This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode, Tofu for You: Meet the Cult Leader, the Spy, and the Pioneering Chinese Woman Doctor Who Brought Tofu to the West, first released on September 14, 2021. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

WENDY FU: I would say that it is a whitish square block that can range in firmness. So anything from fairly soft and sort of… not quite melting in the mouth, but certainly requires very little effort for it to go down your throat. To something that is a little bit more textured, and can be sort of broken up and crumbly and cooked in various ways.

MINH TSAI: It’s like a white delicious cake. [LAUGH]

CYNTHIA GRABER: So a white cake that comes in a range of textures, it’s sometimes melty and sometimes crumbly? Any guesses to what this might be?

NICOLA TWILLEY: Give yourselves a round of applause if you just said: tofu! Because I wouldn’t have.

GRABER: Delicious cake certainly didn’t give it away.

TWILLEY: But tofu is kind of a mysterious substance, at least it was to me. I never even tried it till I was an adult. And I still find it sort of… hard to pin down.

FU: I think most people would say that tofu doesn’t have much of a taste. That it’s fairly bland. But maybe a more positive way to put it is that it has a, welcoming—like it’s open to absorbing any number of other kinds of flavors.

GRABER: I love this image of tofu as something soft, mysterious, and welcoming.

TWILLEY: Honestly, it sounds like a very attractive dating profile. Tofu, are you free this weekend? I’m Nicola Twilley, and I’m looking for love in all the wrong places.

GRABER: And I’m Cynthia Graber, and we of course are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. This episode, is, yes, all about your new favorite delicious white cake, slash date, tofu.

TWILLEY: In this episode, we are going to tell you the story of how people in what’s now northeastern China figured out how to turn this almost indigestible bean that is notorious for causing extreme flatulence into all kinds of highly digestible, non-fart-inducing tofu—from silken to hairy.

GRABER: And we’re going to introduce you to the people over the centuries who tried to convince folks in Europe and North America to take a chance on this welcoming stranger.

TWILLEY: Including a cult leader in Tennessee who believed he was telepathically connected to animals.

GRABER: We also have the cult leader to thank for tofurkey.

TWILLEY: Thanks indeed. Finally, is there really a Japanese delicacy that involves eels swimming into a block of tofu and getting cooked inside it, or is that just my friend and Gastropod supporter Wayne making shit up again?

GRABER: All will be revealed. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: The only time to my knowledge that I’ve ever eaten a soybean in soybean form is edamame—those green pods you get as a starter at sushi restaurants. Which I love.

FU: So young soybeans, which is what edamame is, is generally esteemed. But once you actually have the mature bean, and then you try to cook it, the results tend to be less than appetizing.

GRABER: Jia-Chen Fu is a professor at Emory University who studies the history of science, technology, and medicine in China, and she’s the author of The Other Milk. She publishes under Jia-Chen but she goes by Wendy in her everyday life, so that’s what we’re going to call her this episode.

TWILLEY: Wendy told us that the soybean was likely domesticated in what’s now northeastern China, right on the border with Korea.

GRABER: Wild soybeans, and then domesticated soybeans, they’re not particularly high maintenance. They grow well in a lot of different regions, and they’re beans, which are in general a good thing to eat, and so people ate a lot of them.

FU: It is an early crop that is recognized and becomes part of what is known as sort of the five classical grains. So we know that soybean is not actually a grain but it was treated as sort of a staple food, similar to wheat as well as rice.

TWILLEY: It was a staple, yes, but it was only a staple out of necessity. Like Wendy said, the mature soybean has some issues. More so even than many of its fellow bean colleagues, it causes pretty intense gassiness and flatulence. And even though, like all beans, it’s packed with protein, it also contains a chemical that means our bodies can’t really process that protein.

GRABER: But there’s a way around the protein-blocking problem, and at least a little of the flatulence problem, and that is to boil the crap out of mature soybeans.

FU: The earliest ways in which we know people were sort of cooking soybeans basically occurs in two forms. One is to boil it for a really, really long time until you produce a kind of congee or gruel. And the other way is to steam it. Neither of these two methods are particularly appetizing, and the textual evidence that sort of reference these sorts of dishes do not hesitate to tell us that they’re not very appetizing.

TWILLEY: As a result, Wendy says that by a couple thousand years ago, people in the region were eating rice and millet instead of boiled soybeans whenever possible. So soybeans stopped being a staple food.

GRABER: But people didn’t give up on soy altogether.

FU: And they become a key component of creating, like, condiments. And once that process sort of kicks in, we see, first off, the earlier ways of cooking soybeans disappear. And instead, there are sort of other kinds of processing technologies that arise, whether it’s sprouting or fermentation, or grinding, and so forth.

GRABER: To make things like chunky fermented soy paste, douban, which is still essential in Chinese cooking today. Fermenting soybeans makes them much more digestible and much more delicious.

TWILLEY: This is the start of a whole family of fermented condiment-y type uses for soybeans, of which miso and soy sauce are probably the most famous these days. And then the grinding—that’s what gives people their first step towards the next big thing in soybeans: our focus this episode, tofu.

GRABER: The path to tofu seems to have started about two thousand years ago, this is when the grist mill for grinding was invented in China—

FU: And so now soybeans can actually be ground in a way that actually produces the slurry.

