Time for Tofu: Evolving Food Perceptions in America
A brief paper I wrote for my Fall 2019 Expository Writing class at Harvard, “Eating Culture” with Professor Janling Fu. Enjoy!
Like how we truly are convinced that family recipes outdo any Michelin-star restaurant, it seems that eating can be symbolic of our unique social interactions in the world beyond objective taste. While we do have genetic food biases such as neophobia, or “fear of the new” that prevents consumption of potentially toxic foods, it lessens into adulthood, allowing our food preferences to evolve more contingent on social factors not inherent in the food itself (Birch 44). In other words, the social definitions of food can influence our eating experience more so than the immediate flavor. This is particularly evident in the changing perceptions of the “grossness” versus “wholesomeness” of a relatively novel food product in America: tofu.
A portmanteau of “tofu” and “turkey,” the tofu-based Tofurky has been an infamous subject of Thanksgiving disaster stories and comedian jokes, considered an inferior alternative to the indispensable protein at the heart of every Thanksgiving dinner. Yet now, tofu is a staple on many menus in its own right, whether it is featured in Clover Food Lab’s Zucchini Sandwich or college cafeterias’ salad bars. But in my Chinese-American upbringing, tofu has been a tasty constant in my life, as I have savored tofu knots in my mother’s heartwarming soups to spicy mapo tofu in family visits to China. And, nothing about tofu itself has changed — so what did?
To begin, we can first discuss what tofu is: a soft food made from soybean curd, originating from China. Rich in protein, iron, and calcium, and available in silken-soft, firm, and other permutations, tofu has been a versatile ingredient in Asian dishes for centuries, which seems to render tofu a “wholesome” food source (Shurtleff and Aoyagi). However, due to tofu’s foreign origins and relatively recent entrance into American food culture, this concept had not, and perhaps still has not fully permeated the American consciousness. Those searching for one can be met with Merriam-Webster’s definition of a soft food made by “treating soybean milk with coagulants,” or the layman Dictionary.com’s definition of a “soft, bland, white cheeselike food” “made from curdled soybean milk.” The description of the “bland” and “curdled” tofu made from mystifying “coagulants” seem to convey distaste. More important is that cheese, an unarguable staple in the American diet, is made in a parallel manner, as New York Times writer Mark Bittman bluntly describes: “you take milk and you add something that will clump it up. Period.” Cheese is made from dairy milk curd; tofu, soy milk curd. However, the public notion of cheese does not immediately include the aversive “curd”: a word more associated with tofu, as evinced by its common alternative name as “soybean curd.”
Interestingly enough, tofu was once marketed as “soy cheese” but found its niche as a meat substitute due to its protein content. In this way, predetermined notions of food categories can influence our eating before physical consumption. Food writer Maxine McBrinn notes this with her experience trying durian, a Southeast Asian fruit with odorous flesh, pondering whether her “mental construct of durian as a fruit” prevented her from “concentrating on the more pleasing tastes” found in durian (140). In other words, the durian, whose texture is more similar to an avocado, violated her Western-biased mental schema of fruit as sweet and tarty, drawing her away from purely focusing on the taste. We can also draw a similar parallel to tofu. In the United States, meat consumption skyrocketed in the 1960s with more transportation and refrigeration technologies and a rising standard of living. With heavy and hearty meat dishes — fried chicken, pork chops, grilled steaks — composing the public’s mental concept of protein sources, it is no surprise that the suggestion of a less-flavored, strangely squishy food material as a viable meat substitute in American diets would be off-putting.
With such conceptual biases in mind, our immediate social environment can further define our eating experiences. One obvious example is travel, which heightens the sense of the unknown. In McBrinn’s case, she tried and had an unpleasant reaction to durian after buying it at an outdoor market in Malaysia as a few relatives looked on with “excitement” and disgust” (137). She also notes how travel guides had warned of a smell “worse than old tennis shoes” and a flavor “likened to vomit-flavoured custard” (135). Primed with such outside negative expectations in an unfamiliar location in addition to culturally different food categories, it is not surprising someone trying a novel food would find it strange or “gross.” In the case of tofu, whether it is now or prior to the soybean industry’s surge in America a few decades ago, those in less culturally heterogeneous areas would likely only be exposed to tofu in contexts that highlight the suspicion of its taste as alien: foreign travel like McBrinn; takeout from East Asian restaurants, which are traditionally viewed as unclean and mediocre; to even a Tofurky being derided as a “fake” Thanksgiving meal. In contrast, I eat lovingly crafted tofu dishes at my family dinner table and my favorite authentic Asian restaurants. So, like Malaysians eating durian in their daily lives, I have vastly more positive social environments reinforcing and defining tofu in my diet.
