Soy: Traditional craft, miracle crop, male threat?

Since soybeans emerged in China around 9000 years ago, this multipurpose plant has been pressed into tofu, fermented into sauces and even been transformed into cars and suits.

This ingredient is the backbone of many time-honoured crafts – which Yoora Yoon and Jung Eun Chae uphold at their award-winning Chae restaurant outside Melbourne.

Instead of relying on supermarket-ready products, Chae is dedicated to making soy sauce and condiments the classic Korean way – fermented in nearby onggi jars, over months and years.

My grandma and mum always make their own soy sauce.

Chef Jung Eun Chae

This commitment to centuries-old traditions has led to Chae winning the Good Food Guide’s Chef of the Year award, and it’s sparked widespread curiosity and appreciation, too – her restaurant’s wait list once stretched to 10,000 people.

And while some people might dismiss soybeans as bland or underwhelming, cookbook author Tony Tan has maximised this ingredient in fascinating and diverse ways – from enjoying it in mapo tofu to turning it into cheesecake.

Tofu is obviously like a blank canvas. You can do wonderful, wonderful things with it.

Cookbook author Tony Tan

In addition to claims that soybeans are a threat to men, you might have heard this staple increases your risk of breast cancer or you have to drink 22 cups of soy to get the calcium equivalent of one glass of cow’s milk. Is any of this actually true? Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris, program director of nutrition and food sciences at the University of South Australia, offers a health expert’s perspective on consuming edamame, tofu and all things soy.

Credits

Should You Really Eat That? is created by Lee Tran Lam

Mixed by Max Gosford

Artwork: Grace Lee

Theme music: Sydney Sunset by Nooky

This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal of the Eora nation. I’d like to pay my respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country.

Jung Eun Chae: My grandma and mum always make their own soy sauce.

Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: And the amount of soy milk they consumed a day was sort of around three litres a day, which is huge.

Tony Tan: Tofu obviously is like a blank canvas. You can do wonderful, wonderful things with it.

Lee Tran Lam: Soybeans first emerged in China around 9000 years ago. This multipurpose plant has been pressed into tofu, a salty sauce and roasted soybeans have even doubled as a coffee substitute. What’s been called a miracle crop is also known as ‘green gold’ in Paraguay, so why has #soyboy become a modern insult – and does soy have a concerning impact on our bodies?

I’m Lee Tran Lam and you’re listening to Should You Really Eat That?

This show explores the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet.

Should you embrace olive oil, native ingredients and chocolate? Or skip the butter, salt and soy? It can be bewildering keeping up with what’s quote unquote good for you and so many different beliefs shape what we consume – what’s fact and what’s fashion and whose perspective is being overlooked? Untangling all of this can be tricky, which is why I started this podcast!

Today’s episode is on soy.

From Indonesian tempeh to Nigerian beske, soybeans offer a surefire protein fix. Soy sauce has salted food for millennia and Japan’s setsubun festival is celebrated by tossing roasted soybeans at evil spirits to frighten them away. But recently the #soyboy insult has created a panic over this staple. So what’s with the fearmongering over soy?

And does it overlook how foundational soybeans are to cuisines around the world – like in South Korea, where 400-year-old soy sauce is brought out on special occasions?

Let’s talk to a couple who create Korean condiments the traditional way in Melbourne.

Jung Eun Chae: My name is Jung Eun Chae. People probably know Chae as a restaurant, but it’s my family name. I’m also author of the cooking book called Chae.

Yoora Yoon: My name is Yoora Yoon and I’m the husband of Chae. I’m the other half of Chae restaurant. I look after the business, everything except what’s happening in the kitchen. And we’ve been married for 9 years.

Jung Eun Chae: No, 10 years.

Jung Eun Chae: It’s our 10 years anniversary.

Lee Tran Lam: Chae was born in South Korea and in her book, she writes about how her mum would craft soy sauce and other staples entirely from scratch.