TWILLEY: This slurry is a pretty exciting step forward for our initially unpromising bean.

FU: There’s this kind of alchemical transformation that takes place when you work with soybeans. Because you start with, say, these yellow soybeans—I mean, there’s other varieties as well. But if we just start with, say, yellow soybeans, and then you know, you soak them in water, and then you grind them up, and then you cook it, you actually produce this very kind of luminous and glossy white liquid, which doesn’t seem like something that you would get from this particular plant.

GRABER: But that’s not enough to get tofu, tofu doesn’t just magically emerge from this luminous glossy white liquid. There are a few other steps involved, and it’s not really clear when those steps were invented or discovered.

TWILLEY: There are a few different stories to explain the invention of tofu. Wendy started with the most glamorous, but also the most unlikely.

FU: It is said that the originator or the inventor of tofu is this man, Liu An, who was the prince of Huinan. And he was a prince during the Han Dynasty. So we’re talking about 2000 years back.

TWILLEY: In one version of this story, the prince was a scholar and a philosopher and he was experimenting with soy milk in the hope of creating an elixir for eternal life. But, instead, he made tofu.

FU: The problem with this particular sort of legend, traditional tale, is that there’s not a lot of evidence that sort of really supports that, first off, that he necessarily invented it.

GRABER: So then there’s what’s known as the accidental coagulation theory, which is that partially evaporated seawater got mixed in somehow with soymilk, and the natural magnesium chloride in saltwater actually changed the protein structure of the soy and made it coagulate into like a kind of soymilk jelly.

TWILLEY: Again, we’re missing any evidence of that sort of accidental breakthrough though of course that would be kind of hard to find. And Wendy said there’s yet another theory.

FU: Given the sort of foreign context of during the Han Dynasty period, there’s a fair amount of interaction and communication with northern and western neighbors. And their sort of northern-western neighbors are people who consume dairy. Maybe not cows per se, but certainly from horses and other mammalian animals. And so there’s a strong argument to be made that in all likelihood, one of the things that’s probably happening is that they are seeing and absorbing and adapting processes that have been applied to various forms of dairy milk.

GRABER: And noticing that they could kind of make something kind of similar with soy milk. They could take that jelly-like coagulated soy milk, and then press the clumps, which were kind of like cheese curds, press them to get rid of the water.

TWILLEY: This is the cheese inspiration theory for tofu’s creation, and Wendy thinks it’s actually pretty likely. Certainly many of my best ideas involve cheese.

GRABER: There’s still no evidence for this theory, though I do love it too. And one other question is how long people have been eating tofu in China.

TWILLEY: Which is also almost impossible to answer.

FU: If anything, I think what we can say is that in all likelihood, there was some—maybe, early or sort of premature form of making something like tofu, but maybe not quite tofu, during the sort of late Han Dynasty period, so about 2000 years ago. But this wouldn’t have been something that would have produced a food that was available for most common people. It was probably something that was fairly limited to only certain elite households.

GRABER: That’s because of the labor involved in grinding it.

TWILLEY: Which only elites could afford. There’s another legend that tofu was mostly made not for aristocrats to eat but for dead people—in this story, tofu was a grave offering, designed to feed ghosts, because they don’t have strong jaws and teeth, and they need soft foods.

GRABER: But over time, as the technology for grinding the slurry became more commonly available, and because soybeans themselves were super common, tofu also became a food not just for aristocrats and ghosts but for everyone. Jump forward a thousand years, and rich people were eating tofu, poor people were eating tofu, Buddhist monks in particular ate a lot of tofu because they were vegetarians.

TWILLEY: And tofu goes on to spread around the region, to Japan and other East Asian countries. Buddhists and Buddhist monks hop on the tofu train, but so does everyone else. And they start getting creative with their soybean cakes.

FU: There’s sort of all manner of different weights that you could add on to it to make different levels of firmness. And then you can also sort of take those blocks, you can dry them out, and then you have doufu gan.

GRABER: The dried tofu looks like a dried out piece of bread, and when you reconstitute it in boiling water it becomes much chewier and denser than normal tofu.

TWILLEY: And just in case that’s not enough to choose from, Wendy says you can ferment your tofu too, to make a whole new family of tofu products.

FU: So there are several different kinds of fermented tofu. There’s, it’s called I think in English they call like hairy tofu? Where the fermentation process basically produce little, like kind of hairs on top of the tofu. There’s a very popular sort of fermented tofu that you can get in Taiwan, for example, like the cho dofu, this sort of stinky tofu, which people will oftentimes say smells either like the gutter or less savory sort of bathroom related smells.

GRABER: I haven’t tried stinky tofu personally, but Wendy says that it doesn’t taste as bad as it smells, and when it’s used in stews and things it adds a really interesting savory note.

FU: Honestly I really like it, but I understand that it can cause a certain amount of consternation for other people who can’t get over the smell, for good reason.

GRABER: I know Wendy is not making it sound too appealing, but now I really want to try it!

TWILLEY: Stinky or no, the point is, tofu was super popular, it was everywhere in East Asia. Tofu had made it in the East, but it was basically completely unknown in the West.

GRABER: Until European explorers start showing up in the 1600s. At which point they encountered this mysterious white cake.

