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America doesn't know tofu

asteriskmag.com

131–140 of 153 posts

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget TVP aka soy chunks. This twitter account uses it exclusively in their recipes for meaty dishes, https://x.com/tofumasque/status/1725857452392898849 (videos) I think the US is so meat-centric that seitan (for those who even know what it is) and tofu/soy are commonly seen as some sort of weirdo/hippy/vegan/activist food. I suspect the reason 90% of people who arrive at seitan who aren’t involved in a cultu…

For other readers, TVP = Textured vegetable protein. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textured_vegetable_protein I only see that term used in India. Is it used elsewhere?

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Re: America doesn't know tofu

#132
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, no, the person you’re responding to is not wrong. “Soy boy” as an insult has never been about processed foods - what are you on about?

It's never been about anti-Asian racism, either. It's largely targeted at vegans but soy is also an extremely common ingredient in processed foods, and is probably associated more with them because of Soylent and the movie Soylent Green. More to the point, I've never seen a single soyjak meme that was targeted at Asian people. It's not about Asian people. It's about a specific type of white person.

> More to the point, I've never seen a single soyjak meme that was targeted at Asian people.

No shit. The person you're responding to wasn't even remotely suggesting this. ;P

Their entire point is that by acting as if soy is this problematic ingredient, but failing to acknowledge that entire nations consume it without problems, is inherently racism-tinged/backed. It has always been an attempt to decry non-meat-eating as effeminate by attempting to attribute a poorly drawn study from well over a decade ago that people seemingly barely read through.

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#133
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, no, the person you’re responding to is not wrong. “Soy boy” as an insult has never been about processed foods - what are you on about?

The soyboy insult came about particularly to criticize frail tech nerds (who are white in all the memes) who eat meal replacement diets, particularly soylent. Its not about edamame. Furthermore this meme/insult is new while soy has been grown but not consumed by most people in the west for many generations. The meme cannot explain soys status in the west because it came late.

> The soyboy insult came about particularly to criticize frail tech nerds (who are white in all the memes) who eat meal replacement diets, particularly soylent.

No, it has been around for longer than that. Soylent is a tertiary at best aspect to this.

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#134
post #123
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I've been eating tofu in the US all my adult life, since about 1983 or so. Everywhere I've lived (FL, GA, NC, AZ, CA) it's been available in standard grocery stores, generally with several varieties. Asian markets, as you note, have many varieties. I have a number of vegetarian tofu recipes I like but... my favorite Ma Po tofu recipes (there are innumerable versions) have meat in them. I really dislike how com…

Which of her books do you recommend for the relatively experienced home cook who's done a little bit of imitation Chinese cooking?

"Every Grain of Rice" is my favorite cookbook ever. Its emphasis is home cooking so the recipes are pretty practical and it covers more than just Sichuan or Hunan cuisine so there is a lot of variety. The amazing part is that almost all the recipes are delicious. I've made over 120 of the recipes and the percentage of hits vs misses is amazing, probably 90% are things I would make again and a couple dozen have become essential.

The book also has a good section on ingredients and techniques. Many of the recipes are available in her other books (all worthwhile, Fuchsia is my hero), but sometimes slightly simplified here for accessibility and speed.

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The soyboy insult came about particularly to criticize frail tech nerds (who are white in all the memes) who eat meal replacement diets, particularly soylent. Its not about edamame. Furthermore this meme/insult is new while soy has been grown but not consumed by most people in the west for many generations. The meme cannot explain soys status in the west because it came late.

> The soyboy insult came about particularly to criticize frail tech nerds (who are white in all the memes) who eat meal replacement diets, particularly soylent. No, it has been around for longer than that. Soylent is a tertiary at best aspect to this.

Earliest archived use of the term on 4chan was from 2017, several years after soylent meal replacement shakes hit the market. Soy was also being used in various other vegan and/or processed foods at the time, but soylent was particularly conspicuous due to it having soy right in the name.

Regardless of which particularly product prompted this, the point is the meme is new but westerners not eating soy is not new and cannot be attributed to the meme, nor is the meme even about asians. The memes mocked white guys in the west who eat soy products, particularly soylent. As for the general aversion to eating soybeans, read the Wikipedia page for soy. It has a short history of soy consumption in North America since the introduction of the beans here in the 18th century. For most of their history in North America they were raised almost exclusively as animal feed. This wasn't because of a meme that didn't then exist, nor because anti-asian racism; it simply wasn't considered very good to eat. America got the bean itself from Asia but not the culture of tofu production and consumption. In the 20th century methods of processing soybeans for human consumption started to be developed in North America, but it would take several decades to gain any appreciable traction.

The "soybeans are effeminizing" train of thought only came about very recently in response to soybeans actually being consumed now in North America. The memes about "soyboys" exclusively featured white men who were usually skinny or skinny-fat, office workers who lacked physical strength, not laborers, usually with thick-rimmed glasses and an enthusiasm for immature interests like video games or saturday morning cartoons. The memes were about these sort of white men, not about Asians.

