Soy Bomb

Up until recently, soy milk had been a staple food item in my family’s diet. Like with millions of other Americans, lactose intolerance kept cheese and milk intake to a minimum, and the soy industry had a tasty answer for our dry cereal bowls, baked breads and cakes and other culinary needs. While soy was slowly integrating itself into my home cuisine, I was broadening my food awareness in other culinary areas: pasteurized and homogenized milk, out-of-state produce, Thailand shrimp farms, processed “cheese”, Genetically Modified veggies. All of these and many other ethically and environmentally questionable food items were making it into our grocery basket unnoticed on a weekly basis. Nowadays, instead of blindly purchasing and consuming, my family investigates the food we eat. We've since become conscious of the fact that our country does a very iffy job of feeding itself.

Soy milk is touted as a delicious and easy to digest alternative to cow’s milk. Its mainstream image is that of healthy, nutritious and conscious eating. The problem with those ideas is that nobody knows if they are true. There is, in fact, as much evidence that imbibing soy milk on a daily basis may be as harmful for you as it is said to be healthy.

In his book On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen, respected food authority Harold McGee explains that the soybean, along with canola and corn, account for a vast majority of all the genetically engineered food we eat, which is 75% of all processed foods. It’s no wonder then that soy milk was there when my family’s lactose intolerance seemingly called for it; we’re a target market! Millions of dollars and decades of industry funded research and flavor manufacturing have resulted in the soy milk we now see packaged for sale at all grocery stores. Its naturally beany flavor, unacceptable to Westerners, has been removed and its heath benefits government approved. A miraculous, meat-free, high protein, easily cultivated and processed food is now available for your consumption. Now that we’ve heard meat and potatoes are no longer safe, eggs are unhealthy and milk is unnatural, soy seems then to be the answer. But before you pour another tall glass of sugared and cooked bean juice, let’s take a look at some of the arguments against soybeans and the soy milk industry.

Thousands of years ago the Chinese and then Japanese first cultivated the soy bean – as a fertilizer. Soy bean plants were tilled back into the earth to prepare the soil for farming and the beans were only eaten in times of famine. The bean itself was a poverty food. Fermented salty soy foods like miso and soy (shoyu) sauce eventually entered the Asian diet later followed by soy beans which had been cooked and processed into solid foods such as bean curd and tofu, both of which make up the majority of soy bean processing in contemporary Asia. However, unlike what the modern soy industry will tell you, the Chinese and Japanese have not been gulping down chocolate, vanilla and plain soy milk for thousands of years, the notion that they have is quixotic. We therefore cannot possibly understand its potential health effects on Westerners by studying the health of people in the East. Not only do they eat less soy than we believe, theirs is usually less processed or fermented. Our American heated and chemically altered soybean products seem to pose the greatest touted risks.

Upon survey, one finds that the story of American soy consumption is intimately tangled with many varied health topics. A quick Google search yields information on soy and its petulant relations with Osteoporosis, coronary heart disease, cancer, hormone production, and especially mineral ingestion, Thyroid function, antinutrients and baby formulas. Interestingly enough, for every study which says soy milk helps fight cancer, lowers cholesterol and is good for babies, there’s others which say not so. While plowing through documents, evidence presented to the Food and Drug Administration, articles and other similar scholastic pieces, I found it helpful to inquire who was funding the reported findings. If the sale of soy milk was paying the bills, nothing bad was said. Others have steadily hoisted a black flag. Harold McGee’s take is consistent with our incomplete understanding of this bean: “It’s too early to say whether soybeans are more beneficial to human health than any other seed, or whether it’s a good idea to eat them often.”

Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig, PhD, writing for the Weston A. Price Foundation, a non-profit food awareness group based in Washington, D.C., are adamant about the dangers of soy consumption for our society. While their attack is more easily understood by chemists and nutritionists, they basically argue soy is too highly inadequate nutritionally to be used as a replacement by vegetarians for dairy and meat. One reason is phytic acid, known as phytates, which occurs at excessively high levels in the soybean, and serves to “…block the uptake of essential minerals-calcium, magnesium, iron and especially zinc-in the intestinal tract.” Processing the soybean does not alleviate this effect, however, these levels are much lower in traditional soy products like soy sauce, which, unlike highly processed soy foods, also contains anticarcinogenic substances not found in soy milk. Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, author of The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food, agrees, adding: “All modern (unfermented) soy products carry a load of antinutrients and toxins including protease inhibitors, phytates, saponins, isoflavones and other components that have been proven to cause digestive distress, immune system breakdown, thyroid dysfunction, (and) reproductive problems.” Many other health professionals had much of the same to say.