FU: So they oftentimes describe it as a kind of cheese. One of the earliest references, I think it might be the earliest reference that we have of a Westerner sort of talking about tofu is, it comes from a British sea captain who has gone to Japan. And he writes about this cheese that he sees the Japanese eating.

GRABER: Not too long after that, a Spanish friar was the first to write down the name of this cheese-substance: tofu. And for years, these European explorers were all a little confused about tofu. It’s kind of like cheese, but it’s not cheese.

FU: And so when they’re writing back about people eating tofu, there is a kind of mixture of amusement and surprise, and sort of, wow, who would have thought that that you know, that they eat this.

TWILLEY: But at the same time, these explorers in the 1700s and 1800s were definitely not against tofu. In fact, some of them thought it might be kind of useful.

GRABER: And so, they tried to bring it to the west. But it wasn’t easy to convince Europeans and North Americans to love tofu, and it took many of these evangelists, over many centuries, to get tofu to stick around here.

TWILLEY: So let’s start with my main man Ben Franklin—I have a history with him because one of my earliest jobs in the US was organizing his 300th birthday party. Ben got a hold of some soybeans when he was living in London and he mailed them to a gardener friend of his in Philly with a letter that explained that the Chinese made a cheese from these beans called tau-fu. Which is the first time the term tofu shows up in the English language.

GRABER: But, surprise surprise, Ben Franklin’s soy fascination didn’t really go anywhere. The next person who wanted to bring tofu to the Western masses gave France a try.

FU: It is a strange story, I think because the person at the heart of that story is such a strange and fascinating man. So in the early 20th century, there was a young man who had been sent as a kind of student attachment to the first Chinese… I think he doesn’t have the official title as ambassador, but he’s like the minister to France, representing the Qing Dynasty government. And there’s this young man who goes by the name of Li Yuying. And he goes to France and very quickly sort of falls in love and becomes a steadfast, hardcore Francophile. He remains this way for the entirety of his life.

TWILLEY: The plan was for Li Yuying was to go to military school and take careful notes—AKA, steal all the French army’s secrets for the Chinese.

FU: But he found that he was mentally not equipped to go to military school, and instead, enrolled himself in like, an agricultural college just outside of Paris. And then ended up, once he graduated from there, going to the Pasteur Institute and studying science. And he became this soybean proponent, and he set up the first soy foods factory, outside of Paris in 1909. And produced a whole variety of different kinds of soy foods, including what we would call tofu.

GRABER: Li Yuying manufactured all sorts of soy products at this Parisian factory, breads and pastries with soy flour, he sold soymilk, he had a roasted soybean coffee replacement—and he made Roquefort- and Camembert-flavored tofus.

FU: And he very quickly took on this role of propagating and talking about the virtues of soybean and how it’s this amazing plant and how it can produce all these amazing foods that could solve a variety of different problems, whether they were nutritional or economic. He’s also like, one of the earliest Chinese anarchists. [LAUGH] So when he wasn’t talking about soybean, he was actually helping fund and edit one of two of the major anarchist magazines that are known from this early time period.

TWILLEY: And his anarchist zines and Camembert-style tofu were pretty popular with the French.

FU: And so some of the articles will talk about, like, Oh, well, you know, the breads were actually very delicious. And they’re quite light and flavorful. And the cheeses are not really comparable to the cheeses, but they’re like, it’s not unappetizing, or it’s not inedible. [LAUGH] So it’s not terrible. But it is very much a curiosity, like there is a kind of sense that they’re not totally sure what to do.

GRABER: But alas, being a not-inedible curiosity wasn’t quite enough to keep the soybean factory open. It closed within only a couple of decades, and France quickly lost its burgeoning appetite for tofu.

TWILLEY: Meanwhile, back in the US of A, tofu was beginning to gain ground—but, only in the growing Chinese and Japanese-American communities of the west coast. Some of these original tofu shops from the late 1800s are still in business in San Francisco and Portland today.

GRABER: But these shops really just served the Chinese and Japanese immigrant community. They hadn’t cracked the white American market yet—

TWILLEY: which brings us to our next tofu evangelist: Yamei Kin.

FU: She is fascinating because she is this early female doctor, you know, at a moment when there’s not a lot of female doctors who are being trained and graduating from medical schools. She was born in China. Her parents died when she was about two years old. And she was adopted by a medical missionary who raised her, her and another adopted son. He and his wife raised them both in China and Japan and then later in the United States.

TWILLEY: Yamei Kin’s tofu story starts in the late 1910s. When World War I came along, the US government was worried about having enough meat for the soldiers, and they started looking for protein substitutes for the home front. Soy seemed like a promising candidate.

GRABER: And so the government hired this unusual female Chinese-American doctor Yamei Kin to look into it. She’d spent a lot of time as an adult traveling in China, and she agreed that soy was fantastic. She set up a government-funded lab to develop all sorts of soy- and tofu-based delights.

TWILLEY: Like many before her, she didn’t call tofu “tofu”—she called it cheese. But she didn’t stop at serving it as cheese. A reporter who visited her was treated to a multi-course soybean curd extravaganza that she described in her article as a series of quote “camouflage experiments.”

