In praise of soybeans

One of the favourite Japanese snacks with beer is edamame, boiled green soybeans (another is, for some unfathomable reason, cheese). Yesterday, we had a dinner of edamame and soup.
Of course, the company of my wife made everything twice as good, but edamame really are a good snack, with or without beer.
Tofu, another food made from soy beans, tastes great (but it has to be fresh). O-kara, the stuff you get after making tofu (essentially the dredges from soy beans) make for excellent salads, and could probably fit well in bread.
So why do we not eat more soy beans in the world? One answer is that except for cultures where soy beans are a traditional part of the diet (like Japan and China), it is used as cattle feed. Now, I do not know how much soy beans a cow eats per day, but given how much they eat in their regular diet, I would guess enough to feed four people or so.
You could, in other words, alleviate a fair bit of world hunger by eating less meat and giving the soy beans to the starving.
There are three problems with this, though: One is that the soy beans are not where the starving people are. But transport has become cheap, and that can be solved. Africa is not further from Brazil than the US.
The second problem is that soy beans are genetically modified to give bigger crops. That should give you pause: You probably do not want to eat genetically modified crops, but you let cattle do it? Of course, non-modified strains are still available, so that should be possible to counter.
The third reason is probably the real problem: Soy beans are not processed.
Of course, you have to process them in some way to eat them (they are inedible unless boiled), but this is done at home, or in small-time shops (there are at least five within a kilometer from where we live, and people do not even eat tofu every day nowadays. Plus the supermarket tofu is made in a factory somewhere). And that is probably why people do not eat soy beans more often.
Meat, especially in America, was the industry where economics of scale was first realized. A butcher can cut a carcass in a couple of hours, so by centralizing the cutting, America took the first steps towards modern production economics. And processed food.
The value added by the factory is the same as the local butcher, if you disregard the service he provides. And that, in turn, is what makes him expensive. A cut of meat in the supermarket was the same as the butchers up until the middle of the last century (then, quality in supermarkets started to deteriorate compared to the small butcher, but that is a different story). Because if your advantage is to be cheaper than your competition, you have to become even cheaper to keep the margins of your operation.
Now, feeding soybeans to cattle will do this. It is a great feed, since they grow faster on it. And it is cheap, since it is cheap to cultivate. And people (in some countries) can afford meat (since it is cheap). But you feed the agroindustrial complex, instead of people.
"The agroindustrial comples" sounds equally sinister as "the military-industrial complex", and it is. But while the complex may be sinister, and conspire to kill its own members, the people who work there is not. They are probably as decent as anyone, and they are doing it just to feed a market demand. Humans have a problem not eating meat if they can afford it.
Eating meat every day is probably not what we were designed for, except us neanderthals (the white ones, if you wonder). People are made to eat plants more often than meat. But meat is excellent food, rich in proteins and fats, things you need to make your brain and body work well. When humans were growing up on the savannah, eating meat would have been a luxury, since it is quite hard to kill a wild animal, even using tools. Fish were probably more common in the diet of our early ancestors.
Eating meat every day is one reason behind the current obesity epidemic. If we eat the soybeans instead of giving them to the cattle, we will be healthier and we will provide means to feed more people as well (since the producers will discover this as a market). Is that a sustainable snack or what?