Soy: High in protein, low in carbs.
http://waltonfeed.com/self/ntr7.html

Does this mean that the versatility of soy is SOLELY from a higher protein content? That's it?

Vast vego-terrorist conspiracy.

Set the tofurkeys free!

I see there is a soy conspiracy floating around:

http://www.t-nation.com/findArticle.do?article=body_143soy

They also make soy yarn.
I wonder, though, would "lima silk" or "garbanzo silk" really sell as well as "soy silk"? I realize that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but how would it play in the suburbs? Maybe it's all a matter of demographic, but I think one all purpose bean is all I need in life.

I love soy silk. It is so smooth and creamy and chocolaty. Of course when I say soy silk I'm talking about the brand of chocolate soy milk not a fabric.

Steve, I don't WANT to say I told you so...

Let's not forget all the people who want to power their cars with bio-diesel, AKA soybean oil derived.

This is all a part of the clash between the two great powers:

1) Vego-terrorists
2) Halliburton and Martha Stewart.

I hope I don't have to connect ALL the dots for you people

Damn soy Hippies.

Did you know soy sauce wasnt named after the beans. It is the other way around. Back in the day there really wasnt a name for the beans but they called the sauce Soy Sauce. So, yeah.

Damn dirty soy hippies...

Ooooh, don't forget biodiesel! Plenty of folks run their Jetta diesels on soybean juice: renewable resource, lower emissions, better on your engine.

http://www.biodieselnow.com

And it makes your exhaust smell like frenchfries!

I'm a proud "soy hippie" they are the perfect bean. Did you know they even make soy rolling papers. What can't be made of soy? Since swiching to soy to roll my doobies my lungs are the healthier than ever and I can know take bigger bong hits. VIVA LA SOY!

Soy is so much higher in isoflavones than other beans which makes it the obvious choice.

What does that mean? Is the lack of isoflavones the reason I can't buy a Lime Bean Candle online?

If you see the word "soy" a lot, it looks funny. Soy soy soy.
P.S. I drink cow milk, use tree paper, and eat meat burgers..and the only beans I like are jelly.

SOY-lent Green, I say. I believe that soy-licious goodies are derived from people. Grind up the stupid, and use them as food for the rich!

I hate hippies.

If you have to ask, you wouldn't understand.

I thought it had more to do with the agricultural benefits. If you could get the twice the production per acre from garbanzo beans as you do soy, I bet we'd be running our Jetta's on Garbonzoline and drinking Garbonzolade. Garbonuts? Cafe machianzo?

The soy hippie is talking about rolling papers and doobies, but the reality at the end of his rant is that he is too lazy for that, he uses a bong!

Vive la animal products

All I know is that soy hotdogs are NASTY! I tried being a vegetarian for 2 weeks but it made me sick to my stomach and lose so much weight my family accused me of doing speed.

I don't know why people promote soy so much. It tastes like shit. I'm freaking Chinese and we invented tofu and soy milk and all that and I still think it tastes like crap. It's sort of like vegan propaganda. I bet if some highly acclaimed vegan said monkey feces prevented influenza, suddenly you'd see restaurants selling fried monkey poo cakes.

It tastes like shit. Just because someone told you it's good for you doesn't make it taste good. People just pretend it tastes good to find some excuse to eat stuff like Natto.

Eat a steak. If you die from heart disease it's because Darwin said you were screwed anyway. Humans are omnivores, not vegans.

I think what everyone is missing here are all the health risks associated with soy bean ingestion. BEWARE!

Beans make you fart, right? So do all these soy bean derivatives cause gas?

The vegan diet does cannot provide vitamin D or B12 because those vitamins only come from animal products. Proof positive that humans are meant to eat animal products.

I may be wrong here, but I remember reading once that corn farmers will plant soy, instead of leaving a field fallow, because it replaced nitrogen, or something like that. That way they can turn a profit without leaving a feild fallow or using chemical treatments. Anyway, I didn't do any reasearch on that, just talking out of my butt.

Maybe Farmer Bobs wife got so sick of eating them that they were forced to find other uses for them.