GRABER: Yamei Kin made things for that reporter’s dinner like green peppers stuffed with crushed tofu that was cooked as if it were chicken hash, with soybean biscuits alongside. There was one course that was a comparison: she served both fried fish in gravy and fried tofu in gravy. And then for dessert there was some chocolate soy pudding. Sounds great.

TWILLEY: The reporter wrote that she’d never tasted anything more delicious than the tofu chicken hash, and that she left, quote: “ready to root for soybeans.”

GRABER: But once again, this tofu experiment went nowhere. The war ended, people no longer needed meat substitutes, and Yamei Kin returned to China. In America, she was fondly remembered among a small group of soy enthusiasts as a “particularly well-known exponent of bean curd.”

TWILLEY: A tiny handful of white Americans did hearken to the soybean trumpet! Specifically, Seventh Day Adventists, who are mostly vegetarian. One in particular, a Dr. Harry Miller, had come across tofu while he was working as a medical missionary in China, and he was very excited when he returned stateside to discover that the USDA did have some soybeans in its collections.

FU: He set up a soy foods factory in Ohio, must have been after he returned from China, so after 1937. And that factory did make a kind of tofu. I don’t think they called it tofu. I think they called it some kind of bean curd, or maybe soybean cheese.

GRABER: But this wasn’t a hugely popular product. Seventh Day Adventists ate it, sure, and at the time Japanese- and Chinese-Americans were buying tofu at small tofu shops around the West, but it took another major movement to really bring tofu to the general public, and that was the hippies.

TWILLEY: The hippies! I’ve missed them since our cannabis episodes! But they’re coming up after this break.

[BREAK]

JONATHAN KAUFFMAN: Hippie food was all this brown, earthy food like brown rice, whole wheat breads, sprouts, granola, yogurt, tofu, that was kind of strange to all of my friends, but was the food that my parents were cooking for me.

GRABER: Jonathan Kauffman is a food journalist and historian, and he wrote a book called Hippie Food. One entire chapter of the book is devoted to our good friend tofu.

KAUFFMAN: I would call the quintessential hippie food dish a stir fry with tofu and vegetables, seasoned just with some soy sauce, served over brown rice. Like that is the archetypical hippie food dish. So yeah, so tofu is totally at the center.

TWILLEY: So how exactly did the hippies get into tofu, when otherwise in the US, only Seventh Day Adventists and Japanese and Chinese Americans were eating it?

GRABER: It’s a fascinating tale of obsessions, coincidences, and cults. And it starts with a woman named Francis Lappé, she’s known as Frankie.

KAUFFMAN: So Frankie Lappé was a young grad school dropout who had moved to Berkeley. Like a lot of members of her generation, she had gone to college and then was inspired by the Civil Rights movement and by the political movements organizing around the war.

TWILLEY: Young, idealistic Frankie cared about poverty and she cared about hunger, and she wanted to understand why people were hungry. What was the root cause of all the hunger she saw in the world?

KAUFFMAN: And if that sounds very big, you know, that actually, it fits in with the times, but it also fits in with this message, that folks of her generation were hearing over and over again, which was that the world was on the precipice of global famine.

GRABER: Paul Ehrlich was particularly famous for this message, he wrote a book called The Population Bomb.

PAUL EHRLICH: If we continue to let population grow, and if we continue to exploit the underdeveloped countries, if we continue to pollute the seas, with a wide variety of compounds, and so on, it’s very difficult for me to picture things holding together for more than another decade or so.

GRABER: This is Paul speaking in the 60s, it’s from a New York Times documentary that was made a few years ago.

EHRLICH: Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come, and by the end, I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.

KAUFFMAN: And so famine was becoming endemic in places like Pakistan, and India, and people were afraid that, you know, the earth had just surpassed its carrying capacity. And that this would be the way it was going to be for the rest of our lives.

TWILLEY: Newscasters at the time predicted doom and gloom.

BROADCASTER: The US could be busting out at the seams by the end of the century.

REPORTER: If we do not by humane means limit our numbers, then numbers are going to be limited by more famines and shortages, and consequent social conflicts.

GRABER: Faced with all these grim predictions, Frankie took off for the library at Berkeley to see if all those things she was hearing about in the news were real. She read USDA reports and reports from the United Nations. And she realized something strange: most of the farmland in America was dedicated to growing corn and soybeans, and most of those crops were being fed to animals.

KAUFFMAN: And so she started thinking, well, actually, if we weren’t feeding these crops to animals, and we were feeding them to humans, would we have enough to eat? And it also became pretty clear, once she then started looking at nutritional data, that, you know, we were growing enough food in the United States alone to feed the world.

TWILLEY: We were just feeding it to animals. So Frankie became obsessed with cutting out the middleman—or the middle animal, basically. She wanted to find ways to replace the protein that Americans were getting from meat with protein from crops. And soy seemed very promising to her because it was so high in protein.

KAUFFMAN: She first wrote a little pamphlet—everybody was writing pamphlets in those days, especially in Berkeley, and you’d walk down Telegraph Avenue, and people would be handing you political pamphlets. And so she started writing a little pamphlet about, hey, we could solve world hunger if we stopped eating meat.

GRABER: That pamphlet eventually became a book called Diet for a Small Planet, and it was half treatise about the problem, and half recipes.

