ISSN: 0740-9710 (Print) 1542-3484 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.

com/loi/gfof20

A Review of “The World of Soy”

by Christine M. Du Bois, Chee-Beng Tan, and Sidney Mintz (eds.), The
University of Illinois Press, 337 pp.

Ryan Thomas Adams

To cite this article: Ryan Thomas Adams (2010) A Review of “The World of Soy”, , 18:1-2,
114-117, DOI: 10.1080/07409711003708652

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07409711003708652

Published online: 21 Apr 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 136

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gfof20
Food and Foodways, 18:114–120, 2010
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0740-9710 print / 1542-3484 online
DOI: 10.1080/07409711003708652

BOOK REVIEWS

THE WORLD OF SOY, by Christine M. Du Bois, Chee-Beng Tan, and Sidney

Mintz (eds.), The University of Illinois Press, 337 pp.

In 2001, I was able to attend a lecture given by Sidney Mintz at Indiana

University. During the lecture he shared that he was working on a study of
soy, which he saw as having potential to reveal various important elements
related to social change. He described how Sweetness and Power (1985)
showed that the nature of sugar as a source of undifferentiated sweetness
had a transformative impact on the nature of social relations both in terms
of its production and consumption. He saw the same potential in soy as it
may serve in our food system as an undifferentiated source of protein. I was
therefore gratified and excited to see the publication of The World of Soy.
Although the title suggests an all-inclusive study, the edited volume more
specifically addresses the changes in the use of soy in various foodways
and the conditions of its production to a more limited extent. Co-edited by
Christine M. Du Bois, Chee-Beng Tan, and Sidney Mintz, The World of Soy
was published as part of the Food Series by The University of Illinois Press,
and includes both historical analyses and ethnographic studies conducted in
various locations in Asia, in combination with three additional studies of soy
in West Africa, Brazil, and the United States.
In the Introduction to World of Soy, Mintz, Tan, and Du Bois note that
soybeans have a more recent emergence as a globally transformative food
crop compared to the transformations in agriculture and diet that shifted
pre-Columbian crops into European, African, and Asian cuisine, citing Alfred
Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange (1972). As we find in other work by Mintz,
the introduction interweaves specific historical events and broader economic
trends, showing how changes in agricultural production are connected to
changes in the social lives of consumers living great distances from the
places of production. In the case of soy, its initial use in the United States was
primarily as a forage crop and as a source for oil, animal feed, and material
with industrial applications. “In the scheme of things, then, soybeans were
perceived not primarily as human food but rather as an industrial crop that
could best be exploited by breaking it down into its components, more like
an inedible oilseed, such as cotton, than like a food containing oil, such as
maize or peanuts” (p. 4). The current widespread production of soybeans
and popular use as both an industrial crop and a human food, despite its late

114
 Book Reviews 115

entry into various Western cuisines, inspires an ethnographic examination

of soy’s acceptance, which forms the bulk of the material contained within
this edited volume. This acceptance is dealt with first in studies based on
the traditional uses prior to its global expansion, then in areas where soy
consumption intensified more recently.
Following the excellent introduction by Mintz, Tan, and Du Bois, there
are two sections. The first section, “Acceptance of Soy in Global and His-
torical Context,” begins with an overview using archaeological evidence by
Lawrence Kaplan and then proceeds historically from a very brief look at
soy’s early uses in China, based on a study of early Chinese literature by
H. T. Huang, through an examination of fermented beans in the West, in
which Mintz shows how fermented soy is part of a wider process of adop-
tion. “In the last three decades or so, the capsicums, and particularly the
piquant varieties, have moved out of the ethnic category and into the Ameri-
can category, partly through the growing popularity of ethnic cuisines (such
as Mexican and Thai) but also as added elements in dishes already familiar”
(p. 66). The first section concludes with the chapter “Genetically Engineered
Soy,” by Du Bois and Ivan Sergio Freire de Sousa, which takes a rather pes-
simistic view of the practice, explaining the negative health, environmental,
social, and economic consequences of biotechnology.
The second section, “Ethnographic Studies of Soy’s Acceptance,” is
mixed in terms of the theoretical/topical focus, geography, and quality of
the contributions. The first chapter in this section, “Tofu and Related Prod-
ucts in Chinese Foodways,” is particularly strong, with an excellent his-
torical context, detailed information about tofu preparation, and clear in-
sights into the symbolic associations of tofu. There is a substantial, but still
growing, literature looking at the consequences of the growing popularity
of fast food and industrial production of local food products. There were
several examples of excellent work in The Cultural Politics of Food and
Eating: A Reader (Watson and Caldwell 2005), and Cwiertka and Moriya’s
chapter, “Fermented Soyfoods in South Korea,” in The World of Soy is
another contribution to this genre. Another strong contribution by Myra
Sidharta, “Soyfoods in Indonesia,” includes elements of political economy,
food as a marker of cultural identity, and even a partial analysis of gen-
der roles in explaining the increasing levels of consumption of soyfoods in
Indonesia.
The chapters following these present a different picture, as they are
drawn from areas with a more recent adoption of soy, including the United
States (Du Bois), Brazil (De Sousa and Vieira), Bangladesh (Du Bois), and
West Africa (Osborn). The two chapters on the United States and Brazil
are holistic and extensive, including historical studies of changes in pro-
duction and changes in consumer attitudes toward soy products. In Social
Context and Diet, particular attention is returned to the topic of how soy has
116 Book Reviews