Jung Eun Chae: Every year, every winter, my mum usually goes back to her hometown. And then she make a fermented soybean block. Two months later and then she make a soy sauce and soybean paste with my grandma all together.

Lee Tran Lam: These flavours were so ubiquitous that Chae doesn’t remember her first taste of soy. But gochujang – a spicy Korean condiment made with the by-product of soy sauce – is something she recalls trying for the first time in Australia.

Yoora Yoon: The store-bought gochujang tastes so differently to what she was used to.

Lee Tran Lam: She’s allowed to say the Australian version’s disgusting if she wants.

Yoora Yoon: No, not disgusting. [Laughs] Very sweet.

Jung Eun Chae: Yeah, so sweet. And then not much flavour, just sweet like sugar.

Lee Tran Lam: Instead of relying on supermarket-ready products, Chae’s dedicated herself to the slow tempo of ageing condiments over months and years. Her commitment to centuries-old traditions has led to the Good Food Guide naming her Chef of the Year, and her restaurant’s wait list once stretched to 10,000 people.

Which is amazing, as it can only seat six diners at a time.

The restaurant started in the couple’s tiny Melbourne apartment, but they relocated it to a house in Cockatoo, an hour outside the city, in the Dandenong ranges, so they could properly honour Korean traditions.

Yoora Yoon: We needed more space to store those condiments. They are typically stored outdoors in a traditional clay jar called onggi.

Lee Tran Lam: These vessels – from a seventh-generation onggi maker in South Korea – now sit on Chae and Yoora’s porch, in rows filled with ageing soy sauce, fermented soybean paste, and gochuchang chilli paste.

Yoora Yoon: Yeah, so everything happens in our house.

Lee Tran Lam: There aren’t many examples of Australian-made soy sauce. Yaemaejin on Sydney’s outskirts, also ferments Korean soy sauce in onggi vessels. And Wildflower brewery has aged soy sauce in its beer barrels. Their flavours have a salty depth and dimension I’ve found hard to forget. You can taste the time that’s gone into them.

Chae says fermenting Korean condiments is “like developing film” – dedication and skill are required, and there’s an element of mystery over how the final result will turn out.

So how does the process work?

Yoora Yoon: The first step of making soybean paste and soy sauce is you basically cook soybean until they’re really soft and then you mash it and then you make it into a rectangular soybean block, which is called meju. So meju is the fundamental ingredient for making soybean paste and soy sauce. You basically create a suitable environment for ripe bacteria to grow inside that meju.

Jung Eun Chae: Fresh hay has really lots of good bacteria inside. So my mum’s always collecting the fresh hay from the farmers, and then she prepares to ferment it.

Yoora Yoon: You basically create a suitable environment for bacteria to grow within the meju block. You basically submerge those blocks in the saltwater for a couple months. What happens is during that two-month period is that saltwater becomes darker in colour. You end up with this naturally fermented umami-infused saltwater, which we now call soy sauce.

Basically, soy sauce and the soybean paste comes from the one, one same batch. So after that couple of months, you eventually remove the meju. That will eventually become soybean paste after at least a one-year ageing process. We use our soybean paste and soy sauce after one-year mark. But the longer you let it age, the deeper the umami becomes.

Lee Tran Lam: It’s a tradition Chae continues from her mum. But with ready-made bottles available at shops, why do this yourself?

Jung Eun Chae: We always make our own soy sauce and soybean paste.

Yoora Yoon: She just prefers to making her own.

Jung Eun Chae: She is used to it.

Yoora Yoon: And she’s been making condiments all her life. It’s just a way of living.

Lee Tran Lam: From the thick, sweet glugs of Indonesian kecap manis to lighter splashes of Japanese usukuchi shoyu, soy sauce can have a diversity of flavours. So what do Korean versions taste like?

Yoora Yoon: Korean soy sauce is divided into two large categories.

Jung Eun Chae: One is the soy sauce for soup and the other one for like a sweeter soy sauce.