KAUFFMAN: And it was this underground success that got very little coverage in the news, but ended up selling 500,000 copies in the first two years alone.

TWILLEY: Of course, like good hippies, Jonathan’s parents had a copy.

KAUFFMAN: It’s sort of a paperback, but it’s a spiral bound. And it’s got this sort of arrangement of grains on the front. And it’s actually very approachable, almost cheery, which almost sounds like I’m diminishing the impact, but it’s very, like, Hey, here’s how we’re ruining the world! Here’s how we can save it!

GRABER: The book Diet for a Small Planet had some tofu in the recipes, but tofu wasn’t like the main focus. So Frankie on her own didn’t convince us all to eat tofu. But she ended up having a big influence on the growth of tofu in America because of a guy named Bill Shurtleff.

KAUFFMAN: He was a Stanford grad, he was one of the early Peace Corps volunteers who went to Nigeria, or what was then called Biafra to teach for a couple years. He came back, he joined the San Francisco Zen center, he became a monk.

TWILLEY: Bill went to Japan with a mission to found a Zen center for traveling Americans, but then the guy who sent him died. Bill was sort of stranded there and he was really poor, and he was a vegetarian, so he found himself eating a lot of tofu.

KAUFFMAN: And right about then he meets Akiko Aoyagi, who is a young fashion student who was then designing a line of clothing for people with intellectual disabilities. And the two bond over their shared mission to make the world better. And, and as they’re kind of getting to know each other, he picks up a copy of Diet for a Small Planet, and is like, Oh my god, the tofu I’m eating every day is this thing that could actually solve famine.

GRABER: Bill and Akiko became tofu obsessives.

KAUFFMAN: And, the two of them spend two and a half years traveling all over Japan, documenting traditional ways of making tofu and apprenticing at a tofu shop. And then developing 500 recipes, some of which are traditionally Japanese, and some of which are like American in order to, you know, sell tofu to Westerners. And they published this book in 1975.

GRABER: It’s called The Book of Tofu, and they do have a bunch of recipes in it that are based on traditional Japanese ones. But also, Akiko spent a lot of time combing through that great American classic, the Joy of Cooking, and trying to replace all sorts of ingredients in it with tofu.

TWILLEY: We’re talking about tofu ravioli, tarragon tofu dressing, tofu loaf, eggless eggnog tofu mousse, and those perennial favorites, tofu stuffed veggies. Peppers of course, but also zucchini.

KAUFFMAN: And then after that, they go on book tour. And they put out a little notice in some of the leftist journals, and they rent a van. And they fill it with Books of Tofu, and little tofu making kits that some other hippie guy makes for them, and they travel to 64 stops around the country in four months. And they give a little presentation at each of them. Where you know, they make a little tofu and show people what it might taste like and give the spiel, which is very much based on Diet for a Small Planet. And in almost all of the stops, counterculture kids are inspired to start up a little tofu factory. So they’re often called the Johnny Appleseeds of tofu.

GRABER: And now on to the final stretch of this tofu relay: a place called The Farm.

KAUFFMAN: So the Farm was America’s largest rural commune from the 1970s. And it was based in Tennessee, but it actually originated in San Francisco. There was a professor named Stephen Gaskin. He was older than the hippie kids. He was probably about 10 years older than them. But he started teaching at San Francisco State and then he did a lot of acid. And as he was doing a lot of acid, it just reworked his brain.

TWILLEY: For one thing, Stephen started believing that he was telepathic with animals, which made it tough to eat them. And he also then somehow convinced 50 bus loads of kids to drive from San Francisco to Tennessee with him, and go back to the land.

KAUFFMAN: And they are able to purchase some land and they settle in and they’re living in these lean-to’s and shacks and foraging watercress and giving each other hepatitis and starving, and… but their commune takes hold, and they call it the Farm.

GRABER: It was a commune, but honestly, it was also a little cultish. Stephen was the spiritual leader, and if you wanted to live on the farm and follow his teachings, you had to take a vow of poverty and share everything you owned with the collective.

KAUFFMAN: And they all collectively decide to be vegan. Because part of Stephen’s teachings are that, you know, animals have energetic presences, too. And that, you know, if you are killing an animal, you are bringing your energy levels down. So they do all this research to figure out what you can eat if you’re vegan. And they talk to folks from the USDA about nutritional guidelines, and then they get a hold of copies of Diet for a Small Planet, and they decide: soybeans. Soybeans are going to keep us alive. So they cook soybeans at every meal. They all get pressure cookers from their parents, because otherwise it takes about eight hours for soybeans to cook, and they make soybean tortillas, which are like basic burritos, whole wheat flour, soybeans and salsa.

GRABER: As you might remember from what Wendy told us about boiled soybeans, they’re kind of gross, and so all those soybean dishes were actually pretty disgusting. They were also only seasoned with care packages of ketchup and garlic powder that the hippies’ parents sent them.

TWILLEY: And not only did they taste bad, but if you happened to take the soybeans off the stove a little too early they made you feel bad, too. There was apparently some digestive unhappiness on the Farm.

GRABER: And then came the break through. Tofu.

