Magic Bean

In this timely book, Matthew Roth weaves together the histories of soy as plant, agricultural commodity, food, industrial component, cultural touchstone, and entrepreneur’s dream in an engaging narrative that will appeal to historians of food, agriculture, business, the environment, science and technology, and the twentieth-century United States. The book’s strength derives from the diverse cast of characters Roth traces across the twentieth century, who helped transform soy from obscure transplant to major cash crop. These actors include Japanese immigrants longing for a taste of home, USDA plant explorers seeking new varieties for domestication, and Seventh-Day Adventist missionaries pursuing vegetarianism. But bringing the seed across the Pacific was only the first step. Soybean promoters—from agricultural reformers to health-food advocates—built interest in the crop in the early decades of the twentieth century. Though their aims of diversifying southern agriculture, transforming the American diet, raising farm incomes, and developing new and ingenious products were largely unrealized at the outset, the infrastructure they built for distributing seeds, processing the crop, manufacturing soy foods, and making and sharing knowledge formed a crucial foundation for the bean’s eventual success.

Agricultural economics · Agriculture · Appeal · Archaeology · Biology · Cash crop · Domestication · Economics · Economy · Immigration · Political science · Taste · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Food Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law