The Other Milk

Reinventing Soy in Republican China

Jia-Chen Fu

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780295744056
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the early twentieth century, China was stigmatized as the "Land of Famine." Meanwhile in Europe and the United States, scientists and industrialists seized upon the soybean as a miracle plant that could help build modern economies and healthy nations. Soybeans, protein-packed and domestically grown, were a common food in China, and soybean milk ( doujiang ) was poised for reinvention for the modern age. Scientific soybean milk became a symbol of national growth and development on Chinese terms, and its competition with cow's milk reflected China's relationship to global modernity and imperialism. The Other Milk explores the curious paths that led to the notion of the deficient Chinese diet and to soybean milk as the way to guarantee food security for the masses. Jia-Chen Fu's in-depth examination of the intertwined relationships between diet, health, and nation illuminates the multiple forces that have been essential in the formation of nutrition science in China.

CHAPTER 1

The Romance of the Bean

Rethinking the Soybean as Technology and Modern Commodity

IN February 1911, the North-China Herald reported that “the most up-to-date factory in France, and perhaps in Europe, has, states a Paris correspondent, just been established here by a Chinese, and all its employees are young Chinese.”1 The news, whether carried in an English-language newspaper in China or by American or European presses, was both surprising and unprecedented. At the time, “up-to-date” was perhaps not the first adjective to come to mind when referring to China. The North-China Herald, the most important and longest-running English-language newspaper in China, served a mixed readership of foreigners and elite Chinese literate in English. Its lead story in the same issue concerned Japan’s increasingly intimate friendship with Russia as the two empires sought mutual support and justification for their presence in Manchuria. The newspaper, which was also the official journal for British consular notifications and the British-led Shanghai Municipal Council,2 patronizingly suggested, “A frank and clear-cut statement in regard to her continental policy, could, if Japan harbors no ulterior designs, do her not the slightest harm, while it would relieve China of anxiety and other countries interested in the Far East of doubt.”3 The second lead item concerned the spread of the plague in northern Chinese provinces, also in contrast to China’s association with an “up-to-date factory.”

In addition to this factory’s modernness, its specialization in the production of foods made from soybeans signaled a world turned upside down and counter to popular perceptions. As an editorialist for the Christian Science Monitor had pointedly observed, “Oriental cooking has not so far inspired the celebrated chefs of the world centers. For famous recipes, the epicures would hardly look to China.”4 And yet, the Monitor went on to report, a young Chinese man who had studied agricultural science in France dared to do the unimaginable: “What then, shall be said of Li Yu Ying, home address Peking, who has established himself in Paris and believes he has something of value in the cooking line for even the surfeited Parisians? This, assuredly, is blazing a new trail where it must have required considerable courage to venture. China teaching France how to cook! Here, to say the least, is a gastronomical novelty.”5

The man in question, Li Yuying, more commonly known as Li Shizeng (1881–1973), was the son of a former grand councilor of the Qing dynasty and tutor of the Tongzhi Emperor in the 1860s. Li arrived in Paris in 1902 as one of two embassy students in the entourage of the newly appointed Chinese minister to France. He enrolled in the École Pratique d’Agriculture in Montargis and after graduating in 1905, studied chemistry and biology at the Pasteur Institute. The factory, Usine Caséo-Sojaïne, or “soybean foods factory”, which Li established in the Parisian suburb of Colombe, produced a variety of food products, all derived from soybeans.6 In making common, everyday Western foodstuffs—milk, jams, breads, condiments—Li’s soybean foods factory marked a significant shift in how young, modernizing Chinese intellectuals understood the social and economic value of soybeans.

Soybeans, which had long been recognized by the Chinese as an important famine crop, base for fertilizer, and source of oil for cooking, lubrication, and lighting, became globally esteemed as an agro-industrial commodity of tremendous economic importance in the early twentieth century. Chinese reassessment of the indigenous plant and crop occurred in conjunction with and as a response to changes in the global commodity markets. Japanese and Western interest in Chinese soybeans reframed the social and economic importance of soybeans such that Chinese scientists and entrepreneurs increasingly saw soybeans and especially soybean-derived products as critical components for Chinese progress and modernization.

