Soybeans

Editor's Note: The four of us are all teachers and this is the end of the semester crunch. So, apologies for the very belated post, and promises of much more to come in the near future to get us caught up.

A couple of weeks ago Joe and I drove north toward Fayette to visit a farmer by the name of Johnny Walker. Mr. Walker and his son John farm about one thousand acres in northern Tuscaloosa County. They are traditional commercial farmers, growing primarily the key cash crops of our industrial agriculture system - wheat, soybeans, and corn. Most of what they grow isn't for human consumption. It will become animal feed or be made into alternative fuels. But, the fact is, like most industrial growers, the Walkers don't ultimately know where their crops end up. Once they sell their grains to an elevator, they join the great grain river that flows across the country and propels our food system (thanks to Michael Pollan for the "river" analogy). Unlike many of the small scale producers we've dealt with so far, the Walkers have been farming for generations on the same plot of land and have seen the progress of industrial agriculture first hand. We had a fascinating conversation about the futures market, about the state of agriculture subsidies, and about the volatile economics of food. Mr. Walker told us things I'd recently been reading about in the New York Times (like this story or this one), but hearing them straight from a farmer in my own county underscored the growing complexities of the global food market.

We originally called the Walkers to see if they might have some wheat, but they informed us it was long gone. The corn too. All they had left was a few thousand bushels of soybeans, and they were about to clear the grain bins of those to make room for their wheat harvest in early June. So Joe and I came back with two huge containers of soybeans - about three bushels each, weighing in around 200 pounds. What we'll do with all these soybeans has yet to be discovered. Joe and Sarah have made flour with them, but soy flour is different than wheat flour in that it doesn't contain gluten and can't be used in bread recipes, etc. We can make tofu, but haven't had the time. Rashmi and I have boiled some of them in our pressure cooker the way we would any dried bean. The result is a fairly bland but protein heavy bean, good as a side dish with more flavorful foods. So, if you've got a dried soybean recipe, by all means let us know about it!