TOFU GURU
AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM SHURTLEFF CO-FOUNDER OF THE SOY FOODS CENTER
By Mary Clifford, R.D.
The Soy Foods Center recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. It is one of the world's leading information sources on soy foods, and its founders, William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi Shurtleff (husband and wife), have largely been responsible for the introduction of soy foods and tofu to mainstream America. I had the privilege of discussing with William his interest in and lifelong work with soy foods.
How long have you been a vegetarian? And why?
I became a vegetarian in about 1967. When I was getting my master's degree, I was living in a commune with about 12 people. A number of them decided to become vegetarians and we cooked all our own food.
They began cooking meals that I thought were very delicious. For example, they would make whole wheat bread and brown rice, which is something I had never had before that time. So when I began making meals for everyone, respecting their dietary preferences, I would make vegetarian meals. And gradually, for no philosophical reasons whatsoever, I realized that I liked their way of eating better. And frankly I didn't really think much about it at the time. I simply fell into it.
That's 25 years ago, a long time to practice something you "fell into." What made you stick with it?
Shortly after that I went to Tasajara, a Zen Buddhist monastery, to practice meditation. Here we ate a vegetarian diet. For the first time, I started thinking about vegetarianism. Before that, I ate because I was doing something else — the food was the fuel for other activities. At Tasajara, the food became a very central thing because I was working in the kitchen. As a cook, I wanted to know more about the nutritional value of the food we were serving. I began studying.
What did you discover?
The more I studied, the more sense a vegetarian diet made to me. Initially it was from a cost point of view. I realized how much less expensive a vegetarian diet was than a typical diet with meat. Then I read Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet. That was really the book that opened my eyes to the vastly bigger picture than I had been aware of at Tasajara.
At Tasajara, of course, I knew that eating meat involved killing animals, but it wasn't really much of an issue. It was more that we ate a vegetarian diet because that's what you do at a Zen Buddhist monastery. And so I don't ever recall anyone talking about "we eat a vegetarian diet because it doesn't involve killing animals." It was not the focus of our practice. We weren't there to think about diet, we were there to practice meditation, although a lot of people thought a lot about food. It's inevitable in that kind of situation.
What did you get out of Diet for a Small Planet? It's mentioned by almost everyone I know as having been part of their decision to become a vegetarian, and certainly was a strong part of mine.
After reading Diet for a Small Planet, I began to look at vegetarianism in a totally different light.
I had been a vegetarian for about four years at that point. The focus of the original edition of Diet for a Small Planet was on world food resources: if you eat a vegetarian diet, you make it possible for many more people to have enough food to eat. I put two and two together. Frances Moore Lappe didn't know much about soybeans and there was very little mentioned about them in the original edition. What she wrote was mostly about two types of soy food — whole soy-beans and soy flour — that even to this day we never use. So her basic perspective, combined with what I had been learning in Japan about the multitude of de-licious ways that the Japanese used soy foods, was the catalyst that interested me in writing our first book, The Book of Tofu . And of course a big part of my interest in soy foods and Japan came from my wife, Akiko Aoyagi, who is a very good cook and introduced me to many things. I had also spent time in a local tofu shop learning how to make tofu from a tofu master, and tasting a lot of tofu recipes at restaurants.
Let's backtrack. You went to Japan in 1971, to practice Zen meditation. How did tofu come into the picture?
While I was in Tokyo, I had very little money and I had to live as a poor student in Kyoto, learning Japanese and practicing meditation. And that's when I really got to know tofu. I had been aware of tofu because while living at a Zen center in the mountains of California, we had tofu fairly often. But in Japan, it became a very important part of my diet, not only because I was a vegetarian, but because it was inexpensive and I thought it was so tasty. We had a nice tofu shop about three minutes' walk from where I lived, which is true anywhere you live in Japan. The meditation took me to Japan. I had no intention of doing anything related to soy foods initially.
How did your interest develop to the point where you started an organization devoted to soy foods?