Yoora Yoon: So the soup soy sauce is called guk ganjang. And the sweet soy sauce is called –

Jung Eun Chae: Jin ganjang.

Yoora Yoon: Guk ganjang – guk literally translates to soup. It’s literally soup soy sauce. Guk ganjang.

Jin ganjang has more sweetness, it’s commonly used in stir-fry.

Jung Eun Chae: Stir-fry or dipping sauce, anything except the soup.

Lee Tran Lam: With the many condiments they’re ageing in onggi, what’s the oldest one they can turn to?

Jung Eun Chae: Four years –

Yoora Yoon: Four year old –

Jung Eun Chae: Soybean paste.

Lee Tran Lam: This is old – but soy condiments can last for ages. Korean food master Ki Soon-do has served her family’s soy sauce to American President Donald Trump. This soy sauce has been around for nearly four centuries, making it older than the settlement of the United States.

Back to Chae and her fermented soy paste. It develops lots of flavours after many years: sweetness, saltiness, everything in one.

Jung Eun Chae: It can be a like a mother, like a medicine, if you feel sick or not enough energy, you just make a doenjang tea with warm water mixed with just one spoon of doenjang and then drink it.

Lee Tran Lam: So doenjang is the name for Korean fermented soybean paste. As a non-Korean-speaker, I must admit, it’s a word I’ve repeatedly messed up until Yoora taught me how to say it correctly.

Yoora Yoon: Really slowly, it’s dwenjung. Really fast and it sounds like doh-en-jung, dwen-jung. It’s actually one syllable – dwen. Almost like ‘when’, but you say ‘dwhen’.

Lee Tran Lam: What’s an easy way to make the most of doenjang?

Jung Eun Chae: A soup, like a doenjang guk.

Yoora: Not just a classic doenjang soup, but we also like to be creative and make a –

Jung Eun Chae: Doenjang-mite.

Yoora Yoon: We recently did an event with a cheese retailer. We mixed doenjang and cashew and other ingredients to create like a spread. We thought it goes really well with the melted cheese.

Lee Tran Lam: Chae and Yoora feel a responsibility to educate people about doenjang – which is similar to Japanese miso, but not as well known.

My favourite doenjang description is from a user called on the Maangchi Korean cooking site. Kumaxx says doenjang tastes like the “hardcore version of miso”, in a schoolyard, “doenjang would punch miso in the nose and take his lunch money”.

The process for making doenjang is not so violent, though!

Yoora Yoon: With the miso, you inoculate soybean with the one strand of bacteria, which is koji. But with the doenjang, we use multiple bacteria to inoculate soybean. Using multiple bacteria creates the three-dimensional, deeper flavour.

Lee Tran Lam: This reminds me of the long process of crafting miso. One of Japan’s oldest producers has fermented their deeply rich red miso the same way for over 600 years. The intensity of their soybean paste comes from ageing it for at least “two summers and two winters”.

Speaking of summers, there’s a recipe in Chae’s cookbook I’m curious about: kong guksu – noodles served with chilled soybean milk.

Jung Eun Chae: My parents loved this soup in summer time. They always make and they keep in the fridge for whole summer season.

Yoora Yoon: You can either add sugar or salt as condiments. And my family, who is from Incheon, they like to add sugar. But Chae’s parents from down south, they almost always add salt.

Lee Tran Lam: Soy dishes can seem understated – but like a quietly elegant dress, simplicity is part of the charm. In Tokyo, cold-pressed tofu served with just-crushed ginger and soy sauce left me jolted by how good this low-key combination was. And my favourite recipe from Emiko Davies’ Gohan cookbook is the shira-ae, where you mash silken tofu with sesame, sugar, soy sauce and miso into a flavour-loaded sauce you lavish over vegetables.

Some people might be underwhelmed by tofu, but you shouldn’t underestimate it.

Jung Eun Chae: Tofu is like a cheese for me, you can use for anything: you can make a cookie, you can fry, steam – you can use for everything. It’s like a base sauce for Korea cuisine.