KAUFFMAN: Laurie Praskin was this young woman who was kind of the—one of the main workers at the soy dairy, which is their plant for cooking soybeans and making soy milk. Which was already the sort of big invention that they’d stumbled onto by reading USDA reports.

TWILLEY: And here’s how it comes together—or maybe should I say coagulates. What happens is that Bill Shurtleff, the Johnny Appleseed of tofu, he was in touch with some of the same USDA scientists that had taught Laurie on the Farm how to make soy milk. And so somehow Bill ended up reaching out to Laurie to share the advance proofs of his and Akiko’s Book of Tofu, including their instructions for exactly how to make tofu.

KAUFFMAN: And so she followed it, and they started producing tofu regularly.

GRABER: Suddenly all the folks on the Farm were eating better, too. The tofu scrambles and stir fries and everything else they were eating, this was a huge improvement over the boiled soybean dinner they’d been forcing down. And this tofu transformation clearly left an indelible mark on many of the members there.

TWILLEY: And then, when things went a little south on the Farm in the 80s, a lot of the people who packed up and left ended up starting their own tofu and soy businesses that are still huge today, like Wildwood and LightLife foods. Former Farm members picked up where Bill and Akiko left off in making tofu into a commercial product all over the US. Finally!

GRABER: The Farm also left its mark in the creation of another famous tofu delight, Tofurkey.

KAUFFMAN: So tofurkey was popularized by this guy named Seth Tibbett, who, back in the 1970s, was an environmental educator, and also sort of a spiritual seeker, as you were at the time. And he was fascinated by the Farm. He would get these cassette tapes of Stephen lectures. And so he does like an internship in Tennessee and decides to go visit the Farm and check out Stephen, and he decides that he really doesn’t want to live in, you know, a shack with 40 other people and eat nothing but soybean tortillas.

TWILLEY: But Seth did see the potential in tofu. He ended up moving to Oregon and living in a treehouse and he started a business making a commercial version of this sort of tofu mock turkey thing that was popular in the counterculture at the time.

KAUFFMAN: And now it is a multimillion dollar company, still based in the same city, producing tofurkeys that go all over the country. And it’s run by his stepson, and he’s still involved in the business.

GRABER: Tofurkey is so popular that a Grammy-winning children’s musician named Joanie Leeds wrote an entire ode to it.

JOANIE LEEDS: [SINGING] Some people don’t eat turkey, so what do they do? On Thanksgiving they eat turkey, but it’s made of tofu! Tofurkey’s not a turkey…

TWILLEY: I have eaten many things in my life but somewhat to my embarrassment, I’ve never tried tofurkey.

KAUFFMAN: You know, that’s that’s really a gap in your culinary education.

GRABER: I actually started to buy the Tofurkey deli slices when I was a vegetarian in the 90s and 2000s, and now we still occasionally enjoy them at home. But I’ve only had it as slices, I’ve never tried the original recipe.

KAUFFMAN: So it’s a blend of tofu and wheat gluten, formed into this sort of orb that’s stuffed with some stuffing in like a circular hole on the inside, and you stick in the oven for an hour and a half and it comes out and you sort of slice into this plump brown thing and it’s chewy. It’s got some flavor, but it’s not meat. It’s kind of bland, but it’s kind of appealingly bland. I don’t know, we always have one at Thanksgiving table because my husband’s vegetarian, has been vegetarian for 25 years, and he loves the taste.

GRABER: Nicky, another thing to add to your bucket list of foods to try.

TWILLEY: I mean why not. And certainly, between Frankie Lappe, Bill and Akiko, The Farm, and tofurkey, tofu was suddenly … not exactly *everywhere*, but part of the mainstream in the US in a way it had never been before.

STORE OWNER: I’m seeing it in more stores all the time. It’s easier to find and I’m seeing lots of homemakers trying to figure out ways to use it and incorporate it in their menus.

GRABER: This is from a 1981 NBC local newscast in Virginia—and the store owner named Shelley, who’s suddenly seeing this new food that people are starting to experiment with at home? She may not have known it, but she had the hippies to thank.

KAUFFMAN: When it comes to their effect on tofu, I think that they publicized it—or they sort of made it approachable, made it available to a lot of non-Asian Americans, who had not grown up eating it. And I think that it became *the* go-to vegetarian convenience food, for better and worse, for vegetarians for a very long time.

GRABER: Other people had tried and failed. But the hippies succeeded. One of the reasons that tofu finally caught on when the hippies were pushing it was that by this time, a couple decades after World War II, the US was just growing a LOT more soy, all the soy that Frankie Lappé noticed was going to feed animals.

TWILLEY: But more importantly, the hippies made eating tofu part of a moral crusade.

KAUFFMAN: I think it caught the zeitgeist, I think, because it was framed as a political act. So they liked the idea that it was the right choice to eat.

GRABER: So the hippies popularized tofu, but at the same time, they also kind of screwed it up.

KAUFFMAN: Because it was always, like, presented as a meat substitute. And it was never going to be a meat substitute. So there are a lot of people who think tofu, and think ugh, bland, gross.

TWILLEY: That’s the next part of our story: tofu made it to the West, but now it needs a reputation refresh. It’s all very well saving the world, but can Westerners learn to love and crave tofu too? Coming up after the break.