I don't know much about soy other than high protein, low carbs, but isn't it almost time for another installment of "Steve, don't eat it??"

I agree with Christiane.
Steve Don't Eat It!
Steve Don't Eat It!

They can make crayons out of soy also. We were in Denny's once, and they brought the kids the usual little miniature marketing booklets to color along with four crayons each, and in the geologic age we ended up waiting for our food, we noticed that the crayon labels said they were soy-based. We were not QUITE hungry enough to try eating them. But it was close.

Speaking of Steve, Don't Eat It.

You know, I had a few health problems a couple of years ago. I had to go through eliminating food from my diet to figure out what made me sick. I switched to Soy Milk to see if that made a difference. I was really into knowing what I was eating, so I did some digging about Soy products and I found out that they are not as good as what people think. There are so many myths that people openly believe without thinking about them.

Apparently people in Asia eat loads of Soy products and they don't get the aweful cancers that western people get. This is why we should eat more soy. This is in fact a complete load of bull. The Asian Nations use soy as a condoment. They hardly eat that much soy at all. The do have higher rates of other tyles of cancer though, throat cancer for example. They do not use Soy as a food alternative like we do. Do they drink soy milk while eating their soy derived meat alternative? nope. Why, because they don't let marketing folk influence their views. Or perhaps it is more to do with traditions.

Western cultures follow fads, and marketing folk exploit these fads to their fullest extent.

By the way, do you know that soy milk is a by-product of another process? When the people who make Soybean oils were trying to think of ways to reuse the stinky pulp left over from the oil making process, the discovered that they could make a foul tasting milk alternative. The fact that to get the toxic material out of the mix, they have to use other toxic processes is cause enough to be alarmed.

Time for people to start thinking I guess, although the more people that use soy products, the better. It'll mean more space on this earth for me later on in life. All the vegetarians who swear by soy will have probably developed some soy based disease.

If you don't believe me, read some books.

Ever hear of Icenyne foaming building insulation? It is petroleum-based.

Recently they have developed Biobase 500 that is completely identical to Icenyne, and it is: you guessed it! Soy-based!

It is identical in every way I can see/feel/taste/smell.

Maybe soy is chemically easy to derive back to a petroleum-like substance to be used like plastics?

If you don't believe me that it is bad for you, then check out these links:

http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/

http://www.nydailynews.com/city_life/health/v-pfriendly/story/12099p-11453c.html

http://creativehealth.netfirms.com/soycrisi.shtml

http://www.greatdreams.com/soybeans.htm

Steve, you said that Dan would like to know the magical propertues that make soy so irritatingly versatile. Well, it has everything to do with the money behind the product. The Soy industry has people pushing soy as a product 24/7. I find this irresponsible considering the risk.

Mankato, Minnesota smells like dog food every Wednesday night, due to the soybean processing plant on the west end of town.

I prefer the taste of soy to most foods since I can't exactly eat a lot of the food soy replaces since I'm a "treehugging vegetarian hippie".. Soy ice cream tastes just like the real stuff (just ask my meat eating taste tester), soy candles produce less soot, tofu can be a great meat replacer... the list goes on.

mmmm Natto

Hi! First time posting, although I've been following The Sneeze for some time now. (Do more Steve, Don't Eat It!)

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that there are crayons made from soy beans as well. What the fuck? Apparently they are "good for the environment", but I had no idea the other wax kind was so dangerous. Remember that nest time your child is coloring a piece of paper, they are really damaging the Earth.

I say we take the baked bean and make crayons out of that. It's GENIUS! We'll be millionairs!

Soy beans are a government conspiracy designed to turn us all into healthy, healthy robots!

No thank you, Uncle Sam!

Soy offers more protein per acre of land, and requires less water than rice. We learn to like soy or soon we will not be able to afford to eat.

Last week I actually had a shrimp cesear salad with soy shrimp. They kinda look like large grubs, had the same consistency as shrimp and sort of tasted like them, but in a shrimp cocktail.....no way

i hate lima beans.