Lee Tran Lam: Soy foods can be polarising – like natto. This sticky stringy fermented soy staple is known for its health benefits, and has been beloved in Japan for centuries, but also appears in Sweden’s Disgusting Food museum.

Yoora Yoon: We have a similar fermented soybean food, cheonggukjang. It’s known for its stinky smell, but like any other food – sometimes you don’t like the smell, but the more you try, the flavour eventually grows on you. So you have to push through that phase.

Lee Tran Lam: It’s also worth persisting with traditions – during a recent visit to South Korea, Yoora and Chae met with artisan condiment makers dismayed by the industry’s decline.

Yoora Yoon: What they are saying is this business is not very profitable. It takes a lot of investment, a lot of space and a lot of labour. It’s not like you make it and you generate revenue the next day.You make and then at least a year later, you start making money.

Jung Eun Chae: But you have to find the market.

Yoora Yoon: And unfortunately, back home in South Korea, people don’t really appreciate the home-made condiments.

Lee Tran Lam: But these artisan makers were happy to see how young Yoora and Chae are – a new generation upholding the craft.

This makes me think of Yasuo Yamamoto: a fifth-generation soy sauce maker in Shodoshima, a Japanese island that’s produced this condiment for four centuries. He brews his sauce in traditional kioke barrels – some bought from a craftsman who hadn’t sold these casks since World War II. Reporter Hannah Kirshner has covered Yasuo’s tradition-reviving efforts on the Proof podcast. Only 1 per cent of Japan’s soy sauce is fermented in traditional kioke barrels, so he runs an annual summit to save this craft – there’s even a hula competition involving the wooden hoops that hold these barrels together.

The cultural and culinary impact of soy goes far beyond Japan and Korea.

Tony Tan: Hello, my name is Tony Tan. I am a trained chef. I run a cooking school in Trentham in Victoria. And my cookbook is called Tony Tan’s Asian Cooking Class.

My earliest memories of eating tofu was – two things, actually. One of them is laksa, cooked by my sister – it’s puff tofu, or deep fried tofu, and it is soaked with coconut milk and spices. It’s so delicious that it stayed with me forever. The other dish is something that my mother makes: soft, soft tofu with a little bit of soy sauce, a touch of chilli and a mountain of spring onions.

When I ate these tofu dishes, it was in my home town called Kuantan in Malaysia. My sister had a little coffee shop and my mother had a restaurant. And at the same time, she was the home cook for all of us.

As a chef, I love using tofu. A lot of people tend to think that it is bland – it is never bland. I use tofu in dim sums or in yum cha dishes. I use tofu in my cheesecakes.

And that’s fermented cheesecake, which I think is just spectacular.

I also use tofu with lemongrass and that’s a stir-fried tofu and of course one of the most famous Asian dishes, as far as tofu is concerned, is mapo tofu.

Lee Tran Lam: That meaty, spicy Sichuan tofu dish is named after the small-pox-scarred face of Mrs Chen, who served the dish in her Chengdu restaurant in the 1800s.

Throughout Tony’s career, soy has been part of his culinary repertoire. Like when he cooked at Shakahari in Melbourne, many decades ago.

Tony Tan: Being a vegetarian restaurant, obviously all of us really want to use things that are protein-rich. And one of them obviously is tofu.

Lee Tran Lam: Tofu’s health-food associations might lead people to dismiss it as daggy hippie food. But Tony’s aware of how limitless soy can be – you can make crisp yuba, or tofu skin, from soy milk …

Tony Tan: Simmering it very gently then afterwards and lifting up the skin that forms on top of the milk.

Lee Tran Lam: Chopped tofu also holds a lot of promise.

Tony Tan: And cutting it up into cubes, you know, and then deep frying it and then turning that into a satay, you know, mixed with onions as well as capsicums. And then, of course, we serve that with peanut sauce, which is just sensational.

Lee Tran Lam: But in the 1980s, at the start of Tony’s career, how did people respond to soy foods?