Of course, broader social trends are what contribute to individual positive or negative social environments in the first place. These trends are formed by how, “as decades of increasingly sophisticated food-marketing campaigns have demonstrated,” our enjoyment of food is largely dependent on how it is sold or presented to us (Moyer). So, with online communities helping to perpetuate widespread healthy-eating culture, veganism and vegetarianism, and attention to sustainability, we see why plant-based proteins like tofu are now being marketed as “wholesome” and trendy foods, particularly in “hip” urban areas. Consequently, tofu’s social landscape has shifted: from its start in the 1970s’ “strange, hippie” environmentalist vegetarian movement, to marginal acceptance of Tofurky and other tofu foods, to today. Now, tofu is not only available on countless menus as healthy protein equals to meat, but also lauded by cookbooks and online food writers and even featured as essential in dishes, such as the “Fried 21st Century Organic Tofu” at Henrietta’s Table, one of the most esteemed restaurants in the Boston area — all because of these trends and ensuing changes in public attitude. A most fascinating example of this is New York City Chinatown’s Fong On Tofu Shop, whose success after its recent reopening is not only attributed to traditional tofu products it has served since 1933, but also to them rebranding their “old-school tofu pudding (doufu fa) as a trendy, Instagrammable dessert” to appeal to zealous foodies and vegans (Reiss). This kind of new tofu marketing as a response to popular trends, along with our increasing appreciation for Japanese, Chinese, and other tofu-centric cultures due to increased travel and ease of information exchange online, has led to a more positive reframing of tofu in America.
Indeed, this shift in tofu, from “gross” and unappetizing to “wholesome” and tasty, is what renders tofu such a fascinating case study of evolving social definitions that, regardless of its taste, can influence our eating. Literary critic William Deresiewicz argues that food is not “narrative” and does not “allow [us] to see the world in a new way,” but that trivializes the multitude of human experiences intrinsically tied to food, whether that is my vivid memories eating steamed tofu in my Chinese grandfather’s kitchen, to the rising enthusiasm for tofu in the American consciousness in the past decades. Indeed, our taste of food is emblematic of how the world can grant us distinct perspectives via preconceived categories or definitions, social experiences, or simply the trends of the time in which we experience it. When those factors change, so can whether we find food delicious, gross, or somewhere in between. This reality is akin to a first “plating” before the physical plating of food, initializing our unique “tasting” journeys — even before food touches our tastebuds.
Works Cited
Birch, Leann L. "Development of Food Preferences." Annual Review of Nutrition, vol. 19, 1999,
pp. 41-62. ProQuest, http://search.proquest.com.ezp prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/204143262?accountid=11311.
Bittman, Mark. “Giving Tofu the New Look It Deserves.” The New York Times, 7 July 2014,
www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/dining/giving-tofu-the-new-look-it-deserves.html.
Deresiewicz, William. “A Matter of Taste?” The New York Times, 26 Oct. 2012,
www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/opinion/sunday/how-food-replaced-art-as-high
culture.html.
Moyer, Michael. “Why Does Food Taste So Delicious?” Scientific American, 1 Sept. 2013,
www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-food-taste-so-delicious/.
Reiss, Aaron. “The Heir to a Tofu Dynasty Finally Learns to Make Tofu.” The New York Times,
6 Sept. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/nyregion/the-heir-to-a-tofu-dynasty-finally
learns-to-make-tofu.html.
Shurtleff, William, and Akiko Aoyagi. History of Tofu and Tofu Products (965 CE to 2013). SoyInfo Center, 2013, www.soyinfocenter.com/pdf/163/Tofu.pdf.
“Tofu.” Dictionary.com, www.dictionary.com/browse/tofu.
“Tofu.” Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tofu.
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