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Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America
At the turn of the twentieth century, soybeans grew on so little of America’s land that nobody bothered to track the total. By the year 2000, they covered upward of 70 million acres, second only to corn, and had become the nation’s largest cash crop. How this little-known Chinese transplant, initially grown chiefly for forage, turned into a ubiquitous component of American farming, culture, and cuisine is the story Matthew Roth tells in Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America.
The soybean’s journey from one continent into the heart of another was by no means assured or predictable. In Asia, the soybean had been bred and cultivated into a nutritious staple food over the course of centuries. Its adoption by Americans was long in coming—the outcome of migration and innovation, changing tastes and habits, and the transformation of food, farming, breeding, marketing, and indeed the bean itself, during the twentieth century. All come in for scrutiny as Roth traces the ups and downs of the soybean’s journey. Along the way, he uncovers surprising developments, including a series of catastrophic explosions at soy-processing plants in the 1930s, the widespread production of tofu in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, the decades-long project to improve the blandness of soybean oil, the creation of new southern soybean varieties named after Confederate generals, the role of the San Francisco Bay Area counterculture in popularizing soy foods, and the discovery of soy phytoestrogens in the late 1980s. We also encounter fascinating figures in their own right, such as Yamei Kin, the Chinese American who promoted tofu during World War I, and African American chemist Percy Lavon Julian, who played a critical role in the story of synthetic human hormones derived from soy sterols.
A thoroughly engaging work of narrative history, Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America is the first comprehensive account of the soybean in America over the entire course of the twentieth century.
The soybean’s journey from one continent into the heart of another was by no means assured or predictable. In Asia, the soybean had been bred and cultivated into a nutritious staple food over the course of centuries. Its adoption by Americans was long in coming—the outcome of migration and innovation, changing tastes and habits, and the transformation of food, farming, breeding, marketing, and indeed the bean itself, during the twentieth century. All come in for scrutiny as Roth traces the ups and downs of the soybean’s journey. Along the way, he uncovers surprising developments, including a series of catastrophic explosions at soy-processing plants in the 1930s, the widespread production of tofu in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, the decades-long project to improve the blandness of soybean oil, the creation of new southern soybean varieties named after Confederate generals, the role of the San Francisco Bay Area counterculture in popularizing soy foods, and the discovery of soy phytoestrogens in the late 1980s. We also encounter fascinating figures in their own right, such as Yamei Kin, the Chinese American who promoted tofu during World War I, and African American chemist Percy Lavon Julian, who played a critical role in the story of synthetic human hormones derived from soy sterols.
A thoroughly engaging work of narrative history, Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America is the first comprehensive account of the soybean in America over the entire course of the twentieth century.
- GenresFoodNonfiction
344 pages, Hardcover
Published May 25, 2018
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About the author
Matthew Roth
11 books1 followerMatthew D. Roth holds a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. He has taught environmental history at Philadelphia University and is on the staff of the University of Pennsylvania’s Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 28, 2020
Exceptional accounting of how soy became a top agricultural commodity in the United States. Roth presents the marketing of soy as animal feed, a cooking oil, a protein source, a food additive. This book has a large cast of characters, including scientists, agriculturalists, farmers, politicians, speculators, dietitians, and visionaries.
How colorful to read that in the Sixties, the counter-culture hippies were ecstatic about the promises of soy. Stephen Gaskin, founder of The Farm, had "a great and psychedelic vision of the soybean, in which he saw it as a great provider for all humankind." (pg. 204, author quoting Jerry Sealund). Gaskin's wife, Ina May, would become a famous midwife whose books remain popular today.
Read this book if you appreciate tofu, are interested in factory farms, are concerned about land use for feeding meat animals. Highly recommend!
How colorful to read that in the Sixties, the counter-culture hippies were ecstatic about the promises of soy. Stephen Gaskin, founder of The Farm, had "a great and psychedelic vision of the soybean, in which he saw it as a great provider for all humankind." (pg. 204, author quoting Jerry Sealund). Gaskin's wife, Ina May, would become a famous midwife whose books remain popular today.
Read this book if you appreciate tofu, are interested in factory farms, are concerned about land use for feeding meat animals. Highly recommend!
November 4, 2019
As a tofu-munching vegetarian, I assigned myself this book to read as homework. Unfortunately, getting through it turned out to be a chore, as there are so many details to parse through and only faintly-outlined narrative threads to tie them together in a compelling way. Magic Bean is reading better suited for a scholar but in its strongest moments I was truly compelled by the vast intersections between biochemistry, mercantilism, immigration, culture, marketing, labor, food security, and food production all through the lens of the soybean. The anecdotes that weave together this contemporary ancestry of soy in the U.S. are noteworthy and by the end they had me blessing up the Seventh-day Adventist fam for being the soy pioneers I never knew I needed!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews