50 Fun Facts About Soybeans

Which American carmaker unveiled a plastic-bodied prototype in 1941 that became known as the soybean car?

Henry Ford wanted to join farming to industry, so the car wore some fourteen plastic panels on a tubular steel frame. Wartime cuts to car production ended the experiment.

Which NFL team was founded by A. E. Staley, the company that made Decatur the Soybean Capital of the World?

The Chicago Bears began as the Decatur Staleys, a works team. George Halas took the club north in 1921 with $5,000 from the firm, on condition that it kept the Staley name for a season.

Which Founding Father, the first American known to mention tofu, posted soybeans home from London in 1770?

Benjamin Franklin tucked a few of the beans into a letter to John Bartram. He had come across the curd made from them during his time in London.

At Japan's Setsubun festival in early February, families throw roasted soybeans to drive what out of the house?

Demons, called oni, are the target, and a relative often plays one in a mask. Afterwards it is customary to eat one roasted soybean for every year of your life, plus one more for luck.

In Japanese folklore, the fried tofu pouches called abura-age are said to be the favourite food of which animal?

Fox spirits, or kitsune, are said to love fried tofu, which is why a bowl of udon topped with it is called kitsune udon. The same pouches wrap the rice of inari sushi.

Which Japanese name, meaning stem beans, is given to young green soybeans boiled in the pod and salted?

Edamame were once sold still attached to the stalk, which is where the name comes from. The pods are usually picked by hand so that the plant is not damaged.

Which legume contains more fat than the soybean, at close to half its weight?

Peanuts are about 48% fat against the soybean's 20%. The soybean wins on protein, though, at 36% of its weight to 25%.

Since a 1987 trial at The Gazette in Iowa, most American daily newspapers have used soybean oil in which product?

Ink based on soybean oil came out of a search that began when 1970s oil prices pushed publishers away from petroleum. More than 2,000 plant oil recipes were tested before one worked.

Which South American country overtook the United States around 2020 as the world's top soybean grower?

Brazil turned its Cerrado savanna into productive cropland, work that earned the 2006 World Food Prize. Varieties bred for low latitudes in the 1980s did the rest.

The soybean's genus name, Glycine, was coined by Linnaeus from a Greek word with which meaning?

Sweet is the sense of the Greek glykos. The plant Linnaeus had in mind was a relative with a sugary root, and botanists later moved it out of the genus altogether.

Bacteria living in nodules on soybean roots pull which gas from the air and turn it into plant food?

Nitrogen is turned into ammonia inside the nodules by Bradyrhizobium bacteria, so the crop needs less fertilizer. Farmers in the Dust Bowl years planted soy to revive exhausted soil.

Tofu is made by curdling soy milk and pressing the curds, much like the making of which dairy food?

Cheese curds are set with rennet, while tofu makers use mineral salts or acids. The more water is pressed out of the curds, the firmer the finished block.

Which Japanese soy sauce brand sells its product in a tabletop bottle designed by Kenji Ekuan in 1961?

Kikkoman was formed in 1917 when eight family brewers in the town of Noda merged into one company.

European Union food labels must highlight soy in bold or capitals because it is one of 14 listed what?

Allergens on the list also include milk, eggs and shellfish. Soy proteins are far weaker triggers than those in shellfish, so severe reactions to soy are rare.

Which Japanese cooking style grills fish or chicken under a shiny glaze of soy sauce, mirin and sugar?

Teriyaki joins teri, the shine that the sugar gives the sauce, to yaki, meaning to grill or broil. The style is thought to have developed in Japan during the 1600s.

Which firm cake of whole soybeans, bound together by a white mould, comes from the Indonesian island of Java?

Tempeh is knitted into a sliceable block by a Rhizopus fungus. It was first made in Central Java and was a common food there by about 1700.

Which salty Japanese paste of fermented soybeans is stirred into dashi stock to make a famous soup?

Miso fed armies as well as families: it was issued as military rations in Japan's warring-states era, and making it earned feudal lords a good income.

