The Source of Soy

The Cornucopia Institute is a watchdog group "promoting economic justice for family scale farming." They do in-depth research on the status of issues effecting small farmers and consumers with special attention given to the "organic industry" (which, by the way, is gradually losing more and more of its luster and integrity since being "bureaucratized" by the Federal government).

One of Cornucopia's most recent in-depth projects was to determine the quality of the soy going into the hundreds of organic soy-based products now on the market. That is, are soy products that claim to be organic verifiably organic? Are the companies producing or selling them transparent about their processes? Is the soy GMO? Has it been produced with hexane, an EPA-listed contaminant used in much commercial soil processing? Etc?

Cornucopia developed a thorough screening process for ranking companies producing organic-labeled soy products and assigned a rating based on the company's practices and their transparency in providing information.

Here is the page that details the study, provides an executive summary, and provides a very detailed scorecard for the scores of companies rated. It's easy to see how your favorite organic soy companies or product lines fared using the scorecard (by ranking or alphabetically by company/product name).

The rankings go from zero to five "soy beans," five being the best. Here are how a few well-known brands ranked:

Eden Foods (5 out of 5)

Tofurky (4 out of 5)

Nasoya (4 out of 5)

Vitasoy (3 out of 5)

Harris Teeter Private Label (3 out of 5)

Trader Joe's Private Label (2 out of 5)

Boca Burgers (0 out of 5)

Pacific Foods (0 out of 5)

Silk (0 out of 5)

365 by Whole Foods Market (0 out of 5)

Kirkland by Costco (0 out of 5)

Wegmans (0 out of 5)

The above represents a small sampling of the scores of companies profiled. Two things to bear in mind:

1. A company might have scored poorly for their unwillingness to divulge information about the sourcing of their soy as well as for the actual sourcing itself.

2. Almost all private-label brands (TJ's, 365 by Whole Foods, Kirkland by Costco, et al) scored poorly because they have no idea where their "organic" soy comes from because the production is handled by multiple layers of "middle men" who prepare soy products for private label brands.

This research is another example of just how complicated "food" has become in our modern system—even "organic" food. I'm especially bummed about the amount of hexane my liver has probably struggled to process after polishing off several quarts of Silk Nog over the holidays. :-)

There remains no substitute for growing one's own food and eating it in as pure (unprocessed) form as possible with one's personal "beyond organic" standards of integrity.

[Two other helpful resources for understanding the "organic" food industry on the Cornucopia web site are these: a graphic showing who really owns the organic food sector (increasingly, the large agribusinesses) and an animated graphic showing the consolidations that took place in the organic food industry between 1995 and 2007. Both graphics were prepared by Dr. Phil Howard at Michigan State University.]

(Thanks to the Cornucopia Institute for the unauthorized use of the image above from their web site.)