During the late 1960's, one theme in America was that people should give consideration to the "right" livelihood. People didn't feel like going into a corporation and for example, becoming a banker. They wanted to do something that they felt would be useful to the planet as a whole, and be good work. So when I saw this opportunity for a type of right livelihood, that is, making tofu, I thought "boy, this is something that a lot of people in America are looking for. And if they knew about it, many of them would be interested." That became a major part of our book.
Many people will ask, "Is The Book of Tofu a cookbook?" It's definitely not a cookbook, it's much more than that. And one of the dimensions of it was to try to show people a new, good livelihood.
It just so happened after The Book of Tofu was pub-lished, my wife and I came to the United States and did a three-and-a-half month tour at the request of literally hundreds of people who asked us to speak.
We ended up doing 14,000 miles, 70 public programs, and many radio and television programs, all talking to people mostly about tofu and vegetarianism.
An interesting side note is that about 10 years later I looked at all the existing tofu shops in America, and one had started within a month after we spoke at essentially every single place we spoke. So it was like planting a seed which grew immediately.
Did you start the Soy Foods Center as a result of this nationwide tour?
Actually, before. We started out basically wanting to write a book in order to introduce an idea. We didn't know if anyone would be interested in the book, but we both believed that this was an idea whose time was ripe. Both of us used tofu in our daily diet, and we knew that few Caucasian Americans knew anything about tofu. On the one hand, both of us thought that this was an idea that had real potential, but on the other hand we didn't know if we'd be able to sell any books at all. So the initial printing of The Book of Tofu was 5000 copies, which is about typical for a book. In the first year it sold over 100,000 copies.
What that told both of us was that our intuition was correct. Then we said, "well now it's time to establish an organization where people can write and request information. It's time to have a catalog, it's time to offer some services. We're no longer just two people with an idea — we're now an organization." And that was how Soy Foods Center started.
What was the reaction to a Westerner showing such an interest in Japan's traditional food?
It was very interesting. We had a tremendous amount of media coverage, even before our book was published, which was in December 1975. The equivalent of the BBC in Japan, the NHK, had us on three times before The Book of Tofu was published. We also were featured in many newspaper articles, to the extent that often we would be traveling in Japan doing research and folks would come up to us and say, "Oh, you're the folks doing research on tofu. We saw you on NHK." So their interest was kind of a double interest. The first, I would characterize as, "We're really happy you're interested in spreading our traditional Japanese foods. This is an honor to us." And the second half would be "Why tofu?" It was like someone coming to America to study bread. Something that we take for granted.
Exactly. It's like somebody from Somalia coming here and spending three years studying bread — the history of bread, the nutritional value of bread, and famous bread restaurants in San Francisco. So they were kind of puzzled. The Japanese would really be amazed when they came to our home, which was in Tokyo. They would say, "Well, how are you going to introduce Americans to tofu? What kind of recipes are you going to use?" So we would serve them recipes — for example, tofu cheesecake, a salad with creamy tofu dressing, or a tofu-strawberry parfait. And they never even thought of doing anything like this with tofu. I mean it was totally taboo. You just don't do that with tofu in Japan. At least this was true in 1976. But now because of the influence of the United States and Europe (I won't say just our work) the eyes of the Japanese have been opened to the tremendous versatility of tofu.
So they weren't even using it to its full extent. If you look at the typical American diet, it's the same thing. People use potatoes two different ways over and over again — baked or mashed.
Ninety-five per cent of Japanese consumed tofu in four different ways.
So it wasn't very difficult once you got back — you basically had people asking you to introduce tofu to the West.
That's right. I've never been a promoter-type person and to this day I don't really like that role. I like responding to requests for help, or requests to do something. But I'm not the type who likes to go out and beat the drum, unless someone else asks for it.