Roughly three-quarters of the world's soybean harvest ends up being used for which purpose?

Livestock feed takes most of the crop, mainly as the protein-rich meal left once the oil has been extracted. Growing demand for meat has driven soy planting since the 1980s.

Soy wax, made by fully hydrogenating soybean oil, is mostly poured into containers to make which household item?

Candles of soy wax are usually sold in containers because the wax is softer than paraffin and melts at a lower temperature. Additives are needed to make it stand up as a pillar.

By 2000 soybeans covered more than 70 million American acres, second only to which other crop?

Corn stayed ahead, yet soybeans had been practically unseen on American farms in 1900. Until the 1920s the plant was grown mainly as forage.

Beyond its saltiness, soy sauce is prized for which taste, first identified by a Tokyo chemist in 1908?

Umami was traced to glutamic acid by Kikunae Ikeda, who proposed it as a basic taste of its own. Fermented sauces rich in glutamate were already seasoning food in ancient Rome.

Mapo tofu, soft bean curd in a fiery sauce with numbing peppercorns, comes from which Chinese province?

Sichuan diners trace the dish to a Chengdu eatery opened by a couple named Chen in the 1860s or 1870s. Mapo means a pockmarked old woman, so it is sometimes called pockmarked grandma's bean curd.

Big soy traders pledged in a moratorium not to buy beans from newly deforested farms in which rainforest?

The Amazon pledge came in July 2006, after Greenpeace, McDonald's and European food retailers pressed traders such as Cargill to act. It began as a two-year trial and was later made indefinite.

Which Japanese breakfast food is whole soybeans fermented until sticky, slimy and strong-smelling?

Natto gets its texture from the bacterium Bacillus subtilis, which once came from the straw the beans were wrapped in. A lab-grown starter replaced the straw in the early 20th century.

Besides soybeans, which roasted and crushed grain goes into the mash for most Japanese soy sauce?

Wheat is what sets most Japanese soy sauce apart from tamari, a darker, richer style that contains little or none of the grain. That makes tamari useful for people who avoid gluten.

Hoisin sauce, a dark glaze built on fermented soybean paste, takes its name from the Cantonese word for what?

Seafood is the literal meaning, yet the sauce contains none and is rarely served with fish. It is better known as a dip for Peking duck and a glaze for roast meat.

Soybean oil is the main American raw material for which renewable fuel, sold in blends such as B20?

Biodiesel is usually blended with petroleum diesel, and the B number gives its share: B20 is one part in five biodiesel, while B100 is the pure fuel.

Soy isoflavones are plant compounds whose shape lets them weakly mimic which human hormone?

Estrogen is imitated closely enough that the compounds can act both with and against the hormone. The soybean plant itself uses them to summon the root bacteria that help it grow.

Stinky tofu, a fermented snack known for its powerful smell, is a night-market favourite on which island?

Taiwan even has a whole street of stinky tofu restaurants, Shenkeng Old Street in New Taipei. The snack is cooked many ways there but is most often served fried.

North America's first soybean crop grew in 1765 from seed that Samuel Bowen brought to which colony?

Georgia's surveyor-general planted the seed on Skidaway Island because Bowen had no land of his own yet. Bowen went on to make soy sauce near Savannah and sell it to England.

Which US president's brief 1973 ban on soybean exports pushed Japanese buyers to seek a new supplier?

Richard Nixon's embargo lasted only a week, imposed after futures markets wrongly signalled a shortage. That was long enough to convince Japan it could not rely on American supplies.

Which American company launched Roundup Ready soybeans in the 1990s, engineered to survive its own weedkiller?

Monsanto's launch changed the crop fast: about 8% of American soybeans were genetically modified in 1997, and 93% by 2010. The gene that shrugs off the spray came from a bacterium.

Which mineral, better known as the raw material of plaster, is the traditional coagulant for Chinese-style tofu?

Gypsum, or calcium sulfate, is quarried and needs no refining, which makes it the cheapest way to set soy milk. It gives a curd that is tender but slightly brittle.

