the Orient and Far East have been steeped in a soybean culture for centuries surely it’s a pointer in the right direction? Soybeans is one of our ancient tastes of health although it may be new for us in India where we swear by bovine milk and dairy products are our ancient taste of health! Except that when we take a natural product and process it to extinction it ceases to offer any health or at best only sub-standard or marginal health. Frankly, I would rather we patronize a soybean culture than an increasingly ultra-processed food industry (founded on eco-unfriendly and health-damaging technologies). Say yes to soybeans and soybean products without any qualms.

Since my last soybean write-up here I’ve been looking for soybean cookbooks and found them at where else but Khalil Ahmed’s 4,000 square meters of Broadway Book Center in Panaji (Near Hero Honda Showroom), you should discover it just for its large children’s and cookbook collections. It’s the perfect place for any bookworm to while away an afternoon! I picked up “Earl Mindell’s Soy Miracle” (Simon & Schuster) which is a ground-breaking up-to-date soybean and soy foods book, and Kavita Reddy’s beautifully produced “The Indian Soy Cookbook” (obviously) sponsored by The American Soybean Association and published by Rupa & Co., priced at Rs.295. Both testify to the advantage of including soybean products in one’s drinking and eating habits. Mr. Mindell is a noted registered pharmacist and professor of nutrition at Pacific Western University in Los Angeles and the author of several health-conscious books (he’s got a large readership abroad), his book comes completewith 70 super soy recipes but amongst other things he quotes extensively from scientific research which in nutshell says including soybeans in one’s daily diet does help fight breast, prostate cancer, battle coronary artery disease, ease menopausesymptoms, lower cholesterol and boost the immune system.

Range of Soya Product.

Kavitha Reddy’s book is just a cookbook chok-a-blok with recipes (where one may substitute soybean products for making virtually every familiar recipe!) with a couple of interesting soybean history nuggets of information, probably taken from Mr. Mindell’s researched, far more comprehensive book. They’re worth being clued up about so I’ll share them here for the benefit of readers who are soybean fans or are interested in becoming soybean fans…

SOY THROUGH THE AGES

• The Chinese were the first to use soybeans as food. Legend has it that around 1500 B.C. two Chinese warlords got hopelessly lost in a northern Chinese desert. Starving, they survived by eating the hard “peas” or “seeds” of soybeans. By round 1100 B.C. soybeans were being cultivated in east-central China and soon became a staple of the Chinese diet. The Chinese showed their high regard for soybeans by naming them ta tou (meaning “greater bean”).
• Bean curd (known as tofu) has been used for several centuries in traditional Chinese medicine. Externally, it was placed on sores and ulcers to promote healing; internally, it was used in hot soups to treat colds. (Note: Drop in a few cubes of tofu in French onion soup!)
• Soybeans were introduced to Japan around 100 A.D. and soon spread throughout other Asian countries. Although the Chinese may have been the first to use soy, the Japanese were the ones who developed the plant’s full potential as a food source.
• Soy found its way to Europe about 1500 A.C. Soy historian Dr. Theodore Hymowitz credits Benjamin Franklin with bringing soybean samples back to the United States from Paris’ Jardin des Plantes. Whether or not this tale is true, by the early 19 th century soybeans were planted commercially in the US.
• THE UNITED States produces half of the world’s soy beans, it’s the country’s second biggest cash crop; there are 440,000 soybean farmers producing two billion bushels of soybeans annually. In fact, the United States exports much of its soybean crop to Japan and other Asian countries. (Note: As long as it is not genetically modified soybeans!)
• IN THE 1970’s soybean milk (tau chui) and cheese (tofu) became popular as “environmentally friendly” food alternative to beef. People concerned about second and third world impoverishment and the need to be eco-friendly advocated tofu as a cheaper and more efficient source of protein than animal products. Popular books such as Frances Moore Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet” and William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi Shurtleff’s “The Book of Tofu” promoted vegetarian soy-based diets. Their argument was convincing: Beef cattle grazing on one acre of land can produce enough meat to sustain a person for 77 days. If planted with soybeans, that same acre can produce enough protein to sustain a person for almost two-and-a-half years. Many environmentally concerned people switched from meat to tofu (tofu is generally accepted as vegetarian meat), or at least cut down on meat consumption for the sake of the earth.

(Note: For the sake of one’s own and the good earth’s better health is the right choice, become asoybean convert! In India, of course, we prefer to sacrifice wonderful fertile farming land to grow the poisonous weed of tobacco, India is the third largest grower of tobacco and tobacco consumers in one way or another add to oral or mouth/tongue/ throat/lung cancers, the primary cancers vis-à-vis men in India. A concerned government would discourage farmers from growing tobacco – or sugarcane for refined sugar for that matter – but the reverse is true. Grow more tobacco, it’s “good” in all kinds of ironic ways for our half-starved masses and by and large feckless classes! One of these days I’d like to tell you how Gujarat ruined its fertile farming lands for tobacco monopolies in the 50’s and spawned enough impoverishment to fuel the migration of thousands of Gujaratis to greener pastures abroad.)

*Today more and more people are switching to tofu and other soy products (bean cake or tau kuah, fried bean cake cubes or tau fu pok, dried soya strands or tau ki, soyaskin sheets or tau pui, soybean sprouts or tau geh – this last is very popular in noodle dishes, tempeh which is fermented soybean cake, there’re several soy sauces….according to Soyfoods Center which is tracking soy use worldwide, there are 500 new soy foods coming on the market each year, adding to the 12,000 already available!) if not to save the world at last to save themselves from cancer and heart disease. People are turning to soy foods out of concern for their health, and the marketplace is responding to these concerns. (Note: If only one could speed up this process in India!)

You can say that no other bean has triggered such a foodie revolution in our drinking and eating habits. This is to say think about all this and acquire a taste for some basic soybean products like milk and tofu. I dread any honest-to-goodness food becoming a mega food industry quite simply because when that happens all the hardware of technology comes in to tamper more and more with the natural goodness and shelf life of the product. End-result? No longer food but non-food and even dangerous food. Poison food! Stick to basic soybean foods.

POSTSCRIPT: Reader Eric Vaz called up with a query about soybeans but I cannot revert to him because of an incorrect telephone number. Please call me on 2456458 before 10 a.m. or after 6 p.m. Where to get soybeans – I found some very good ones at the Sainik Store (Defence Colony, Porvorin, Rs.14 per 500 g pack) but I’m sure other stores stock them too. There is only one place where you can get the best tofu in Goa – at Farm Products in Panaji and that too on order on Tuesdays. Judging by some queries folk still don’t know how to eat soybean products….hey, you drink the milk, you scramble or stir-fry cubed tofu (use it in lieu of paneer). Okay, soy recipes coming up in a future issue, watch this space.

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