In reference to the person who stated that "if you say soy over and over it becomes a weird word"- yeah it does. Especially when you see it written out a lot like SOY SOY SOY SOY SOY SOY SOY SOY SOY SOY SOY. And then you stop to consider that it means "I am" in Spanish and you're just like WTF, mates?

I don't know about anyone else, but Mrs. El Impulso! has been on a vegetarian bender for the past year, which has resulted in some dietary changes for me as well. I can truthfully report that soy beans are just as gassy as any other kind of bean, and great at providing extra fiber in the diet, too...let's just say regularity is no longer an issue in our home! Maybe this thread should be combined with the Love and Methane thread, killing two birds with one stone? Because we're no longer shy about farting in front of each other now, as it's an inevitable result of a soy heavy diet! Vive le Soy!

Actually, the dried soy nuts are quite good, be they on a salad, out of the bag, or whatever.

This coming from a guy who won't touch vegetables.

I'm hoping nobody posted this yet, but i was playing trivial pursuit with my family a couple of months back (no, they aren't made of soy), but the question asked what most newspaper ink was made out of, and can anyone guess the correct answer? SOY!!!

I'm from the "Soybean Capital of the World", Decatur, Illinois. Decatur is the home to the huge food conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). I always assumed ADM was the largest processor of soybeans in the world.

I was wrong.

A little Googling reveals a company called, Bunge in Brazil is the world's largest processor.

The soybean is good for Bunge; whole, not just a portion of the company. And this is true not only for Bunge headquarters in Brazil. Your Bunge, here in the states, relies on the soybean for a healthly bottom line.

There are no redeeming qualities to soy beans. None.

What has it done for me?

Tricked me into thinking it was milk, ruined my count chocula.

Soy? That's nothing. Corn is what's taking over the world. Corn syrup, corn sugar, corn starch, corn powder, corn meal --- pick five things out of your cupboard at random, I'll bet four of them have corn in them somewhere.

How come the people who invented eating soy is only using it as part of food when white people decided that they should use it to completely replace food?

What kind of messed up logic is that? Maybe there's a reason they aren't trying to sell a bean as shrimp or a bean as a crayon.

It's really pretty funny seeing how many white people look to Asian cultures for medicinal products and totally change the way it was used. Maybe you guys could steal the rice patty Vietnamese hats that protect you from sunburns and sell them as enemas instead.

I'm just waiting for the day that they can make me a soy wife. Then my life will be complete

steve, I would like to see you eat a soy crayon.

or some lead based paint.

I second the person who mentioned corn. Let's add peanuts and wheat to that list. People with allergies to any of the above will tell you soy/corn/peanuts/wheat are in most processed foods.

Industrial agriculture = high yield cheap soy, corn, peanuts and wheat. There's been a lot of research and a lot of money thrown at it, and saying "soy" can sell an item to particular markets because of what they associate soy with (it was supposed to save the world from hunger back in the 70's, to start with).

By the way, if you like McDonalds hamburgers, those are something like 25% soy.

Soy, soy the multitasking bean,
It can be a candle and ice cream,
But there's better things to fill your plate,
Like chips and peas garnished with steak.

Don't forget most everything is printed in soy ink, and you can get soy paper.

Another benefit of soy for women is that it greatly curbs uncomfortable premenstrual and menopausal symptoms.

So in other words, any of y'all fly shorties out there be gettin' them cramps real hard? Soy will knock them pains right on they asses...

Oh by the way the reason crayons at restaurants are now made out of soy is due to the fact that kids like to put things in their mouths... Steve you should so know this!!! How many times has your kid eaten a crayon???? In the past crayons had a chemically produced color that had similar properties to spray paint. Now Crayola uses a more friendly version that is based off plant cells (soy is included!) instead of harsh chemicals! The crayon base is based on soy so that way if a child does eat one, the restaurant will not be sued if the child becomes ill. (cheapie crayons are usually made out of a very low grade wax that can cause huge intestinal problems, but now the cheap soy alternative is curing that problem)

Oh and by the way, MORE "STEVE DONT EAT IT!!!!"

you know who loved soy products?
henry ford did.
just loved 'em.
-had a suit and tie made out of them
-provided a 16-course soy meal at the 1934 "century of progress" expo in chicago.