After that tour, the media coverage we got was really amazing. For example, we were in five straight issues of Mother Earth News. They did long excerpts from our book and a cover story. All the publicity would then lead to other stories. People were saying, "tofu, what is this tofu?" So they would go out and buy it, and that would help local tofu shops get started.
My goal was to see tofu companies start all over the United States. I knew that was going to be what really got the food out to the people. And that was the main reason that we did that tour. Once that happened, they began further to amplify the efforts that we were making just in terms of running their own companies. Obviously they had to promote their products, distribute them, and make them known, and probably have free recipes on the shelf. All of a sudden things began to be amplified without our doing much.
Of course we continued to support these companies. One of the first things we did was to write a second book called Tofu and Soy milk Production, a book on how to start and run a tofu company. It's a technical book that explains everything from how to develop a business plan to the specifics of making tofu and soy milk, and a lot of second generation products from them. We were constantly supporting the people who were out there, opening these tofu companies. And we have to this day; that's been one of our major activities, to support private business.
What has it evolved into? What kind of services do you offer?
Our basic activity is publishing books. We have about 40 books in print now. We're an information center, in that we have the world's best computerized database on soybeans and soy foods. It has more than 42,000 records from 1100 BC to the present, world-wide. So for example, if there was an article in East West Journal in 1976 on tofu, it's going to be in our database. We also have every known commercial soy product in our database. If somebody's just introduced a new low-calorie soy yogurt in England, it'll be in our database. We have about 900 original interviews in our database, as well as archival, unpublished documents Every document is computerized.
Who uses these databases?
All different kinds of people. For example, recently a company wanted to get the USDA to allow more use of soy foods in school lunch programs. The sticking point was iron in soybeans. The USDA was claiming that iron was a real problem in soybeans and they were basing this on a small number of studies. So this person wanted to see everything that had ever been published on iron in soybeans. We did a database search, and they're now working with the USDA to get them to change their restrictions on the use of soy in school lunch programs. Another example is a person in Colombia who's doing a project on introducing soy foods to that country, wanted to know everything that's been done on soybeans and soy foods in Colombia, or low-cost extrusion cooking, which is a way of preparing soy, anywhere in Latin America.
We get doctoral students working on a thesis. You have to do a review of the literature when you do a Ph.D. thesis, which means that you're aware of what everyone else has done and now you're going to add something original to that body of knowledge. Doing a review of the literature is extremely difficult, because there are things published on different continents, in different languages. How are you going to locate all that stuff? ell, ours is one-stop shopping. You order a database search on soy and you don't have to do anything else. It's all finished for you. And that can save a Ph.D. student a year of research time.
Companies use this in developing products. Let's suppose there's a company in England that wants to do a soy yogurt. They want to see what kinds of soy yogurt are being produced everywhere in the world, what percent are fermented and what percent are non-fermented, what are the ingredients, how are they marketed, and what are they called? They just do a search on our database and they get the whole picture. It's like they had every container in front of them: The color, the size, the ingredients, everything.
Why would such specifics be important?
Well, for example, take India. Yogurt is widely consumed in India, but it's a rich person's food. So they'd like to know what we're doing over here in the west so that they can sell an alternative to cow's milk yogurt in India that's lower priced, so that more people could afford it. That very specific type of information is going to be of tremendous value to them. They don't have the research and development facilities to figure it out themselves.
What do you make of the current discussion of soy foods consumption and prevention of chronic degenerative diseases? I know you feel the strongest connection is between heart disease and soy foods. Do you think the link between soy foods and, for example, cancer prevention, will get stronger?
They get stronger all the time. If you look at the literature on diet and heart disease, it wasn't until 1986 that the squabbling over that one stopped. What they used to call heart-diet hypothesis was a hotly-debated subject. Is there any relationship at all between diet and heart disease? As more questions were raised, more studies were done. Then came a consensus.
