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.
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