My wife is a vegetarian, as I have said in past posts, this makes my life interesting, as she does not cook meat (but I do). I keep telling her that we eat meat for many reasons, one being the waste of the rest of the cow after we have stripped them of their seats, jackets and shoes. The other is because we have incisors (designed to cut meat) as opposed to a mouth full of molars.

Pass the veal

If we ever get the Jetsons-style food synthesizer, it will be soy based. Future generations will all eat Bocaburgers unless they pay a $$$ premium for real meat.

In reference to: "The soybean is good for Bunge; whole, not just a portion of the company. "

Bunge whole?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

God I'm so immature.

"Soy" Sauce is derives from the Japanese word shoyu, which derives from the chinese...ahh who the fuck cares? For the veggies: Every acre of cultivated farmland is responsible for more animal deaths than a meat eater can eat in one year.
For the meatheads: Eat your beans! Soy or otherwise. It doesn't matter wht you eat, your still going to get cancer. MWAH HA HA HA.

i think its cuz, soy beans dont have much flavor so you can pretty much make them a substitue for anything, i love soy

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals, dying of nothing. Give me meat anyday.

Have fun and eat meat and do wacky stuff with your life! Nobody gets out alive anyway.

I tried Soy Coffee. ONCE! For the person who ever wondered what nutty diarrhea tastes like, brew yourself a big steaming cup and ponder no more.

Steve, Don't Drink it!

well, I think it's because they don't have ANY taste whatsoever.

Soy coffee.

Can you get that at Starbucks?

This weekend, I wandered into a Vietnamese restaurant and ordered a bowl of pho. It came with the usual goodness ingredients, but afterward I wanted a little something sweet. So I ordered the "Special Sweet Drink." It was exactly like you'd made a coconut milkshake, with bits of coconut and coconut milk and ice and a little heavy cream, but then imagine after making the milkshake you got bored and then stirred in some--

wait for it--

imagine you stirred in corn and soybeans.

Yes. Those wacky Vietnamese make a dessert that features corn.... I'm trying to imagine a recipe for, say, ham and potatoes that involves putting Hershey's syrup on the top...In my opinion, corn and soybeans do not belong anywhere near frozen desserts.

Did you know we as humans gained our precarious position at the "top of the food chain" by defeating the soy bean? We have learned from early cave paintings that thanks to our ancestors besting the rancid soy bean in their struggle for survival it is us, humans beans, not soy beans that rule the world.

Yes, it's true, a little know but dramatic piece of our species history. As you all do know, to this day, and more than ever actually, humans are enslaving the once mighty yet now beaten bean. Hey, I'm not the one who said "to the victor goes the spoils or war" (read natto). Coincidence, I think not.

Do you think the soy bean wants to be milk, or crayons grub like shrimp? Hell no they don't! But who cares what they want, we won damn it, and that inferior bean had better do whatever we tell it to do.

well i'd like to see a soy thong. or soy condoms.

Hmm.. A high protein thong with the tensile strength of steel that tastes like a Big Mac? NOW YOU"RE TALKING SISTER!

2 words: lactose intolerant.

We drink soy milk to avoid pain, and to make life much sweeter smelling for all of you who hate us damn dirty soy hippies.

The explosion in soy products, both edible and not, is a direct outgrowth of overproduction of soybeans on large scale industrial farms and the needs of agribusiness to 'create' demand for soy products.

My life GREATLY improved after I stopped eating so much soy. My wife used to get stomach aches after breakfast, turns out it was the soy milk. It is not a wholesome food product, it is a byproduct of soy manufacturing that is sweetened, enriched, and marketed to vegetarians looking for milk alternatives.

I do enjoy tofu and tempeh occasionally, but I will NEVER drink industrial soy milk again.