A TIME OF DEARTH

Although soybeans had been grown and sold on a commercial scale in East Asia for more than a thousand years, the early twentieth century marked a radical shift in both scale and content for the soybean trade. Its introduction onto a world stage was so sudden that Western commentators repeatedly invoked refrains of fantasy and fairy tale when speaking of the soybean. As The Times (London) observed in July 1910, “The history of the growth of the bean trade in Manchuria is as captivating as the story of the rise of Jack’s famous beanstalk of our nursery days. It reads more like a fairy tale than a page from the Board of Trade Returns.”7 The Japanese-American journalist Kinnosuke Adachi waxed poetic in calling it a “miracle bean,” whose history in the West was a “wonder tale.”8 For many, these evocations of the fantastical only skirted the boundary between truth and exaggeration. The “little bean” from China was wondrous precisely because it could be used to make plastics, tires, soaps, and oils, as well as serve as the basis for everyday foodstuffs like flour and milk.

That such a humble legume could stir the imaginative fancies of so many in the early twentieth century could not have been predicted by its more prosaic and well established role in traditional Chinese agriculture and dietaries. Archeological evidence indicates that by 1000 BCE, the soybean was already being cultivated, and textual references to the soybean in the The Book of Odes (Shijing), a collection of folk songs and ceremonial odes that dates from the eleventh to the seventh centuries BCE, identify both the seedlings and the leaves as edible vegetables.9 Considered one of the five staple grains (wugu) of ancient China, the soybean was likely boiled and then steamed to produce cooked granules (doufan). This method resulted in a coarse product that gave the taint of inferiority to the soybean. Like wheat, which could also be boiled and then steamed to produce maifan, the soybean was regarded as an inferior grain. The biochemist turned historian of science, H. T. Huang recounted a passage from the “Contract between a Servant and His Master” (59 BCE) stating that one of the hardships the servant had to accept was “to eat only cooked soybeans (fan dou), and drink only water.” When confronted with this and other indignities to be borne as part of his employment, the poor man broke down and cried.10 Soybeans could assuage hunger, but they signified a humbleness of circumstance. When, for example, local irrigation works broke down in Anhui during the first century BCE, local people composed a song complaining that all they had to eat were soybeans and yams.11 Thus, prior to the development of the technology to ferment and process them, soybeans occupied a relatively unappealing place in local foodscapes.

Knowledge of the nutritional disadvantages of eating unprocessed soybeans goes back to very early times. Apart from the immature beans (now known internationally by the Japanese term edamame), which can be eaten directly as a vegetable, mature beans require substantial processing to enable proper digestion, because they suffer from three serious defects when cooked as food. Soy proteins are difficult to digest. The carbohydrate component in soybeans, if not properly hydrolyzed by human digestive enzymes, will lead to the generation of gas and flatulence. Cooking the beans also produces an unpleasant beany flavor that results from the oxidation of polyunsaturated oils by the enzyme lipoxidase.12 To make soybeans more palatable, ancient Chinese devised a variety of ways—fermentation, sprouting, and grinding—to convert soybeans into wholesome, attractive, digestible, and nutritious foods.

