This is a view of a field of the Hahto variety which is a particularly fine variety for use as a shelled bean. In China the soy bean is very little used as we use beans. They do not cook the bean and eat it as we do; but instead they make it into a cheese which they call tofu, and this cheese is made by soaking the beans, grinding them into a pulp, then boiling for ten or fifteen minutes with about five volumes of water; then the milky mass is precipitated with sulphate of magnesia or citric acid, a very small amount because they use it as a curd. I have here a sample of the curd which I will pass around in a moment for you to see. This picture shows this curd pressed in large cakes. The soy bean curd is stored on wooden trays in a dark room. It is also stored in large earthen jars. They cure it and make cheese out of it which very closely resembles our American milk cheese. They also use the beans for sprouting.
The bean lacks only two things. It lacks lime and the fat-soluble vitamines. It contains a considerable amount of the fat-soluble vitamines. It is one of the very few seeds that is found to contain a sufficient amount of the fat-soluble vitamine to promote growth, so that animals will grow and develop normally on the bean alone without any other sort of fat-soluble vitamine. If the bean is sprouted, a large amount of this fat-soluble vitamine is produced by the plant itself. This is also found to be a valuable means of preventing scurvy—by sprouting the beans in this way and using the sprouts as a salad. The sprouts are used as a green vegetable. It is an easy way of getting green vegetables at any season of the year. It takes the place of ordinary greens.
Here is a courtyard full of pots in which the fermented soy beans are placed. This is a very interesting scheme they have for making a substitute for meat extract. By this means they prepare an extract which closely resembles extract of beef. In fact, it is rather a finer flavored product than meat extracts. It is made by first cooking the beans, spreading them out in the yard on trays and allowing a fungus to grow, and after two or three weeks the whole mass is put into pots of brine in the yard and allowed to remain there for a year or more, and at the end of that time the brine has become soy sauce.
This shows a mass of soy roots. It has been suggested it might be very useful to nut growers as a means of fertilizing the soil, a crop which will fertilize the soil for the trees and at the same time give a valuable return for the labor and expense. The little nodules on the roots are very numerous and show well here. They produce nitrogen, concentrated nitrogen from the air as do the nodules on the roots of alfalfa. The Scientific American recently stated that the soy bean is one of the most promising of vegetables. It provides food for man and beast. Given enough soy beans and granted the art of preparing them so that they might be served as food having sufficient diversity and palatableness, neither meat nor fish nor fat would be needed. In this respect the Germans did not prepare for war. If they had had the soy bean industry well developed it might have helped them through, and the map of the world might have been seriously changed from what it now is.
I think one of the finest of the soy beans is the Hahto variety. They grow one or two in a pod. I saw some of these beans in the market in Jerusalem forty years ago. When about three quarters grown and used as shelled beans they are exceedingly palatable. If at the dinner table today you will call for a soy bean omelet, you will be quite surprised. Dr. Morris tried it this morning and was kind enough to say it was the finest he ever ate.
The soy bean is the best of a large part of the cookery of the orient. We have been introducing it here the last few months, and it is very palatable, very digestible, and our patients like it very much. If you are interested in the soy bean, write, to W. J. Morse, or to the Agricultural Department, Bureau of Plant Industry, and they will give you a lot of interesting information about it. In starting the planting of the bean, it is necessary to inoculate the soil as in the starting of a planting of alfalfa.
President Reed: Mr. Bixby has prepared a paper on "Judging Nuts" which there is not now time for him to read. It will be inserted in the proceedings at this point.