I can't blame Starbucks for my soy coffee experience. I blame only myself. I plunked down hard earned cash for a bag of Soy Coffee Substitute thinking i was doing myself a favor.

blahblechretch.

nutty diarrhea.

with room for cream, naturally.

I saw a couple people talking about inks being made out of soy as being part of a vast conspirecy to turn us all into hippies. Wrong! Soy inks have been around for longer than the current soy craze. Soy inks were developed because they can be easily washed out of paper pulp during recycling. Petroleum based inks can't be washed out easily, and make darker recycled paper grades. This means brighter, whiter TP (and other recycled grades) for us, the TP loving American consumers.

P.S. Soy milk tastes bad, but it keeps like a month in the fridge, for us lazy single guys who hate shopping for groceries.

Beer lasts for months in the fridge with little or no degredation of taste, this is what the single guys should be thinking about. If you don't want mom or a date seeing a fridge full of beer, get a wine fridge for the garage. Cheap piss beer will last for eons in the fridge or cabinet at room temperature.

By good beer I mean www.saintarnold.com

Pass the milk.... out the window, hand me a beer (luckily not made with soy).

I don't think beer would go well with the often called upon and traditional single guy dinner option of cereal. After all, milk should be used on cereal, not beer!

.....Well, maybe except Lucky Charms.

kai: If that's true, then McDonalds is lying on their website.

("McDonald's hamburgers are made from 100% beef.", it says.)

Which is not impossible, but I don't see any reason to believe the contrary, either.

Who told you they were pushing soyburgers?

You guys are forgetting the best part: 15% less anal leakage!!!!

Found soy yarn at www.flyingfingers.com - it's amazing stuff, honestly. VERY soft - amazing that it's actually soy.

Wow, I had no idea that soy was so damned versatile! It's like the "new hemp".

Hmmm, can you smoke soy?

Complete protein, with all the essential amino acids. All other vegetarian foods have to combine two sources of protein to get the essentials, like rice + beans.

It grows cheap, fast, and puts nitrogen back in the soil.

If you eat too much, your breasts get bigger. Be aware.

Aya,
eatin' fish now

I work next to a sybean company called ADM. It makes the whole town smell like poo fyi...

I think we missed Steve's point--didn't he want to know why the soybean, in particular, was so versatile that it could be made into virtually anything? Instead, we've degenerated into an squalling match over vegan-vs-meat. Can't we all just get along??

I really want to know, myself...why is it so versatile in the non-food sector? (In the food sector, it's because it has no taste of its own and can take on the tastes of other things easily, right?)

Can these crazy non-food soy products be made out of any agricultural product, but soybeans are used b/c they are everywhere? Who knows? Anyone?

All I know is my kid used to drink soy milk like it was going out of style as a youngster, since she was allergic to the real thing. Glad she grew out of that (in all that time, I could never bring myself to taste it).

I would support another installment of "Steve, Don't Eat It!", but wasn't the natto enough?

Bless you, Kate! We're 77 comments in, and I still feel like I don't have the real answer.

Hi all --

I am a biochemist with a small nonprofit and while I do not work directly with soy beans, I do try to keep up-to-date in general.

To answer Dan's question of what is the magical property that makes soy bean so irritatingly versatile, here goes:

There are actually several different properties that soy beans possess that make them versatile. Soy is protein and oil rich, and has a substantial amount of fiber. The oil can and has been refined to be used in diverse applications such as candles, vehicle enamels and the like. The fiber can be milled and used as garments, etc.

P. S. Haven't any of you guys every been to a Japanese restaurant and tried those green pods they put on the tables? Edamames are delish.

i think most of this new age soy madness can be traced back to that "soy bom" at the ?grammys? or something. definitely sublimination going on there

Angryjack, you don't know sh!t,...er.. I mean jack.

Asians use beau coup soy sauce - Koreans anyway. My bitch is originally from Korea and we have many Korean friends, naturally. We buy soy sauce by the five gallon buckets from Costco.