[BREAK]

GRABER: One chilly morning in June, Nicky and I traveled across the Bay Bridge to visit Minh Tsai at his home in Oakland. Minh is the founder of Hodo tofu. And he was inspired to start a tofu company because of his memories of loving tofu as an ethnic Chinese kid growing up in Vietnam.

TSAI: So tofu in Asia, are generally family businesses, from Japan, to Taiwan to China. And in every neighborhood, there’s at least one or two tofu shacks. And the one near my neighborhood in Vietnam, you can literally walk by and you can smell the soy milk in the morning. And I remembered my grandmother taking me to the shack to get us soy milk and a fresh tofu in the morning. Because they would sell out by 10am. So—and it was just wonderful. It’s warm, it’s delicious. It’s so fragrant that that memory, I think, stuck with me. So when I was looking for a food business to do, I just like, you know, the tofu in the US has no flavor. It’s bland. It’s really not great. So why not make an artisan tofu? Like, similar to what I grew up eating.

TWILLEY: Minh traces the crappiness of much mainstream US tofu back to none other than hippie tofu evangelist Bill Shurtleff, who he says cared about the planet a lot more than he cared about flavor.

GRABER: American companies that sprouted up in Bill’s wake didn’t have experience with making delicious tofu. They just bought soy beans, figured out the easiest way to make soy milk and get it to curdle, and they didn’t really pay much attention to flavor.

TWILLEY: But Minh told us that soybeans and their milk can and should actually be delicious.

TSAI: So the beans provide a fragrance. A milkiness, a butteriness. It’s essentially got its own sweetness, its own mouth-coating buttery richness. It’s flavorful! And this is why when you walk by a shack, you can smell it. You know, it’s, it’s naturally sweet.

GRABER: Before getting into the food business, Minh had been in regular business, and he knew that the first thing he needed was customers. He had to convince them that his tofu made of creamier, more flavorful soy milk was worth buying.

TWILLEY: He started out in 2004 with a stand at the San Francisco Ferry Building, just handing out samples.

TSAI: You guys might just walk by, take a sample, and eat it without thinking or asking what it is. And then you would have a reaction. What did I just eat? And I would have a great time saying it’s tofu. And you’re like, no that’s not tofu. I was like, well, you haven’t had this tofu.

GRABER: I first tasted Minh’s tofu at the Ferry Building more than a decade ago, probably because someone handed me a sample like Minh described, and I fell in love with it, I would go back to that stand whenever I visited San Francisco. It did taste way better than the tofu I was buying at the supermarket.

TSAI: And in fact, a lot of our first investors were farmers markets customers.

TWILLEY: The big secret to this delicious tofu is not watering down the soy milk.

TSAI: I would equate it to, think of cream versus a light milk. So we use cream to make our tofu. And that really is the flavor difference.

[QUIET LIQUID SLOSHING]

TSAI: So I’m pouring… I’m just heating up the soy milk. And I’m going to let you guys taste. You see how thick it is?

GRABER: What he was pouring literally looked like extra rich cream.

TSAI: So let me give you a try. [CLANKING OF FETCHING CUPS] You can drink that. This is a cold version.

TWILLEY: Cheers.

GRABER: Cheers.

[GLASSES CLINKING]

GRABER: Wow, it’s so thick.

TWILLEY: Also so flavorful. Like it actually tastes of… beans.

TWILLEY: While we sipped our delicious creamy bean juice, Minh heated up about a half gallon of it on his stove. And before long, it formed a skin.

TSAI: Oh, there, the yuba is forming! See that thin sheet?

TWILLEY: Minh taught us how to harvest this soymilk skin with a fork.

TSAI: And just literally just scoop the surface a little bit. You can see that sheet forming? There you go! [SOUNDS OF ENTHUSIASM]

TWILLEY: There’s the little sheet of yuba forming!

TSAI: Yes. And there’s more than one.

GRABER: Can I try?

MS: Yes, of course, I can see your enthusiasm!

GRABER: Yuba is often dried to make a kind of noodly product. But we tried it fresh, it was chewy and creamy at the same time.

TSAI: Yep. Isn’t that like burrata cheese?

TWILLEY: I mean, not exactly, but it was delicious in a different way. At this point we were all yay yay yay, everything soybean, but this episode is supposed to be about tofu. And that was what Minh made next.

TSAI: So I have a little tofu kit here. And I’m going to make tofu on the spot for you guys.

GRABER: Great.

TSAI: Ta da!

TWILLEY: I love it—the wooden tofu box!

TSAI: That’s right.

GRABER: In goes the soy milk, out comes the tofu.

TWILLEY: Well, not quite. First the soy milk had to get curdled, like for making cheese.

TSAI: All right, so the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to put in the coagulant. This is our calcium sulfate. So what I’m doing here is I’m pouring the hot soy milk into the bowl with the coagulant. What you’re looking at is essentially what we make at the plant, except the scale it’s about 20x. So but it’s exactly the same, here we go.

[SOUND OF POURING]

TSAI: All right, so now the first form of tofu, it’s what we Chinese called douhua. And what you’re looking at is silken tofu. So it’s, you see? It’s a jello.

TWILLEY: And the texture is totally changed already.

GRABER: It’s like, yeah!

GRABER: With the coagulant, it had, yes, coagulated. It got more solid into like big pieces of jello and it kind of wobbled.

