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Much Ado About Soy

In the early 1990s, I stumbled into a very odd group of people who got together every sunny summer Sunday at the park by the beach for a vegetarian potluck.  This group cross-pollinated (so to speak) with another group, who hosted vegan potluck dinners once a month, and I found myself attending both from time to time.  Before I met these people, my impression of vegetarians was firmly rooted in the tie-dyed, homespun, lackluster fare that was the hallmark of the 1960s west-coast vegetarianism, complete with self-righteous rhetoric and smug consumption of what seemed to me to be tremendously under-seasoned and unimaginative food.  It wasn't supposed to taste good, I theorized, it was just supposed to be good for you, and some folks seemed to take this as an absolute inversion - ergo, the worse or blander something tasted, the better it was for your health.  This was, of course, before my introduction to Indian Food, or in fact any other culture with a long-standing vegetarian tradition built on both sound nutritional principles and flavourful ingredients.  Suddenly, vegetarian food was much more than the lousy stuff in the fridges of the hippies for whom I would occasionally baby-sit, or the sprout-smothered offerings of local restaurants.  I was swept up in a world of flavours and dishes from a variety of different cultures, where the only common thread was that they were all plant-based.  Some, it must be said, were awful (or at least, shall we say, "acquired tastes").  Others were quite inspiring.  Nowhere, however, were there quivery, cold, wet blobs of tofu.

Ah, tofu.  Butt of many jokes, sadly, and an object of no small terror to the comfortable North American meat-eater. Tofu, bland and somewhat mucilaginous - the epitome of unseasoned - is not only a watchword in lack of flavour, but for many, an organoleptic nightmare.  But, we were told, soy is good for us, with boatloads of data from the traditional Japanese dietary model plunked down as evidence, and therefore we should find some way to incorporate it into our diet.  Since humans seem programmed for extreme reactions, that meant to many that any animal-based portion of a meal could necessarily be switched out for a tofu-derived substitute - a notion which is laughably incomplete when examined in the cold light of day, but which seemed to creep ever-steadily into our gestalt notion of vegetarianism.  The startling array of new products featuring soy protein did little to dispel the growing myth, as we were confronted with soy "cheese", tofu dogs, veggie burgers, and tofunnaise.

This is where it all falls down.  We struggled through the horrors of early attempts to contrive meat-like products from plant-based foods, ignoring both the solutions of established vegetarian traditions (falafel, for example, is the mother of all veggie burgers, and has yet to be surpassed) and the lessons of the great Carob vs. Chocolate debate (carob is delicious, but not if one is introduced to it as a substitute such that "you can't tell the difference").  We learned.  We adapted.  We discovered that we like miso gravy on our french fries. We found ways to make soy work - incorporating it deep into dishes where its less desirable traits were suborned to its awesome ability to absorb and reflect the flavours around it.  We found that soy works well in baking in both liquid and flour forms (and, importantly, how to adjust our favourite recipes so that they didn't suffer texturally), and that it makes better "cheese"cake than "cheese" on pizza. Then came the bad news: now we're being told that soy is bad for you.

Wait a minute.  If soy is (suddenly) so bad for us, what about the Japanese model that has been so highly touted?  What exactly is it about soy that plummets it from super food to public enemy #1?  The answer is this:  North Americans like easy answers and broad categories, and we don't seem to like thinking for ourselves, or, heavens forefend, having to make important decisions about our own health.  Therefore, the revelation that soy has some potentially less-than-sterling qualities or at least some issues whereby an individual needs to make decisions based on their own specific needs as opposed to blindly following a pre-determined regimen, means that the pendulum of favour swings just as hard in the backlash position as it did in the singing praises position. If something is not always good, therefore it must be bad.

The legitimate issues surrounding soy boil down to two categories: allergy/sensitivity issues (including, for general purposes, those with thyroid complications who avoid soy because of its potential effect thereon) and the isoflavone (phytoestrogen) component of soy.  While allergy and sensitivity issues may to a degree be self-explanatory, or at least specific to certain medical conditions, the general public is considerably less well-informed about isoflavones.  However, when the experts themselves are in disagreement about whether isoflavones are helpful compounds that mimic estrogen and possess antioxidant properties that protect against a variety of cancer and thyroid problems or are evil disruptors of the endocrine system that will lead inevitably down a garden path of breast cancer, general hormone disruption, and lowered testosterone levels, it's hard to know what to think. The scientific evidence pursuant to isoflavones is kind of sketchy at best, and arguments abound on whether the isoflavones in soy are a benefit or detriment.

I have yet to find any conclusive studies that show unusually positive or negative effects of dietary intake of soy, with or without a prescribed threshold amount (RDA/RNI). Soy is a food.  It is a food with a very good track record of supplying protein and other essential nutrients in a manner readily digested and processed by the human body.  Its safety as a food has been documented by daily life in Asia for hundreds or thousands of years.  This doesn't, however, mean that it is the sole answer to curing every ill in the western world, or that we should depend on soy for all instances of protein consumption.  All-soy-all-the-time probably will not lead to optimal health, any more than all-lentils-all-the-time, or all-chicken-all-the-time. 

Our tendency to want to replace our favourites with a mock version made from some more acceptable material is in a sense our downfall, because while it might be very nice to have alternatives to yoghurt, ice cream, turkey and such, it doesn't follow that we should be eating them in quantity all the time.  If science has convinced me of anything, it is that a varied diet is important.  If we replace entire groups of food (dairy, meat/protein) with one, albeit versatile ingredient, we are obviously not doing ourselves any favours, since one ingredient cannot possibly hope to supply all of the vitamins, minerals and other essential nutritional aspects of the other ingredients that it is replacing (requiring further fortification, leading to more processing, leading away from any sort of natural diet).  Yet again, it is not necessarily what we are eating, but the quantity and recklessness with which we go about it.  The same mindset that led to not one but two low-carbohydrate "revolutions" is the mindset that wants to be told: this is good, that is bad, if you only eat from the good list, you'll be okay.  It's never quite that simple.

If only we weren't so inclined to grab hold of whatever crazy diet comes our way.  If only we were willing to try to establish what is needed by our individual bodies, and try to meet those needs without sweeping agendas or instant solutions.  Then, perhaps, we wouldn't fall victim to pro- or -anti food hysteria. Soy is not the villain.  Intellectual laziness, however, if not the devil himself, is a powerful tool thereof.

April 2007