Tony Tan: When I was being trained in France, I can remember speaking to some of the chefs there, and they all said that, ‘oh, this is Western food. We don’t use soy products you know. This is something from Asia. We only use things like cream and butter’, and all that sort of thing.

Since then, you find that there are little bits of tofu that are slowly creeping into the Western repertoire.

Lee Tran Lam: Copenhagen’s acclaimed Noma restaurant has plated pumpkin seed “tofu” with grilled roses, while an Orthodox Jew invented the The Tofutti Cutie, “one of the greatest vegan junk foods of all time,” according to Elissa Goldstein on SBS Food; and Alexis Gabriel Aïnouz, known online as Alex French Guy Cooking, has accessorised tofu with maple syrup, almonds and chocolate.

Yes, tofu can easily flex as a dessert.

Tony Tan: And just adding even just a little bit of honey or sugar syrup to it and all kinds of flavouring ingredients right from vanilla, ooh, to pandan leaves, create those multi layers and everybody loves eating it because they just don’t think that it’s tofu. [Laughs]

Tofu is like milk. It’s a vehicle. With milk, you can turn it to just about anything you can think of under the sun. Tofu obviously is like a blank canvas. You can do wonderful, wonderful things with it.

Lee Tran Lam: Tony has even crafted cheesecake out of fermented tofu.

Tony Tan: Fermented tofu is really very much like a soft cheese with a bit of a funky smell that could approximate blue cheese.

In my cooking class here in Trentham, what I tend to do is I put out jars of different tofu-related things and then try to explain to them that you really have got to think out of the box. And this is how this cheesecake came about. Because, I mean, you know, using fermented tofu, which sounds on paper, it sounds a bit weird, but once you eat it, it is just sensational.

I’ve got this fermented tofu called nanru in Mandarin. What I did was I mashed it up with Philadelphia cream cheese and then baked that off. I would serve that quite surreptitiously to people who come to the cooking class. And they say, ‘oh, yum, this is delicious!’ And if you serve that with poached fruit, it’s fantastic.

Lee Tran Lam: This cross-cultural embracing of tofu shows we’ve come a long way since the snobbery over ordering soy milk in your coffee.

But there’s still some prejudice around this: “For members of the alt-right, dairy milk symbolises strength of body and society … Soy milk represents weakness, emasculation, and all things politically correct,” write academics and for The Conversation website. The #soyboy insult emerges from such thinking, so how does Tony respond to this belief that men who consume soy are somehow lesser?

Tony Tan: It’s all about prejudice. It’s also about misunderstanding. It’s also about educating them. And it’s also about making sure that we have to encourage a deeper understanding – we have got to open our minds in understanding what soy milk, soy produce is all about.

Lee Tran Lam: Racism around soy has been fermenting for a long time: in Australia’s first cookbook, from 1864, author Edward Abbott repeats the rumour that soy sauce is made from crushed-up cockroaches.

The Maintenance Phase podcast notes that in the 19th century, the meat-eating British even used the vegetarian and soy diets of people in Asia to rationalise their colonialism.

The idea that soy is for weak and inferior populations still persists – especially for dudes!

An infamous Men’s Health article from 2009 had the clickbait headline: “Is this the most dangerous food for men?”

Its intro says: “There may be a hidden dark side to soy, one that has the power to undermine everything it means to be male.”

There’s also fear that soy foods can bring on breast cancer in women.

Is there anything solid to these claims?

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: Hi, I’m Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris. I’m the program director of nutrition and food sciences at the University of South Australia. And I’m also an accredited dietitian and an accredited sports dietitian.

So my background is Greek. We are Orthodox Christians. Throughout the Orthodox calendar, roughly about half of the year, you eat vegan.

Soy milk became the replacement for cow’s milk. There’s certain things I don’t like soy milk in, and that’s probably just hot tea and coffee, but in other things like cereal, iced coffees, iced drinks, I’m quite happy with it, and do enjoy it.

