A History of Soy Milkv

We live in a golden age of milks. You can crown your latte with a foam of almond, coconut, oat, or pea; dunk your cookies in hemp or rice; drown your bran flakes in hazelnut, flax, or quinoa. Any legume, grain, seed, or nut, it seems, can be wrung into a mild and milky fluid.

Among this next-gen crowd of plant-based milk analogs, soy milk, the first widely available nondairy milk, stands apart as the unfashionable older sister—a bit dowdy, a bit behind the times. But within the family of soy foods, soy milk is a relative newcomer, with a thin history prior to the 20th century. Other soy foods, such as tofu, tempeh, and yuba, have long been used in a variety of ways in multiple East Asian cuisines, but soy milk played only a limited role in traditional diets in China. The liquid produced from ground-up soybeans that were soaked overnight, it was sometimes served as part of a Chinese breakfast, warmed up and sweetened; seasoned with salt, it became a dipping sauce for youtiao or fried crullers. Most often, it was not a final product but an intermediate step in the production of tofu.

Unlike the ubiquity of miso or soy sauce, the popularity of soy milk in the US is not the result of the adoption of a traditional foodstuff by a widening group of consumers. In the hands of American technologists, Adventist missionaries, hippie environmentalists, and East Asian entrepreneurs, soy milk was always viewed as a food of the future, a salvific beige fluid that held the solution for all our nutritional, spiritual, and environmental travails. For decades, soy milk’s acolytes in the US waited for its time to come, believing that a world that embraced soy milk was a world where the future could overcome the woes of the past. But, although soy milk’s day did arrive at last, its moment in the spotlight of American consumer affections now seems vanishingly brief.