Nigari, the first coagulant used to set tofu in Japan, is a bitter mineral salt produced from what?

Seawater yields nigari once its table salt has been removed, leaving a bitter brine rich in magnesium chloride. Tofu makers still use it because it keeps the flavour of the beans.

Soy is called a complete protein because it supplies all nine of which nutrients that the body cannot make?

Essential amino acids have to come from food, and most other beans run low in at least one of them. That makes soy a mainstay of vegetarian and vegan diets.

Doenjang, a pungent paste made from dried soybean bricks called meju, is a staple of which country's cooking?

Korea has records of the paste from 683, when it was prepared for a royal wedding. The bricks are tied up with straw and hung under the eaves to dry before brewing.

On American supermarket shelves, soybean oil is most often bottled and sold under which generic label?

Vegetable oil on a label very often means soybean oil, one of the most widely used cooking oils. Liquid or partly hydrogenated, it also goes into a wide range of processed foods.

Soybean oil ranks second in world production of edible oils, behind which oil pressed from a tropical fruit?

Palm oil leads because a plantation yields about ten times more oil than the same area of soybeans, with both the fruit and its kernel pressed.

Which delicate style of tofu, made without pressing the curds, is named after a smooth fabric?

Silken tofu can be set right in its container, since it needs no pressing. Even the kinds labelled firm are more delicate than ordinary pressed tofu.

Which seasonal signal tells a soybean plant that it is time to produce its small white or purple flowers?

Shorter days are the cue, with flowering often starting once daylight drops below about 12.8 hours. The exact trigger differs from one variety to the next.

Which emulsifier, extracted mainly from soybean oil, helps chocolate flow smoothly in the factory?

Lecithin takes its name from the Greek word for egg yolk, which is also full of it. In confectionery it thins the mix and stands in for more expensive ingredients.

Vitasoy, a soy milk brand first delivered door to door by bicycle in 1940, was founded in which Asian city?

Hong Kong entrepreneur Lo Kwee-seong chose soy milk because many Chinese people are lactose intolerant. The business stopped during the Japanese occupation and resumed in 1945.

Soybean flowers make nectar that bees enjoy, yet the plant sets seed without insects by which method?

Self-pollination takes place inside each small, self-fertile flower, tucked where a leaf joins the stalk. Bees still call in because the nectar is high in sugar.

The most damaging soybean pest in the United States, which attacks the plant's roots, is which kind of animal?

A nematode is the culprit: the soybean cyst nematode can cut yields by 30% with no visible symptoms. Females swell until they burst out of the root.

Which food is the thin film lifted from the surface of simmering soy milk and dried into sheets?

Yuba, also called tofu skin, is not strictly tofu at all, because no coagulant is used to make it. Written records of the food go back to 16th-century China.

Which roasted soybean flour, whose Japanese name means yellow flour, is dusted over rice cakes such as mochi?

Kinako is made by grinding roasted soybeans to a fine powder, usually after the skins have been removed. It also coats dango, dumplings made from rice flour.

Which Japanese word names the pulp strained out when soybeans are pureed and filtered to make soy milk?

Okara is the insoluble part of the bean and the oldest of the basic types of soy fibre. Far from being thrown away, it is cooked in several East Asian cuisines.

After soybeans are cracked and rolled into flakes, which solvent is used to extract their oil?

Hexane washes the oil out of the flakes, and what is left becomes high-protein soybean meal. The beans themselves are only about 18 to 19 percent oil.

In Chinese myth, which legendary emperor proclaimed soybeans one of five sacred plants nearly 5,000 years ago?

Shennong's five were soybeans, rice and three other grains. Whatever the myth says, soybeans were an important crop by the time of the Zhou dynasty, which began around 1046 BC.

Which name do botanists give the scar on a soybean seed, which may be brown, buff, gray or yellow?

Hilum is the term, and at one end of it sits the micropyle, a tiny opening in the seed coat that lets in water for sprouting. A seed whose coat is cracked will not germinate.