Today, I’m going to tell you a story about soybeans. Soybeans are an ancient crop and their origin story is fuzzy. Somewhere between the Yellow river and the Huai river, people started to cultivate soybeans somewhere between 6000-9000 years ago.

I know this area of the world somewhat because I was born in a railroad town in the region. I know the rural land through family stories because our ancestral villages sit amidst myths and old graves on the mountains and flood plains. The fabled capital of the mythological Xia dynasty, that kingdom which was birthed by a woman who copulated with a magical bird and laid an egg, sits somewhere in this region that produced the first soybean. Soy is one of five crops which are considered to be sacred to the shamans and the scholars from this part of the world, a gift given to the community from the river itself.

Soybeans first entered North America by way of intellectual theft. Samuel Bowen, an employee of the East India Company, snuck into the Qing empire and stole several tons of soybeans seeds. He gifted the stolen seeds to entrepreneurs in Georgia and, from there, soybeans became an American plantation crop.

After the American Civil War, some Black farmers were sent to emaciated lands that could not produce any more food as a planned effort to starve out Black families. Much of the land in the south had been forced to produce so much tobacco and cotton that they could not produce anything alive anymore. To rescue Black farmers from famine, George Washington Carver encouraged farmers to rotate their crops and to use legumes like soybeans and peanuts to bring nitrogen back to the soil. Along with peanuts, soybeans healed the impoverished soil and, with it, revived the American agricultural project. Today, farmers still rely on Carver’s methods of crop rotation.

Despite soybean’s pervasive influence in American farming and land use, soybean eating has never been tolerated by the American public.

In the essay Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice; American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism—Which Shall Survive? written by the American Federation of Labor, Chinese laborers are portrayed as an uncountable and faceless horde. The AFL claims that important Portuguese and British colonies such as Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia are filling up with thousands of Chinese who must be contained.



The AFL writes, “The Chinese are streaming over the greater part of the globe, and are also forming colonies, albeit after their own fashion. High gifted, although inferior to the Caucasian in the highest sphere of mental activity; endowed with untiring industry; temperate to the utmost abstemiousness; frugal; a born merchant; a first-class cultivator, especially in gardening; distinguished in every kind of handicraft, the son of the Middle Kingdom slowly, surely, and unremarked is supplanting the Europeans wherever they are brought together” (italics my own).

The AFL warns white laborers that the presence of Chinese laborers will reduce their rights and diminish their quality of life. They make a case for slavery, arguing that human traffickers have an interest in the laborers that they exploit while owners of Chinese labor do not. Chinese workers are portrayed as social vermin who live in moist sewers or open cesspools, spreading opium addiction and venereal disease. Much of the metaphors that the AFL employs around American manhood and Chinese coolieism is food related. The conflict between American manhood and Chinese coolieism is also a cultural clash between a meat eating people and a grain consuming one.

American manhood is heroic and unique because it is meat eating. Chinese coolieism is populous and unprecious because it is grain consuming. Grain consumption has the ability to produce a large mass population but meat eating has the ability to produce strong muscles. In the AFL’s portrayal, American manhood is uniquely strong but also vulnerable and rare due to its meat eating ways. Chinese coolieism, on the other hand, because it relies on grains and legumes, is weak and overpopulated.

I grew up in Iowa where you could drive for hours without leaving the soybean fields. Unfortunately for Iowan farmers, Americans have no idea what to do with all of the soybeans that we produce. Ever since Gerald Ford, we have been trying to use all of the vast soybeans that we produce to make plastic.

My family and I would go to the State Fair where different startups would pass around candles, soaps, and crayons made using soybeans in an effort to promote its usage every year. The crayons would be weakly pigmented, not fun to use. The candles were okay but the soaps were weird. The plastics made from soy are too weak to be used for anything serious. My mom would shake her head. “Why don’t they just eat the soybeans?”

When you walk through an American supermarket, you would never guess that America is the world’s second highest soybean producer just after Brazil. Soy products live in a very small section of the supermarket, the vegan section, which is hidden away somewhere in produce. Soy sauce is found in the ethnic aisle if there is one. Tofu is highly overpriced. Americans have no idea how to cook it and claim that it has no flavor because soy has never been integrated into the cuisine. There is no widespread eating of natto, fishcake, tofu skin, bamboo tofu, or tofu soup—no soy sauce braises. And, yet, if you were to total the amount of land that Americans use to farm soybeans up together, you would end up with a territory that comprises the entirety of the Mid-Atlantic region. That’s how much land America uses to produce soybeans.

Much of this land is newly agricultural. On this land used to be grasslands hosting hundreds of diverse species and diverse peoples. Settlers genocided the people, displacing Sauk and most Meswaki people and taking over their forts, filled up the land, and then plowed it, producing apocalyptic dust storms. Today, the land is drenched with RoundUp, making the Mississippi undrinkable for around two thirds of the year. Today, Iowa is one of the world’s most cancerous regions.

Much American agricultural land, settled land, Monsanto land, is used to produce soybeans and, yet, soybeans remain indigestible for the American public not just due to racism but also due to transphobia. Male chauvinists see soybeans and soy products as a feminine food because they associate soy with estrogen. In the early 2000s, men who consumed too many soybeans were called “soy boys.” “Soy boys” were seen as overly plentiful, weakened, and overly empathetic. Alpha males, on the other hand, should consume an all meat diet if they want to be big and strong. Projects which try to rebrand soy products as American, such as Tofurky during Thanksgiving, have failed.

Of course they have. An empathic crop, soybeans feed the soil back. Soybeans are soft, fuzzy, and cute. As a result, many American men fear that soybeans will somehow turn them into women. American manhood is once again under assault, not just from empathy but soybeans.

Soybean farmers are currently going through what can only be called a crisis. Due to America’s trade war with China, the price of soy has now fallen to around $8-9 a bushel, falling steeply from $14 a bushel just last year. Caleb Ragland, a soybean farmer in Kentucky who voted for Donald Trump, begs him to do something. In his letter to Trump, he writes that, “This year we’re hoping to hang on with a loan to cover the difference. But not every farmer is so lucky. I’ve watched my fellow farmers, who were already having difficulties, forced to have auctions and sell their farms. Some have had to declare bankruptcy and take whatever work they can get as farmhands.” In Iowa, even city dwellers can already see the unraveling. Farmers are having more yard sales, selling their tractors and equipment as they slide deeper into debt.

Ragland is too late, not because China (where many people eat soybeans) ordered soybeans from Brazil where rainforests will be deforested to make room for monocrops this year but because so much of settled land remains socially unproductive. In the midwest, these monocrops are indigestible, stored inside of highly combustible and barely insurable silos to rot and stabilize the market. Farms run on subsidies while farmers vote to incarcerate their own workers. No one eats soy. America continues to produce around a third of the world's soy while refusing to eat it.

There is absolutely no logic here. No land is supposed to be a monocultural wasteland. Soy is a part of American agriculture but I don’t think it will ever be a part of American cuisine.