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There are some great Tofu suppliers in America, but also a labor saving device that allows people to easily experiment with variations themselves: https://www.

There are some great Tofu suppliers in America, but also a labor saving device that allows people to easily experiment with variations themselves: https://www.soymilkmaker.com/ https://www.soymilkmaker.com/ One of the problems is that, like so many things in America, tofu has taken on some silly political baggage. Among a significant share of the population, both conservative and health oriented, there is a common belief that soy is full of extrogen that will, if ingested, reduce masculine characteristics and emphasize feminine characteristics. The reality is that the phytoestrogens in soy do not have a significant effect on humans and we have an extremely large amount of data including the massive "China Study" that shows that. But the idea has taken hold and now many people are afraid to eat tofu because it will turn them into weak and unhealthy girls.

Snow_Falls 3y ago
Don't forget the anti-asian racism implicit to the belief that soy, a food eaten widely in asia, makes you weak and feminine (whatever that means). The backlash to soy is inextricably tied to old stereotypes of asians as weak and docile.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  Soy has long been grown in America but it isn't a traditional part of western diets and was generally considered animal feed (more so in the past than now). This isn't because Asians did eat it, but because westerners didn't in the first place.
- philwelch 3y ago
  No, it isn’t. The stereotypical “soy boy” is a white vegan polyamorous hipster from a West Coast city, and most of the backlash to soy is targeted at processed foods than Asian cuisine. It’s more adjacent to the sort of right-wing hippie natural food scene that likes to slonk raw eggs than to any sort of anti-Asian racism.
  - Klonoar 3y ago
    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?
    - philwelch 3y ago
      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.
      - Klonoar 3y ago
        > 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.
        lupusreal 3y ago
        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.
callalex 3y ago
It’s really fun asking/showing those people how much estrogen is in cow’s milk. After all, milk is meant to be consumed only by babies.

Snow_Falls 3y ago

Don't forget the anti-asian racism implicit to the belief that soy, a food eaten widely in asia, makes you weak and feminine (whatever that means). The backlash to soy is inextricably tied to old stereotypes of asians as weak and docile.

lupusreal 3y ago
Soy has long been grown in America but it isn't a traditional part of western diets and was generally considered animal feed (more so in the past than now). This isn't because Asians did eat it, but because westerners didn't in the first place.
philwelch 3y ago
No, it isn’t. The stereotypical “soy boy” is a white vegan polyamorous hipster from a West Coast city, and most of the backlash to soy is targeted at processed foods than Asian cuisine. It’s more adjacent to the sort of right-wing hippie natural food scene that likes to slonk raw eggs than to any sort of anti-Asian racism.
- Klonoar 3y ago
  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?
  - philwelch 3y ago
    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.
    - Klonoar 3y ago
      > 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.
      - lupusreal 3y ago
        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.

callalex 3y ago

It’s really fun asking/showing those people how much estrogen is in cow’s milk. After all, milk is meant to be consumed only by babies.