Soybeans aren’t just appreciated in Asia: they’ve been used as a coffee alternative in Switzerland, Russia and the US; and American car-maker Henry Ford even attempted to make vehicles and suits out of soybeans.

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: Who doesn’t love tofu? I’ve got a 16-year-old boy who loves tofu. We’ve got a stir-fry and he nicks it all. And it’s like, hey, where’s the rest of it?

Lee Tran Lam: Edamame, tempeh and other foods that naturally showcase soybeans are worth stealing, too.

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: It’s such a broadly used product, isn’t it? And it’s got a lot of health benefits. When we talk about people having a wide and varied diet, you know, this is one of those other foods that people should try to incorporate into their diet.

They’re a great addition to stews and soups and curries and all sorts of things. But then I guess the most popular one would be soy milk. The reason it has become so popular is because a lot of people have lactose malabsorption and of course soy milk is free of any lactose.

Lee Tran Lam: The majority of the world has trouble digesting lactose – so people turn to cartons of soy milk as an alternative, while others skip traditional milk for ethical or environmental reasons.

Because soybeans contain phytoestrogens and isoflavones, there’s anxiety that consuming soy milk and tofu will emasculate cis men.

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: You mentioned two words, phytoestrogen and isoflavones. So the broader grouping is an isoflavone, and then phytoestrogen is a type of isoflavone. And we call it phytoestrogen, because phyto meaning the word plant, so it’s a plant lookalike of the estrogen in the body. And that’s not unusual to have, you know, things found in nature mimicking other molecules that we have in our body. And so the phytoestrogens, their effect is not as great as that of the original oestrogen is – but that was the original concern that maybe be these phytoestrogens are acting as another source of oestrogen in the body and hence leading to potentially hormonal disturbances.

The main one that everyone’s concerned about, particularly men, is the feminisation of the body.

Lee Tran Lam: In The Tri-State Livestock News, James Stangle wrote that the plant-based Impossible Burger patty, made with soy protein, had “18 million times as much estrogen” as a standard patty, and so consuming four Impossible Burgers a day would generate “enough estrogen to grow boobs on a male”.

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: This is not a word we use very often – gynecomastia – and I’m probably saying that in the Greek way, or gynecomastia, and that’s enlarged breast tissue in men. And there’s also the concerns about also the hypogonadism and that’s when the testicles become smaller.

Lee Tran Lam: And that Men’s Health article, with the headline suggesting soy was “the most dangerous food for men”?

It profiled an ex-American army officer James Price, who reported that his body was “feminizing” and growing breasts – and soy milk was blamed.

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: And the person apparently consumed large amounts of soy milk. And the amount of soy milk they consumed a day was sort of around three litres a day, which is huge. But the problem is the type of study. A case report doesn’t give us good quality evidence – because we can’t be certain that one is linked to the other because it’s just an observation and it’s a retro observation, so we’re looking backwards.

And so what the scientific community has done is done large – what we call meta-analyses and umbrella reviews, where they pull together all the studies that have been done to look at the impact of soy milk on the feminisation of the male body, and to bring all the results together, which makes it a really huge powerful study. And what they’ve seen in those, there’s been two recent ones, is that it has no major impact on any of the hormone levels.

Lee Tran Lam: While the Men’s Health and Tri-State Livestock News stories got much coverage, they were later retracted by their publishers.

The Men’s Health article has been replaced with a piece titled Tofu Is the New King of Protein, and its intro admits soy is “totally okay to eat and actually really delicious”. It might also lower your risk of developing diabetes and prostate cancer, too.

And when interviewed by Todd Kliman at The Atlantic, James Stangle confirmed there’s ‘no evidence’ that eating four soy-based burgers would result in man boobs.

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: Men might think, “oh, but should I be consuming a phytoestrogen, even if it doesn’t have an effect?” But the reality is we’ve got all of the hormones in our bodies, obviously in different levels.

The good news is, if you like soy milk, you enjoy drinking it, there’s no reason to be concerned about consuming it in normal quantities.