TSAI: If you can grab a few spoons from there. You can taste this. Again, you’re going to ooh and ahh. Tada.

GRABER: Woah!

TWILLEY: It’s like a pudding.

TSAI: It’s like a pudding.

GRABER: That was so quick.

TWILLEY: You can indeed make this silken tofu into a delightful pudding. But we were visiting in the morning, so Minh made it into a breakfast scramble for us with zaatar and it was very tasty.

GRABER: Silken tofu is one way to enjoy tofu, but that’s not the most common form you buy at the store these days. Most shoppers are looking for firm tofu.

TSAI: So I’m breaking up the silken tofu into smaller piece. So you can see the water’s leaching. Can you see that?

GRABER: Yep.

TWILLEY: To make this silken tofu into firm tofu, Minh used a big spoon to ladle the broken up curds into the wooden box, which he’d lined with cheese cloth. And then he put the lid on and just pushed down on it with his hands.

TSAI: So this allows me to press out the wate. When we make this in batch, it’s essentially essentially the same way just with you know, a hydraulic press.

GRABER: You’re putting a bunch of weight.

TSAI: Yeah, I’m literally standing on my toes.

TWILLEY: Can I press a tiny bit?

TSAI: Yeah, come on over!

GRABER: Nicky took over from Minh and put her hands on top of the wooden lid and she took a turn pressing. The water that was flowing out of the box slowed down. And Minh told her she was done.

TWILLEY: And then oh, then when I lift it up, what do I do?

TSAI: You put your hand at the bottom, you just flip it to pour the water out. Yeah, just keep at it.

[SOUND OF RUNNING WATER]

TWILLEY: This felt kind of nerve wracking, like I was flipping a pancake, but actually it was super simple, I just turned the box upside down while holding the lid in place and any last little bits of water came out the side.

TSAI: There you go. And then you can take this top off of the box go into yet.

TWILLEY: Are you sure?

TSAI: Yeah. Pull it up. You go.

TWILLEY: Okay.

GRABER: Looks a little wobbly, but very square.

TSAI: Now take the whole tray and put it in the water…

TWILLEY: This was the birth of my very first tofu and I was kind of in awe of it. It was just this beautiful white wobbling cuboid. I hardly dared get it out of the tofu press.

TSAI: It’s okay, you won’t break it. It’s not as delicate as you think. There you go. So now we’re putting the block of tofu in a bath of cold water. And you’re going to unfold the cheesecloth. Slowly, yeah.

TWILLEY: This does feel like …

TSAI: I know, right? It’s, it’s your treasure.

GRABER: It was surprisingly impressive. I mean, it was only a few minutes from hot soy milk to this, well, lovely block of fresh tofu.

TWILLEY: There we go. Oh, so beautiful.

GRABER: Very pretty.

TWILLEY: Thank you.

GRABER: Like everything we ate that day, it was really tasty.

TWILLEY: It was a tofu feast, and I still left wanting to eat more. Minh told us that’s normal—he said he can barely keep up with the demand for all his various forms of tofu these days.

TSAI: And we’ve seen an unbelievable adoption of tofu. Now 40 plus percent growth just from 2020. So the plant-based, plant protein space, have grown 20 plus percent over the last year. But tofu has grown more than 40%.

GRABER: That’s super impressive—but even before this year, over the past decade or two, tofu had already taken off. It was no longer just for fake egg salad and tofurkey, lots of Americans were finally ready to embrace tofu for tofu’s sake.

TWILLEY: Centuries after Westerners first encountered this East Asian culinary treasure, and decades after the hippies made it a staple of every vegetarian cookbook, Minh—and also Jonathan—think that tofu has finally arrived over here.

KAUFFMAN: And, and so now, I think a whole generation of cooks, multiple generations of cooks, they have Asian American heritage, or they’ve they lived in Asia, or they’re exposed to Asian restaurants in a way that 1970s white Americans weren’t—have seen tofu in so many other forms, cooked in so many other ways, and appreciate it for its own delights.

GRABER: The soybean may never fulfill the dream the tofu believers had of solving world hunger, but it’s a damn fine food all on its own.

TWILLEY: But what about the eels?

[MUSIC]

ELLERY: He says that you don’t need to use that many eels, because eventually, like the tofu will get too cratered, I guess.

[MUSIC]

MAN: Enter… enter…

GRABER: They’re not going in. They’re trying to escape.

ELLERY: He still wants them to enter.

GRABER: This is Tim’s son Ellery watching a video with me. We’re trying to figure out if a Japanese dish we heard about from Nicky’s friend Wayne is really a dish. Ellery loves Japan, he lived there for a couple of years and is relatively fluent in Japanese, and we had fun reading some websites and watching a video together. So—is there a dish where live eels swim into soft, pillowy tofu and then get cooked inside? If you receive our special supporters’ newsletter, you’ll find out! And if you want to subscribe, go to gastropod.com/support. All will be revealed…

TWILLEY: Thanks this episode to Jia-chen Fu, Jonathan Kauffman, and Minh Tsai, we have links to their research, books, and products on our website, gastropod.com. Thanks also to superstar producer Sonja Swanson for her help this episode.

GRABER: We’ll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode, till then!