tofu

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It’s very common to do two things when veganism is discussed. One is to associate it strongly with soya. The other is to criticise it on that basis as environmentally unsustainable. Further down the line is a common equation between soya and phytoëstrogens (how do you spell that?), leading to a whole gender politics thing about “soyboys” which is a load of b0ll0x. Today, or whenever this sees the light, I’ll be talking about this stuff.

In a way, I should be saying “plant-based”. The reason I didn’t is that veganism is not the pursuit of a plant-based diet. Rather, it’s an ethical position akin to pacifism with practical consequences. A plant-based diet is merely one which eliminates the intentional consumption of animal products, and as such the term is a misnomer as it may include fungi. It’s arguable that a plant-based diet including soya is optimally vegan, although I personally eat soya products and I am going to defend their use as well as criticise them. This is somewhat similar to the palm oil situation, which was declared non-vegan by some although it seems to me that a whole load of other foods could be equally seen in that way.

I’m going to start with a similar kind of botanical breakdown of what soya plants are. Soya, 大豆, Glycine max, is a member of the Leguminosæ along with lentils, peas, clover and so on. This family is “green manures” because they contain nodules in their roots with symbiotic bacteria which can fix nitrogen. Hence they are extremely useful in agriculture and horticulture. Some of them are also high in hæm, which is the porphyrin found in hæmoglobin, which they use to bind to oxygen, I think increasing the nitrogen concentration around the roots and therefore the efficiency of this process, and as an aside this hæm is used to make more convincing veggie burgers, which may however not be vegan because they have been safety-tested on animals, although don’t quote me on that – do your own research. Soya is unusual among plant protein sources because it contains large amounts of all essential amino acids. In general the sources of bulk protein in a plant-based diet are either low in sulphur-containing amino acids or low in others, but soya has an unusually high quality. That said, the idea of quality in amino acid content is now somewhat passé for reasons I don’t fully understand, although it is true that you needn’t combine protein sources in a single meal and also, I haven’t investigated this but it’s long seemed likely that digestive enzymes from further up in the gastrointestinal tract would end up being digested and absorbed further down, so I’ve long had my doubts about that idea. Soya is also the source of a fixed oil used in cooking and to make margarine, and in the manufacture of soap (which I have done incidentally), plastics, paint and biofuel. This last in particular is ecologically significant and I’ll be returning to it. The Latin name seems to be the origin of the name of the amino acid glycine, which is the only non-chiral and simplest of that family of compounds and is found in the interstellar medium, unlike all other amino acids as far as I know. Glycine is also a neurotransmitter, like some other amino acids. Maybe the name is just a coincidence. Soya sauces are also derived from it. It seems to have originated from southwestern Asia, although its traditional use has been greatest in the Far East. However, today something like four-fifths of the world’s production is in the Americas, including North America. It cannot be grown in the British Isles because it’s susceptible to frost, although climate change might mean it will be possible at some point. It grows from four dozen centimetres to two metres high and produces pods containing three or four seeds each up to around seven centimetres in length.

Like Cannabis, soya is one of those species which tends to get focussed on in a biassed manner due to its social position, and information on it can therefore be seen as fairly obfuscated. There are two main sources of criticism. One regards environmental impact and the other influence on the reproductive function. This of course edges yet again into herbalism, but I’ll cover it here anyway. Soya is œstrogenic on account of its isoflavones, genistein and daidzein, and has been blamed for increasing the risk of breast cancer and reducing male fertility. This is potentially part of a narrative where plants are problematised rather than seen as nutritious and beneficial, which is also rife in anti-herbalist rhetoric. In fact, considering that soya has been high in diets in east Asia for centuries, this is almost certainly baseless unless the processing of soya as an ingredient in more Westernised diets does something significant. There are also elements of sexism in this, because it portrays œstrogen as something foreign to the human body which is likely to cause problems. In fact I can testify that there are much stronger œstrogens elsewhere in the plant kingdom and that soya is extremely weak in this respect, and that xenoestrogens, that is, compounds organisms have not encountered until recently, are far more significant in this respect because the liver is less able to deal with them and they are lipid-soluble. Having said this, it is true that the processing of biological matter can change its profile and action, so it really depends on whether there’s a significant difference between industrial and pre-industrial treatment of soya.

For a long time. soya didn’t constitute a significant part of my diet, even as a vegan, because I tried to source my food as locally as possible and I simply had no need for it. Whereas there certainly are hidden ingredients in processed food, very little of my diet was in this form. Probably the main heavily-processed item would’ve been pasta. There is an issue with abrogating responsibility when you hand over the preparation of food to strangers, particularly if they are part of large organisations. I have generally tried not to do this, though not so much recently. I also didn’t take the approach of substituting æsthetically similar products for animal products, so for example when I gave up milk and cheese I didn’t replace it with anything that seemed similar although I did research the nutritional value and replaced it in that sense. Hence soya milk hasn’t played much of a rôle in my life, for example. Tofu and tempeh, however, have, so it has had an indirect rôle in that way since both are involved in the production of soya milk. It is, incidentally, possible to prepare a similar food from peanuts, since like soya beans, peanuts are pulses. I’ve never done this though. All that said, nowadays I do eat a fair bit of tofu, for my sins, which is an æsthetic choice rather than a nutritional one. Therefore in the following, I am as culpable as anyone else, but probably less culpable than carnists who eat farmed meat.

Since 1970 CE, soya production has increased four dozenfold. Almost one and a quarter megaäres of land is devoted to soya farming, much of it in the Americas. Brazil, Argentina and the US are the leaders here, the Argentine being a distant third compared to the equal production of the other two. It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that one of these countries is known for a certain biome. Therefore, unsurprisingly, soya farming is associated with deforestation. Soya plants are annuals, so the ground needed for them constantly increases. It is true that the conditions for soya are better in savannah areas than rain forests, but the area of Brazil used for the plant is still special and unique in terms of biodiversity. Farming it has resulted in soil erosion, as it often does.

Although it’s true that soya farming is environmentally destructive, this cannot be used as an argument against vegetarianism and veganism for two important reasons. One is that five-sixths of global soya production goes to feed farm animals. This is where the bulk of Brazilian soya bean exports go. The other is biofuel. Soya can be used to make both biodiesel and ethanol, so it’s actually a source for two different fuels. The biodiesel produces a by-product which can be used for farm animal feed. The oil itself is reacted with methanol and the glycerol is extracted and fed to farm animals along with the beans themselves. Most American biodiesel is from soya oil. China imposed a 25% tax on American soya for this reason, which will have driven up the cost of soya as food generally. Hence much of the world’s soya production goes either to feed farm animals or to produce biodiesel and by-products thereof, including farm animal feed, and since tropic levels mean that soya for meat production is hugely inefficient, carnists are in no position to point at non-carnist consumption of soya unless they also intentionally avoid meat which comes from animals who have been fed on it. That said, soya doesn’t deserve a halo and it is better to avoid it, not least because you’re supporting an industry that profits from animal farming, although I’m not sure what you could do to avoid that, bearing in mind that self-sufficiency involves having enough money to own land and where did that money come from?

To conclude, then, although soya is by no means wonderful, it isn’t riskier to the health than most foods and carnists can’t use consumption of it as a stick to beat vegans and vegetarians unless they too make efforts to avoid meat fed on it. And to be fair, some of them do, and ecologically there is a difference between eating road kill, for example, and having a Big Mac. But on the whole the argument is invalid for the vast majority of carnists. At the same time, we should all probably be making some effort to reduce our consumption of soya, directly or indirectly.

Ar Dinnear

Soya And Veganism