Want safe soy sauce? Grow your own beans and brew it yourself.

Photo courtesy of Xinhua Community College

"Why keep a cow at home just to drink milk?" A group of people in Tainan say, "To drink a sip of safe, mellow soy sauce and soy milk, we grow our own soybeans and brew our own soy sauce." This spring, Tainan City Xinhua Community College offered a hands-on pure-brewed soy sauce course that drew an enthusiastic response from students. It coincided with the GM soybean and tainted starch incidents, and the students thought: "Since GM soybeans are so unreliable, why not grow our own?" Last week, on more than 2 fen of fallow land provided free of charge by a student of the community college, they planted soybeans, and next year they will be able to taste soy sauce and soy milk made from beans they grew and brewed themselves.

Brewing soy sauce from beans you planted yourself, safeguarding sovereignty over the dinner table

Endless waves of adulterated additives have left the public "unable to eat with peace of mind." In March this year, Xinhua Community College invited the second generation of a local soy sauce factory with more than 60 years of history to offer a hands-on pure-brewed soy sauce course, letting community residents experience the arduous process of a jar of pure-brewed soy sauce, from making koji and fermenting to maturing. Many students also learned from it to defend their sovereignty over the dinner table.

Guo Zhaonan, director of Xinhua Community College who was in charge of planning the course, said that mellow-brewed soy sauce takes more than half a year, and many students only realized after the hands-on experience how hard food is to come by. At the time, adulterated soy sauce and GM soybean safety incidents kept emerging, and everyone thought: "Why don't we grow soybeans ourselves?" Later they found that a nearby agricultural research and extension station happened to have a researcher specializing in soybeans, and the two sides hit it off immediately. Nearly 20 students thus began planning to grow their own beans and brew soy sauce and soy milk.

"I never understood before why the price gap between soy sauces on the market is so large? After making soy sauce myself, it became obvious that some cheap soy sauces smell of chemicals." Class member Lin Shuling is a homemaker who cooks every day. After this class, all the soy sauce on her family's dinner table was switched to handmade brewed soy sauce. As soon as she heard they could grow soybeans themselves to make soy milk and brew soy sauce, she lent out more than 2 fen of her family's fallow land without a second thought, free of charge.

Lin Shuling said the risks of genetic modification are unclear. She used to think soybeans with a black hilum were genetically modified, but now that variety improvement technology has advanced, that can no longer be used as a judge; since they cannot fight the big GM conglomerates, they grow their own beans to protect their family's health. "I'm so looking forward to tasting the soy sauce and soy milk made from the soybeans I grew myself!"

(This article was funded by the Jianzhen Environmental Education Foundation for personnel costs, but the foundation does not interfere at all with news topic selection or interview writing, ensuring news independence.)