Also, there’s the concern about hemagglutinin, a blood clotting agent found in unfermented soy products which slow the body’s oxygen respiration, the growth depressant trypsin, the toxin lysinoalanine, dangerously high levels of MSGs, and some other flavor and substance additives which are at best suspect.

Most US soybeans, which represent half of the world’s production, are originally processed for animal feed or soy oil which is made for hydrogenated fat products like margarine and shortening, foods which surreptitiously replaced butter. Consequently, butter has gotten a bad rap. As butter consumption has steadily dropped, heart disease and cancer have risen rapidly, paralleling soy, corn and canola oil consumption. With modern food production technology, the insipid byproducts of soy oil can be processed further into the spray-dried protein-rich soy protein isolate (SPI) powder laced with all the questionable soy components listed above. Much of this is then turned into the controversial soy baby formula which contains not only the phytates, but also high levels of aluminum while lacking cholesterol and lactose, ingredients essential to breast milk and healthy infant development. While adults may intake soy as part of a varied diet, new babies only drink their formula. Not only then is soy missing the basic things our body requires from staple foods, it could actually be detrimental to our health. Few “staple” foods are further from “natural” than soy milk.

If soy is so unhealthy, how and why is it becoming more and more popular? In reading about the powerful soy industry, its meetings, campaigns for consumer acceptance, lobbyists to the FDA, thousands of dependant growers, millions of planted acres, development of new products like soy yogurt, soy ice cream, cosmetics, and other model consumer goods, it was easy to see how we bought into it. The soy industry, headed by Archer Daniel Midlands, the world's major soy processor, fought for years for FDA and consumer approval of its products and continues to do so. Millions of dollars of advertising works on Americans. If it’s supposed to be healthy and is widely available, cheap, and made to taste good, we’ll buy it. For the vast majority of us, that’s all the further we need to investigate. Learning about where our food comes from is a thing lost in the confusion and spectacle of late capitalist America. Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig eloquently explain, “Advances in technology make it possible to produce isolated soy protein from what was once considered a waste product—the defatted, high-protein soy chips—and then transform something that looks and smells terrible into products that can be consumed by human beings. Flavorings, preservatives, sweeteners, emulsifiers and synthetic nutrients have turned soy protein isolate, the food processors' ugly duckling, into a New Age Cinderella.” From toxic, inedible byproduct waste to our dining room tables, that’s where soy milk comes from.

Speaking out against soy is uncommon because of how powerful the industry really is. I’m pretty sure Wide Eyed just lost a sponsor. The soy industry spends millions on advertising and those are dollars the media does not want to lose. It also payrolls major PR firms which insert pro-soy reports in newspapers, magazines and politician’s mail boxes. However, if you start putting your ear to the growing cracks of this highly exposed industry, you’ll begin to hear others rumbling about the health myths of soy. Here’s a quote from the beautiful www.Silksoymilk.com: “Soy milk is loaded with vitamins and minerals your body needs to maintain peak health. It also provides special nutrients called isoflavones that scientists believe may help reduce the risk of certain cancers and provide other important health benefits.” The Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) has categorized soy isoflavones as GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) with the FDA, but not everyone agrees. In an article submitted to the FDA by Michael Fitzpatrick and the Weston A. Price Foundation, estrogen-like isoflavones are condemned as under-studied and toxic. His biggest worry: “The potential for chronic endocrine system and reproductive toxicity and alterations to the immune system.”

I now understand that while soy milk may contain vitamins and minerals, almost none of them are naturally occurring. The phytates found in soy milk reduce the body’s ability to absorb such nutrients anyway, so what’s the point? The health consequences of soy milk are still mostly unknown, and that’s what scares me the most.

Beer and yogurt: tasting the difference

Quintessentially, brewing beer is cooking food. One who participates in the practice invariably begins to see food and drink as more than staple necessities, and those who enjoy craft beer eventually begin to ask for more from the solid foods portion of their diet. If good craft brewed beer, made in the spirit of homemade goodness, tastes so much fuller, more malty and flavorful than the dumbed-down stuff, perhaps then other foods may have more to offer too.

In modern times, food is manufactured predominately with the producer’s, not the consumer’s, needs in mind. We eaters and drinkers have our minds made up for us. Really, it’s true. Millions of dollars of advertising and lobbying has us all eating artery clogging margarine and shortening, thyroid disrupting soy milk, and defatted and elutriated skim milk; none of which tastes even relatively good. That was not our decision. It’s time we make our own food again or at least start buying it from people who care about more than just profits derived from the sale of a commodity. It worked for beer, saving us from the dark age of post prohibition yellow lagers, so where else can we apply this model? How about yogurt and cheese?