become accepted as a human food in American cuisine, which was an issue

of special significance raised in the introduction. The various ways that soy-
bean products have been integrated into the diets of many African cuisines
are touched on in the chapter by Osborn, “Soybeans and Soybean Products
in West Africa.” The chapter was not as extensive as I would have hoped,
but it serves as a useful orientation to several issues related to soybeans in
West Africa, both in terms of production and consumption. The case from
Bangladesh offers a contrasting example to the other cases described in The
World of Soy, in that soy agriculture and soy consumption are surprisingly
unpopular there. The agronomic challenges are noted, along with the impli-
cations of severe poverty at the national level, in terms of local production
versus importation of soy meal, and at the household level, in terms of the
cost of preparation for soy compared to other pulses.
The chapter by Ivan De Sousa and Rita Vieira examines both the ex-
pansion of land under soybean cultivation in South America, and also the
changing nature of soy in the diets of Brazilians. As the landscape in South
America is increasingly transformed into a zone of industrial agricultural pro-
duction, there are important implications for the rural communities affected
by depopulation and the urban areas where the small-scale rural producers
are arriving. In “Soybeans and Soyfoods in Brazil,” De Sousa and Vieira do
an excellent job of contextualizing the expansion of soybean production in
terms of historical factors, government policy, and changes in the technology
of production (both agronomic and mechanical). They correctly note that the
high cost of the transportation infrastructure (compared to North America)
is a central concern among Brazilians working in the soybean industry. My
own work among soybean farmers in the Brazilian Amazon suggests that
the authors have an accurate grasp of the nature and implications of the ex-
pansion of soybeans into the Brazilian Amazon (Adams 2008). However, the
impact of the ban on soy produced in deforested land will not be confined
to reductions in deforestation in the region, as it has served to bring together
the newly arrived soybean farmers and the local elite, who did not view
one another as allies prior to the strong push against soy in the Amazon by
environmentalists.
The World of Soy is an excellent source of case studies related to the ex-
pansion of a food item into the cuisine and diet of various cultures. The work
presented makes important contributions to our understanding of the place
of soy in various changing foodways, and to a lesser extent contributes to
our understanding of the political economy of agricultural production. The
work could be complemented by other studies examining the nutritional
contribution of soy or the implications of soybean production as an undif-
ferentiated source of protein. It would serve as an excellent reader for a
graduate level course in food studies or courses in the social sciences with
a focus on food.
 Book Reviews 117

REFERENCES

Adams, R. T. 2008. Large-Scale Mechanized Soybean Farmers in Amazônia: New

Ways of Experiencing Land. Culture and Agriculture Vol. 30, No. 1–2:32–37.
Crosby, A. W. 1972. The Columbian Exchange; Biological and Cultural Consequences
of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Pub. Co.
Du Bois, C. M., C. B. Tan, and S. W. Mintz. 2008. The World of Soy. The Food Series.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Mintz, S. W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New
York: Penguin Books.
Wansink, B. 2005. Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology, and
Obesity. The Food Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Watson, J. L., and M. L. Caldwell. 2005. The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A
Reader. Blackwell Readers in Anthropology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

RYAN THOMAS ADAMS

Department of Anthropology
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
Indianapolis, IN 46202
E-mail: rtadams@iupui.edu

READING FOOD IN MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE, by Tomoko

Aoyama. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. 274 pp.

A study of the treatment of food in literature can offer a more nuanced under-
standing of cultural ideals, motivations, concerns, and practices in both his-
torical and contemporary time periods. This method is particularly successful
when applied to a specific culture, as Tomoko Aoyama has done in Reading
Food in Modern Japanese Literature, a scholarly study of the complex layer
of meanings that food can represent in Japanese literary texts. As Aoyama
shows, this subject has previously received little scholarship, despite the rich
selection of food references found in modern Japanese texts. Organized by
genre into six chapters, Aoyama analyzes novels, short stories, poems, and
plays from the Meiji period (1867–1912) to the present and includes exam-
ples of both well-known texts, accessible to non-Japanese readers, as well as
more obscure, untranslated, and controversial works. Aoyama also considers
the opinions of literary critics and the intentions of the authors themselves.
Despite the unavoidable omission of many texts, Aoyama has provided a di-
verse and balanced selection of Japanese modern fiction and poetry relevant
to the discussion.
Chapter 1, “Food in the Diary,” looks at the treatment of food in fictional
works written in diary format, and the use of food to reveal characters’ in-
ner feelings and circumstances. For instance, Kuroi ame (Black Rain, 1966),