Tldr: these memes weren't about Asians and neither were they the reason it took so long for soybeans to catch on. That's completely ahistorical, wrong by centuries.

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never been about anti-Asian racism, either. It's largely targeted at vegans but soy is also an extremely common ingredient in processed foods, and is probably associated more with them because of Soylent and the movie Soylent Green. More to the point, I've never seen a single soyjak meme that was targeted at Asian people. It's not about Asian people. It's about a specific type of white person.

> More to the point, I've never seen a single soyjak meme that was targeted at Asian people. No shit. The person you're responding to wasn't even remotely suggesting this. ;P Their entire point is that by acting as if soy is this problematic ingredient, but failing to acknowledge that entire nations consume it without problems , is inherently racism-tinged/backed. It has always been an attempt to decry non-meat-eatin…

People in North America lacked exposure to soy consumption because in most of the continent they lacked exposure to Asian culture in general. Soybeans spread across the continent as animal fodder, much faster than asian culture did. They didn't reject all the various forms of tofu, most of them never heard of tofu in the first place. And when some tofu finally became commercially available in North America, most people dismissed it as a bland and inferior alternative to meat because that's essential what is was as presented to them.

Furthermore the premise of soybeans being feminizing, the claim made up thread that prompted this sub-discussion, is a 21st century meme that cannot possibly explain why 18th, 19th and 20th century farmers in North America grew soybeans for their livestock but not themselves. Nor is the reason for this because they hated Asian people, the reason is because they were never well exposed to Asian culture in the first place. Even if you want to blame that on the Chinese Exclusion Act (at the end of the 19th century) and therefore racism, the production of soybeans for animal feed was already established generations earlier. The large expanse of the Pacific Ocean and the slow permeation of culture prior to the information age has more to do with it that anything else.

We're talking about an era in which North American coastal communities thought lobster was a shitty food despite Mediterranean Europeans knowing it to be delicious since at least the Roman era. Food culture didn't travel fast, it took people several generations to figure out foods new to them even when those foods were well understood by people who looked like them and with whom they had relatively high cultural exchange.

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never been about anti-Asian racism, either. It's largely targeted at vegans but soy is also an extremely common ingredient in processed foods, and is probably associated more with them because of Soylent and the movie Soylent Green. More to the point, I've never seen a single soyjak meme that was targeted at Asian people. It's not about Asian people. It's about a specific type of white person.

> More to the point, I've never seen a single soyjak meme that was targeted at Asian people. No shit. The person you're responding to wasn't even remotely suggesting this. ;P Their entire point is that by acting as if soy is this problematic ingredient, but failing to acknowledge that entire nations consume it without problems , is inherently racism-tinged/backed. It has always been an attempt to decry non-meat-eatin…

The person I’m responding to claims “the backlash to soy is inextricably tied to old stereotypes of asians [sic] as weak and docile.” You are claiming that it “[fails] to acknowledge that entire nations consume it without problems”. These are two different claims.

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#138

Most Americans including myself have no idea how to cook tofu well. If you want to market tofu you need to demo it in grocery stores, show off recipes at farmers markets or host tofu fairs. Somehow you need to show what’s possible with tofu and probably adjust it to American (bland) favor pallet

Do this, but leave Stinky Tofu out of it. The entire plan will backfire if there's a single item making the entire fair smell that pungent.

Plus, even in areas where Stinky Tofu is common, it's divisive. When I was in Taiwan, only about half of the people I talked to liked it. The other half wouldn't touch it.

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The soyboy insult came about particularly to criticize frail tech nerds (who are white in all the memes) who eat meal replacement diets, particularly soylent. No, it has been around for longer than that. Soylent is a tertiary at best aspect to this.

Earliest archived use of the term on 4chan was from 2017, several years after soylent meal replacement shakes hit the market. Soy was also being used in various other vegan and/or processed foods at the time, but soylent was particularly conspicuous due to it having soy right in the name. Regardless of which particularly product prompted this, the point is the meme is new but westerners not eating soy is not new and…

I think a lot of the early backlash against soy was more targeted at soy milk in particular. Soy milk was one of the first widely marketed ersatz milks, at a time when virtually all “milk” in the store was actual cow milk and Lewis Black had a hilarious comedy bit about how there were already too many kinds of milk[1]. There was also an infamous 2008 case study of a man who developed gynecomastia while consuming three quarts of soy milk a day[2].

[1] https://youtu.be/6_wDEjCpeOc

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18558591/

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#140
post #124
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of her books do you recommend for the relatively experienced home cook who's done a little bit of imitation Chinese cooking?

Anybody can cook the recipes in "Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook" and "The Food of Sichuan". I would caution people unfamiliar with authentic Chinese food that these are not the flavors of 99% of US Chinese restaurants. To our palette they are vastly better. Sometimes shockingly so, as for example her General Tso's chicken. You cook that correctly you'll get nauseous thinking about American/Chinese General Tso's chick…

I suspect HMarts in the Boston area should have everything I need. Thanks for the comment.
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