Soy sauce is used as a pickeling agent of sorts for garlic, green beans, hot green asian peppers, and many more things including meat. Plus it is used in stir fry, as a marinade, and even as a type of Korean salad dressing for a host of veggies. We eat mostly veggies - I am indeed blessed with this most wonderful of bitches.

My favorite way for the bean is ground up into a consistency and texture not unlike grits. This is mixed with fried Kim Chee. This gives the fried Kim Chee a mellow sort of creamy taste. Mmmm Mmmm.

since when is soybean green ???

As a farmer's daughter, I can verify the fact that soy beans are good for the soil. They are good to rotate with corn because they replace the nitrogen that corn removes.

It is my god-given right as a farmer's daughter to verify or dismiss things.

When I was small, I tried to eat some soybeans that my Dad brought home from the field to look at, and he said that was not good. Soy beans are not good for you. they are good for cows, and cows only.

My friends and I tried to see if we could make tofu taste good, so we made Tofu Parmigania. The sauce tasted delish! The tofu tasted like crap. And I burned my arms on the hot oil.

I'll stick with Chicken next time.

I think that i might have to interject my opinion in here and say that the point of leaving a comment is not to discuss whatever the post may be but instead to assert's ones dominance over everyone else. So while kates comment steering us back on track may be "relevant" and might "make more sense than everything that i have ever written", i will have to respectfully shoot her question-answering ways down. No, the point of leaving a comment is indeed to inflate ones ego and wither who ever may be the unlucky fool who disagrees with you. For instance, the prefix über is just that, a prefix. Therefore it must be attached to the word or else it simply reverts back to it's german meaning "over." So the previous commenter either misspelled their name or their pseudonym means "over fun." See how the game works? Now that i have finished playing i will continue my favorite pastime of hunting for enchanted dragons in my sock drawer.

Ok, cool. Acorn just convinced me that, soy beans, can indeed, be smoked.

Personally, I just think they taste good with some salt, they have a kind of meaty, nutty flavor. I'm not vegetarian, but they are pretty good. Tofu sucks though.

edamame are awesome. And most definitely green.

I'm at a college with a large vegan population. some of the vegans have good reasons, some don't - one friend informed me that she was going to be vegan because the dairy industry "rapes cows" - she was referring to the need to artificially inseminate the cows, and perfectly serious. I refrained from pointing out that the bull isn't normally all that gentle either.

at any rate, I'm sick of seeing tofu in everything

What's the similarity between a lima bean and a pubic hair?

You push them both aside and keep eating.

Just one of my favorite jokes!

Henry Ford knew that, for his time, his automobiles were expensive for the average Joe, who was the person he was trying to sell to. It was he who initiated the idea of buying a car "on time," the lowly "car loan.

But more than that, in the 1930's the USA was still primarilly an agricultural nation. (Ford was helping to end that, but...) Farmers were his BIGGEST market, and he knew if they made money, they would buy his cars and HE would make money. So he started using agricultural products in the production of his cars -

One day in 1939, in an endeavor to demonstrate the commercial potential of a the soybean, he attended a convention outfitted (with the exception of his shoes) in clothes made entirely from soybeans.

During the Depression, Ford spent many hours at a lab near Detroit turning soybeans into cheap plastic to reduce the cost of his Model T cars and support the people who purchased them. In 1941, when Ford unveiled a handmade car with a plastic body made entirely from plants, one reporter called it "part salad, part automobile.")
Even the paint that made it onto his cars was produced from a soybean base.
The result? Farmers bought his car by the millions, and Ford became the foremost industrialist of his age.

i have a friend who can eat soybeans plain. i tried some and in fact, their rather tasty. though what about those poor innocent animals who are dying naturally?

they're cheap ! really, it's just like the whole corn thing-
what else can we feed this overpopulated world ? you have to get people to like whatever is easiest to produce in massive quantities, whether it's formed into chips or burgers or milk. if everyone ate nutritious food that they naturally thrived on, we'd have issues other than rampant 'dis-ease'. i have special feelings for soy because i work in the industry that shamelessly promotes it for everything and probably will never stop now...and i was also vegan for seven years. i had my fill.