Fermentation, or exposing cooked beans to microbial action, was perhaps the first method employed by Chinese to make soybeans more digestible and palatable.13 A fermented soy relish (shi) was found among the pottery jars and identified on bamboo slips discovered at Mawangdui, Changsha, Hunan, a burial site dating from the second century BCE. Shi, which arises from a two-step process in which cooked and cooled soybeans are first exposed to air (aerobic mold growth) and then salted and incubated anaerobically (anaerobic digestion), was a major trade commodity as well as a daily culinary necessity. Permutations of this process led to the development of a fermented soybean paste (jiang) and soy sauce (jiangyou). Tofu, the making of which does not involve fermentation, appeared significantly later, perhaps as late as the tenth or eleventh century.14 The soybean’s primary virtue over the many centuries of use in China was, as the anthropologist Francesca Bray has described, “that it produced good crops even on poor land, that it did not deplete the soil, and that it guaranteed good yields even in poor years, so that it made a useful famine crop.”15 Moreover, because soybeans fix nitrogen in the soil, local farmers did not need to leave land fallow if they included soybeans in their crop rotation.

Oil could also be extracted from soybeans and used for cooking, lubrication, and lighting. What remains after the extraction of oils from soybeans can be compressed into sixty-four-pound rounds, that is, beancakes, and used as nitrogen-rich fertilizer. The famed agronomist and inventor Wang Zhen wrote in the 14th century: “Black soybeans are a food for times of dearth; they can supplement [cereals] in poor years, and in good years they can be used as fodder for cattle and horses.”16 Shandong, Hebei, Shanxi, and Henan in China proper were major growers of soybeans, and they sold soybeans to other parts of China, and on a lesser scale to Korea and Japan, to be used as fertilizers.

Beginning in the late Ming dynasty, the use of beancake, as well as other cake fertilizers derived from other vegetable oils, became increasingly popular.17 By the mid-eighteenth century, at least three macroregions—Lingnan, the Southeast Coast, and the Lower Yangzi—had become dependent on outside supplies of ecologically sensitive goods, namely food, timber, and beancake.18 The Qing maintained a ban on the domestic exportation of grain and soybeans from Manchuria in order to protect the food supply for the bannermen residing there. The government lifted the ban in 1749, but due to restrictions on how much could be transported through the customs office at Shanhaiguan, the only exit for Manchurian exports, a full-scale trade in soybeans and beancake did not develop until after 1772, when the Qing eliminated all domestic restrictions on transporting soybeans and beancake by sea.19

For the Lower Yangzi, which was China’s most agriculturally and commercially rich region, imported beancake from North China and Manchuria was crucial for sustainable agricultural growth and to ensure the fertility of the soil under a double-cropping system.20 The precise magnitude of the domestic soybean trade between Manchuria and the Lower Yangzi region during the late eighteenth century and through the first half of the nineteenth remains a topic of debate, but it is apparent that there was a popular recognition of, and enthusiasm for, the soybean’s agricultural and commercial benefits.21

Beancake fertilizer was especially important in relieving cotton-growing soil, a persistent problem for the Lower Yangzi region. It also became the fertilizer of choice for sugar growers in Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Fujian, who emerged as the biggest importers of northern soybeans after the 1840s.22 According to a 1911 report issued by the Maritime Customs, “The sugar plantations in these sub-tropical regions had for centuries drawn upon northern beancake for fertilizing, and beans were needed also for the southern mills, where their oil was extracted and used as a substitute for ground-nut oil.”23 Chinese trading junks plied the waters from the coastal south to Manchuria, delivering imported beancake throughout the nineteenth century, but their share of the soybean trade di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Romance of the Bean: Rethinking the Soybean as Technology and Modern Commodity
• Chapter 2. The Light of Modern Knowledge: Accountability and the Concept of the Chinese Diet
• Chapter 3. Of Quality and Protein: Building a Scientific Argument of Chinese Nutritional Inadequacy
• Chapter 4. Which Milk? Soybean Milk for Growth and Development
• Chapter 5. Doujiang as Milk: Hybrid Modernity in Soybean Milk Advertisements
• Chapter 6. The Rise of Scientific Soybean Milk: Nutritional Activism in Times of Crisis
• Chapter 7. The Gospel of Soy: Local Realities and the Tension between Profit and Relief
• Epilogue. Negotiating Past and Future through the Soybean
• Chinese Character Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index