So is it bad to consume three litres of soy milk? And it is, not so much for the phytoestrogen levels, but more so because you’re deleting another food group.

And that means you’re not getting the nutrients from the other food groups. And I would say the same if you’re drinking three litres of cow’s milk a day, it’s a problem because then you’re not consuming another food. So that is where the problem is.

Lee Tran Lam: What about claims that soy might increase your risk of breast cancer?

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: Initially, there was concern about it. But certainly we know higher intakes of soy products does lead to a lower incidence of breast cancer. And there seems to be no evidence to suggest it’s problematic for women who are being treated for breast cancer. But once again, this is with normal levels.

Lee Tran Lam: Karen Murphy, Associate Professor of Nutrition & Dietetics at the University of South Australia, examines the links between cancer risk and soy on The Conversation website. She cites a Japanese study showing men who drink up to five daily cups of miso soup might have a greater risk of gastric cancer, but notes that soy might not be the issue – it could be the high intake of salt in the miso.

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: We don’t know what else is going into those soups that can be linking it. But once again, it’s, you know, that high intake, which is being problematic. It’s all about having a little bit of everything – and having it in moderation and getting that great variety in your diet.

Lee Tran Lam: Soy milk has a compound called phytates in it – is that an issue?

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: So there’s two potential problems with soy milk and calcium. The first is the phytates can inhibit absorption of calcium, but we’re also eating phytates in a whole lot of other foods. So unless you’re drinking milk on its own with nothing else, then the other food that you’ve got in your stomach at the same time may also inhibit the calcium absorption.

Lee Tran Lam: As long as you’re drinking soy milk that’s adequately fortified with calcium, she says, you should be OK. But it is smart to watch your calcium intake.

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: So people are concerned about calcium and they absolutely should be concerned about it. Having an adequate intake reduces our risk of osteoporosis.

Lee Tran Lam: You can get sidetracked by claims that you need to drink 22 cups of soy to get the calcium equivalent of one glass of cow’s milk for instance. But a holistic view is more important. Eat a variety of foods – like tofu, almonds and leafy greens – which are all good calcium sources. Include regular exercise and getting enough vitamin D as well.

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: So that weight-bearing exercise is critical for maintaining strong bones, along with a good intake of calcium.

People are worried about little, little things without looking at the whole big picture.

If we compare soy milk to dairy is that soy milk comes out better environmentally.

Lee Tran Lam: Switching from dairy to soy milk could significantly curb greenhouse gas emissions and “free up a land mass the size of Australia”, according to BBC’s Crowd Science.

Dr. Evangeline Mantzioris: But once again, it’s a little bit nuanced because if you don’t finish your carton and you throw it out – well, you’ve lost the environmental benefit.

If food waste was ranked as a country, it would be the third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

Lee Tran Lam: If you care about sustainability, soy is worth seeking out. Tofu can have a much lower carbon footprint than meat-based proteins, for instance – the greenhouse-gas emissions from one kilo of beef is 22 times higher than a kilo of tofu, notes the UN.

Tony Tan: As we transition into, you know, a warmer world, we have got to think about how we are going to eat. And as far as tofu is concerned, be it tempeh or miso or whatever that comes from the soybean world, there is no limit to it. And it is so, so delicious.

Lee Tran Lam: Should You Really Eat That? is an SBS podcast. It’s written and presented by me, Lee Tran Lam. Thank you to the SBS Audio team, Max Gosford and Joel Supple for their contributions and guidance. A major shout-out also goes to Caroline Gates for helping launch the show. The brilliant artwork is by Grace Lee and the theme song is Sydney Sunset by Yuin artist Nooky. The email address for the show is [email protected].

On the next episode of Should You Really Eat That?, we’re churning cream into butter and laminating kilos of croissants. Follow on your favourite podcast app and if you liked this episode, why not share a review that mentions your feelings on tofu, doenjang, soy desserts and tempeh.