At that point, the debate shifted to a focus on the fine points. It was no longer a question, "Does diet affect heart disease?" It was clear that diet affected heart disease. The Framingham study, one of the most important ongoing heart disease studies in the United States, gathered enough data pretty much to show conclusively that there was a fairly strong link, if not the strongest of all links, between diet and heart disease. Then the questions that started to be asked were things like, "What level of blood cholesterol should we call dangerously high?" A number was set, which was 200. Those kinds of determinations. So it wasn't until 1986, basically, that people agreed that there was a significant connection.
When I was in school, we learned that a healthy cholesterol level was 250. Now we're down to 200, and I predict it will keep dropping.
Right. One of the findings of the Framingham study was that never in the history of the study did they find a person with a cholesterol level below 150 who died of a heart attack. So one might say that would almost be the 100% safety level. So we're narrowing it and lowering it, which is good.
The cancer debate is at the point the heart disease one was before 1986. They're gathering data. The data look stronger with every passing study. It looks like the national cancer societies are soon going to start using soybeans in the same breath that they use broccoli and Brussels sprouts: "Be sure to get x number of servings per week." They haven't said that yet about soy, but I think they will, after the evidence becomes undebatable. Just not enough evidence is in yet, even though there are probably 80 studies and the number of studies is accelerating as the subject looks more promising.
The combination is dynamite. Because here you have one type of diet, the vegetarian diet, where using soy foods as an alternative to meat can protect you against both heart disease and cancer. That's something every single American wants to know about, because people are very concerned. And they should be, with 60-70% of the population dying of two diseases.
But I think that one problem is many people are still unfamiliar with what vegetarian eating really is.
There's a tremendous amount of evidence that the word "vegetarian" is not understood by many people, even those that are familiar with it. For example, if you read the literature back in the mid-1800's, there was this huge debate over why we should call a vegetarian diet one that allows you to drink milk, since milk is not a vegetable. And the answer was that the word vegetarian doesn't come from the word vegetable. It comes from the Latin word vegetas, which means something along the lines of energy and activity. Many people think a vegetarian diet is composed of vegetables.
When you get people saying "I'm vegetarian; I eat beef only twice a week," it confuses the issue, although I'm in favor of any reduction of animal products in the diet.
I agree. In fact, I would even go further and say that people who eat any kind of flesh foods should be discouraged from calling themselves vegetarian. They should say, "I'd like to become vegetarian, or I'm interested in it but I'm not one yet, because I eat fish."
What do you see as the future of soy foods in this country? Do you see them becoming as common as McDonald's offering a tofu burger, and even meat eaters eating it for variety? Or do you think it's going to stay something that just vegetarians use?
I think it definitely won't be that. To put it in the simplest terms, I think that in America we're going to follow the east-Asian pattern. That's a diet that's basically vegetarian, but not strictly. And increasingly, using grains as the center of our diet, and legumes as a protein source, and plenty of vegetables. And we're going to be doing that for a lot of different reasons. The first one will be health. That's always been the primary motivator in the United States, the thing that people are concerned about first, and that's the reason that most people become vegetarians. The health evidence is piling up so rapidly that I imagine within the next generation or so that it's going to become common knowledge that if you want to protect yourself against heart disease and cancer, you should eat either a vegetarian diet or one pretty near it.
I think with the end of the cold war, the animal killing issue is going to become a lot bigger. It wasn't too long ago, in my father's generation, that being a hunter of people, to defend your country, was a big thing. You had to be strong if you wanted your country to make it, and not fall the way of all these other countries that have been dominated and conquered. That's really no longer an issue. And so not having to have that whole hunter-killer mentality opens up a whole new series of subjects to talk about. I think the end of the cold war is going to have a dramatic impact on vegetarianism.
