Magic Bean

A “Soybean Fractionation Flow Chart” from 1949, found in the early pages of Matthew Roth's Magic Bean, provides a good illustration of the promise and the challenges of writing such a history: soybeans become flakes, then crude oil and meal, which, on their way to becoming edible oils or livestock feed also find their way into such commodities as plywood adhesives, paper coatings, soap stock, sex hormones, alternative meat loaf, and shortening (p. 11). Soy is everywhere in American life, second only to corn as an agricultural commodity, but it is mostly invisible to the consumer. How does one tell such a bewildering story? Roth's approach is to focus on “the efforts of actual people” (p. 13). As a collection of biographies, Magic Bean is vivid and insightful. We learn of Tsuru Yamauchi and the tofu that Asian immigrants made and sold in the early twentieth century and later subsisted on in World War II internment camps. We meet the African American chemist Percy Lavon Julian, the son of Alabama sharecroppers, who, as director of research at the Glidden Company, discovered how to extract casein, lecithin, and sex hormones, helping integrate soy into the paper, chocolate, and pharmaceutical industries. We also encounter Dwayne Andreas, the son of Prussian Mennonites, who helped consolidate the soy-crushing industry at his family company, Honeymead, then at Cargill, and finally at Archer Daniels Midland, in the process bending the ears of politicians such as Hubert Humphrey and Thomas Dewey and shaping the 1954 implementation of the Food for Peace program. We also learn of Stephen Gaskin, a Haight-Ashbury counterculture guru and the founder of The Farm, a commune in rural Tennessee that pioneered soy dairy and attempted to spread the soy gospel to post–1976 earthquake Guatemala and similar locales. As this partial but representative list suggests, the story of soy in America contains multitudes, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, but comprises two main themes: soy as a basis for traditional Asian and countercultural American cuisine (such as tofu, tempeh, and miso) and soy as a fundamental element of American industrial agriculture and chemistry (such as livestock feed, paint, and margarine

Art · Art history · Economic history · MAGIC (telescope · Soy bean · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Chemistry · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Food Science · History