Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America by Matthew Roth (review)

Agricultural crops often embody the longer contours of the culture, climate, environment, technology, and economics of place. The soybean offers just such a lens. How fields, neighborhoods, technologies, and policies are made and remade in the Midwest has much to do with their intersections with this legume. In Magic Bean, historian Matthew Roth offers a detailed study of one of the most well-known production crops in the United States. Soy's arrival to the heartland followed similar global economic and ecological paths taken by other plants—whether invasive, ornamental, or agricultural—that ultimately benefited or hindered farmers. Roth argues that exploring soy's cultural, ecological, scientific, economic, and political journeys reveals anew the larger, complex relationships that continue to guide and perplex American life. The "efforts of actual people who in the midst of their work did not consider themselves mere puppets of history or of capitalism" loom large in the book. So does the premise that "Societies, economies, innovation, the unfolding of history . . . are not things that run themselves but are kept in motion and given guidance by millions of separate metabolically fueled imaginations" (13).

Early chapters trace the cultural-ecological relationships of the soybean. Roth begins with soy's geographical origins, which are not in rural North Dakota or Illinois but in the northern and northeastern lowlands of China. Glycine max, derived from its wild ancestor Glycine ussurieniss, carried significant ecological contributions to the soybean plant's heartlands in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China and Manchuria. Geography posed the first challenge to adoption in the U.S., according to Roth. In the long arc of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century global trade, soybeans required environmental conditions and a level of soil fertility that the plant would ultimately find in North America's "flat, well-watered plains at the right latitudes, stretching across half a continent." But Roth insists that thriving in the Midwest meant relying on problematic ecological and economic changes that were occurring in the production landscapes of farm states. Even "when farmers were finally able to break the sod of the Midwest with John Deere's steel plow . . . the delay [in soybean cultivation] persisted" (3).

Subsequent chapters explore these intersections in well-researched, engaging prose. Roth offers a compelling account of the soybean and its significant scientific, agricultural, environmental, and technological consequences. He traces the discoveries of notable agricultural scientists such as Friedrich Haberlandt, Frank N. Meyer, Charles Piper, and William Morse; he shows soy's influence on the development of American agricultural scientific institutions such as the United States Department of Agriculture's Office of Forage-Crop Investigations; and he reveals soy's active role in American foreign policy involving peaceful trade exchanges and wartime implements. For example, the 1930s chemurgy movement highlighted soybeans as one of the central crops that united organic chemistry and rural farm production in "chemo-genetics" or "chemurgic" ways; the movement viewed farmers as "organic chemical manufacturers who produced 'raw materials'—starches, proteins, cellulose, oil—that could be transformed by the ingenuity of chemists into an array of substances" (90). Although one of the movement's scientific founders, William J. Hale, focused on soybeans' many uses "such as in soaps, inks, varnishes, and enamels," Roth suggests that the industrialist Henry Ford became soy's most enthusiastic supporter when he instructed scientists "at the Edison Institute at Greenfield Village, which included a chemistry lab and experimental farm . . . to focus their efforts on soybeans, reportedly after he wandered into the lab one day and idly picked up, and then perused from cover to cover, a copy of Piper and Morse's The Soybean" (91). Roth also examines the soybean's central role in World War I and World War II when these legumes offered much during years of shortages and rationing. Of course, calls by the U.S. government for Americans to "consume more of their soybeans directly, rather than via their role in feeding livestock" were met with...