Also, we need to look at the whole rise of the rights movement. The first rights movements were basically slavery rights and women's rights, and those began in the 1800's. England outlawed slavery about 40 or 50 years ahead of the United States. Those movements in England were probably the main factors that led to the rise of vegetarianism. What we've found since the 60's has been a dramatic expansion in the idea of inalienable rights. That is, women have certain inalienable rights, and so do ethnic minorities. And that statement, "I will not discriminate based on x, y, or z." That's going to impact heavily on vegetarians. Because increasingly people are asking, "Well how about animals, how come they're not on the list of things that have rights?" And we've never dealt in our society in a mainstream way with the questions, "Do animals have rights? Do we have a right to kill them?" I think the rights issue is going to affect vegetarians positively.
But what's going to increase the typical American's use of soy foods? We know a low fat diet helps prevent disease, and yet we still eat tons of fat.
Let me illustrate how important background is for what people do. I lived for about a month with Albert Schweitzer in Africa. I worked next to him every day. I talked to him regularly, I had meals with him three times a day. I was assigned to be his helper while I was there. I spoke German, he spoke German, and so we were together all the time. Even though all our meals were vegetarian, it never occurred to me to become vegetarian. Can you imagine that? And I look back on that and my jaw drops. How could I have missed it? I loved the meals. Here was a man I respected tremendously, and when I got home I continued eating the same things I ate before. That was before my first trip to Japan. Then I came back to the United States, and all the people around me were vegetarian. And for some reason, it hit me — this is what I want to do.
So until that background is prepared in people's minds, they can hear as much as they want and it won't affect them. And yet something happens, where it really starts to get close to you, like your daughter becomes vegetarian, and you start listening to things in a whole different way. That's like a critical mass situation, where you just start hearing enough, and it just starts getting close enough that you really start paying attention to it.
And I think that's what's happening to vegetarian-ism now. I think the thing that's going to pull soy foods more and more into the American diet is vegetarianism. And if you become a vegan, soy foods are indispensable. I've noticed in the vegan cookbooks, the number of soy foods recipes is just immense. It's kind of automatic once you become a vegan to find all the different things you can do with tofu, soy milk, and tempeh. I think the vegetarian diet will draw tofu into the mainstream.
Of course a big factor until now has been the large Asian-American population, who are just eating the same thing they've always eaten. And they are a major reason that tofu is sold in supermarkets. There are so many Asian-Americans in this country now that any supermarket that does not stock tofu is just inviting them to shop somewhere else.
So I see a very bright future for soy foods in this country. They're inexpensive, they're healthy, and they're made from America's second largest farm crop.
The other thing affecting us is going to be popu-lation and the use of water. One of the subjects that I follow most closely are water issues, particularly here in California. We've had this huge water crisis, or so-called water crisis. It's not really a water crisis, it's a crisis because cows are drinking all the water.
We have something on the order of five main water-using crops in California, and the biggest one is alfalfa, all of which is consumed by cattle. The second biggest one is irrigated pasture, all of which is consumed by cattle. The amount of water used to irrigate each of those crops separately is equal to the amount of water used by all the citizens in the state of California for everything. In other words, if we just stopped pro-ducing irrigated pasture in California, every person would have available to them twice as much water as they have now. Can you believe that?
I think that by necessity we'll have to realize that at some point. But it's interesting that you mention that tofu is indispensable to the vegan diet. For the first 4 or 5 years I was a vegetarian I was lacto-ovo, and I never used tofu. I had never had it prepared for me; I bought it once or twice, and found it to be awful just straight out of the container. I didn't know what to do with it.
You ate it straight out of the container?
Right. Can you believe it? And yet that's how I think many people think of tofu. But when I became vegan, I thought, "I have to add some variety, I'm going to learn how to use it," and now soy foods are a daily part of my diet. So I think that lacto-ovo vegetarians do not use soy foods to the extent that they could for variety.
You've mentioned a very good point. One of the biggest problems with tofu is that it's just a plain food, and many people don't take the time, and it doesn't take much time, to learn how to make, for example, a good tofu dressing, or to make any of the simple main courses like a tofu lasagna, or a tofu sandwich.
Mary Clifford is a nutrition advisor for VRG and a Registered Dietitian in a hospital located in Roanoke, Virginia.
