Soy Matters by Innes Hope Increasing our knowledge and skills for preparing and cooking a balanced range of plant foods is a joy for most people and very rewarding. Innes Hope works in the arts, crafting thoughts into words, verses and recipes for a better world.
O
ver 50 years, I've seen many health food trends come and go. The saddest to witness was the demise of soy. In the 1970s, vegetarianism was booming. People began eating soy instead of meat and milk. I was one of them. By the 1990s, Big Meat and Dairy were worried soy would threaten their bottom line. They were spending huge amounts on advertising, PR, research, lobbying and AstroTurf organisations (industry shills pretending to be grassroots movements) to scare the public away from soy consumption, according to John Robbins, author of The Food Revolution. I witnessed paranoia about men-boobs, breast cancer, retarded sexual organs in babies, allergic reactions, and so on, spread rapidly across New Zealand. I felt fine eating soy over many years, so I was puzzled. Asians had stayed healthy, slim, and energetic eating soy for a couple of thousand years. Did we Westerners regard ourselves as a different species? Whatever the reason, this was largely ignored, and naturopaths started advising their clients to stop eating soy. At most, they conceded, vegans and vegetarians could safely eat fermented organic soy foods.
The Science
As the 1900s became history, the rise of self-proclaimed experts and 'influencers' became our future. As one cynic put it, 'Why am I being given nutrition advice from my hairdresser?' Blogging and then Instagram gave voice to food gurus, authors, and the privileged health world's 'worried well,' preaching 'THE science' and ridiculing the other guy's science and dietary choices. At the time, many vegetarians and vegans believed they were getting sufficient Vit B12 from certain natural foods like seaweed, Tempe, chlorella and mushrooms. But they weren't - it has to be taken as a supplement. ¹ No wonder people started worrying if they were getting enough of the latest micronutrient or enough protein, if they had enough energy, or if anti-nutrients in plant
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foods were causing health problems. Next thing, heated debates about cholesterol began, and coconut oil was everywhere, priming us for the 'butter is back' campaign, which triumphed. I watched, amazed, as most of my alternative lifestyle vegetarian friends returned to eating meat and cheese.
The Winners
I saw that scenario as a distract, divide-and-conquer situation. Obviously, the soy controversy and similar anti-grain, antilegume, and pro-saturated fat campaigns were serving the interests of cattle and dairy farmers (and wider animal-proteinfood industries) exceedingly well. The market for organic soy fizzled, and protestors were no longer such a nuisance, so the meat, dairy and G.M. industries were focusing on growing their returns. The global demand for meat had exploded, largely due to population growth and increasing wealth in China, so, in parallel, the demand for animal feed grew. Genetically modified (GM) crops were fitting the bill. From the first commercial field of GM soy, planted in 1996, GM. production rocketed to its 350 million tonne-plus status today. In the US, soy, now a subsidised crop, covered the fields of the upper Midwest. Brazil and other Latin countries jumped on the bandwagon. According to the American-based Food Revolution Network, there is now "more soy in a pound of feedlot beef than there is in a pound of tofu." ²
Shunning GM Soy
You might not be worried about GM soy, but health-food consumers are. They don't trust the objectivity of regulatory bodies or corporate industry claims that, despite being heavily sprayed with glyphosate (Roundup), the amount of spray present in harvested beans is negligible and safe to ingest - especially long term. Glyphosate was declared 'probably carcinogenic' by the WHO., and though that is being questioned, traditional foods, spray-free or organically grown, are preferred.