Traditionally, cheese is a food made from milk: the nutritious life-giving liquid mammals use to feed their young. Humans utilize the milk of a specific group of mammals called ruminants which evolved from deer and possess the ability to produce milk from their natural diet of fibrous grasses. They include cattle, sheep, goats, water buffalo, yaks and camels. Before modern plastic packaging, homogenization, pasteurization and refrigeration, people quickly drank milk before it soured and solidified. Cheese, thought to have originated when an ancient middle easterner filled the yak stomach she was using as a camel pack with fresh milk and then left it in the sun, is created when the protein rich solids (curds) in milk coagulate and the other liquids (whey) are run off. Making cheese was simply a way of preserving the edibility of milk. Butter is much the same in the sense that the milk solids, fat in particular, are massed together and the buttermilk rinsed away. Sour cream and yogurt, fermented milk products which include the complete milk liquids, are much creamier.

“One of the remarkable qualities of milk is that it invites its own preservation,” writes food authority Harold McGee in his masterpiece On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Yogurt is one of the best representations of this miraculous microbial process. Like the relationship between yeast and malt sugars in beer, naturally occurring bacteria convert milk sugar (lactose) into lactic acid which preserves the altered milk and inhibits the growth of competitive pathogens. It also makes it taste smooth and tangy. Folks who have a digestive problem with dairy products most likely do not have enough of the enzyme lactase in their small intestine to eat up the lactose before it enters the large intestine and wreaks havoc. Fortunately, milk bacteria Lactococcus and Lactobaccillus, encouraged to propagate in yogurt, take care of the lactose problem, allowing easy and comfortable digestion.

Yogurt and beer have lots of other similarities too. No longer do brewers or dairy producers rely on wild yeasts or bacteria to ferment their sugars: isolated and highly predictable cultures are now used instead. The better the ingredients used, the better the product. Also: the fresher the better. For beer, aromatic hops are most pungent in brewery fresh beer. For milk, the only ingredient in yogurt: the closer to the dairy the better. Most all people buy homogenized and pasteurized milk and milk products. We didn’t make that decision. Most craft beer is unpasteurized because heating food is cooking food; why cook something that’s already done and ready to eat? However, modern milk is produced using highly unsanitary methods, making pasteurization indelible.

To keep the ignorant masses safe from last century’s plagues, the FDA has hence banned the sale of unpasteurized milk. Milk is now in its prohibition. However, a few rum runners are working loop holes known as “cow shares” in order to stick it to the man and deliver farm fresh, sanitary, organic and necessarily local raw milk. The farm cannot sell you milk, but they won’t keep you from buying the cow, or at least part of it. With a cow share, what you are technically paying for is their care of the animal, but we all know what’s really going on. Here in West Michigan are two great places to contact if you’re interested in farm fresh natural milk – grassfieldscheese.com and lubbersfarm.com. The health benefits are extraordinary – check out realmilk.com – and the taste? Remember your first sip of IPA?

Most all the cheese, butter, yogurt and sour cream commercially available is made from pasteurized and homogenized milk, so obviously its possible to make great food despite these industrial processes. Only twelve dairies in the US even make cheese from unpasteurized milk that they themselves produced and Grass Fields in Coopersville is one of them (you can find it at farmer’s markets, organically persuaded grocers, and on their farm.) For beer, the equivalent would be if a barley, wheat and hop farmer fermented and sold her own ales and lagers. I’m not sure if that has ever happened.

Being a beer connoisseur has hence led me to ask more from all food and drink. I’m not sure if there’s much of a difference flavor wise between generic band yogurt and the big specialty producers, especially considering FDA mandates, because yogurt is such a simple thing. Cheese, however, is not simple. Processed “American” and other similar Kraft or generic inexpensive “chunk” cheeses really deserve another title altogether in order to properly describe their attributes; how about “Macro-cheese?” The good stuff, like good beer, is produced in far smaller batches by far smaller diaries with a much larger price tag. Don’t feel like paying for it? Make it at home.

My first attempts have been with culturing yogurt. The process goes something like this: raise a quart of milk to 180F and chill to 116F. Stir in yogurt starter culture and hold temp in a thermos for 6 – 12 hours or until the milk coagulates. Refrigerate and enjoy; preferably with fresh local blueberries, cucumbers, or Naan bread. Try sicilianosmkt.com for the yogurt and cheese making info. Get crazy, share a cow, eat seasonally and make your own food!