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Posted on 03/02/2008 5:42:42 PM PST by JACKRUSSELL
Soybeans are a top crop in Ohio, but good luck finding any locally grown legumes to eat.
Soybeans -- usually marketed under their Japanese name, edamame -- are an increasingly popular health food, but nearly all those sold in local grocery stores are grown in China.
Ohio farmers do grow some soybeans to be eaten instead of processed for other uses, but the majority are exported and used to make products such as tofu.
The problem for local diners with a taste for the bean, experts say, is that soybean farmers are not equipped to grow and harvest edamame, which are immature beans. And vegetable farmers have not yet responded to demand for the product by growing more.
Adding to the problem is concern over the safety of products from China.
Edamame and other imported foods have come under scrutiny recently after numerous product recalls. Trader Joe's recently said that by April, it will stop selling single-ingredient food items from China, including edamame.
"We feel confident that all of our products from China meet the same high-quality standards that we set for all of our products. However, our customers have voiced their concerns about products from this region, and we have listened," Alison Mochizuki, a Trader Joe's spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Trader Joe's now gets its edamame from Thailand.
Kroger sells frozen edamame from China, and Giant Eagle sells organic, fresh edamame from China.
Whole Foods Market carries domestic and Chinese edamame. The store-brand edamame is grown in China, but the natural-foods grocer also sells Columbia River Organics frozen edamame, which is grown in the U.S., said Cathy Cochran-Lewis, a spokeswoman.
That doesn't ensure availability of domestic beans, however.
"Consumer demand for this product has been strong, and it is likely we will sell out of the frozen pods......
(Excerpt) Read more at dispatch.com ...
If it’s grown here, how could it possibly be cheaper to bring in Chinese stuff from halfway across the globe? What do we do with ours?
Sounds like another health food fad.Just give me a nice locally grown steak.
Those are among the first questions that one ought to ask. Fortunately, they are also among the first addressed in the article, and right here on this thread.
I'm a notorious title-reader and article-skimmer, and even I saw it.
Agreed!
I live in the Central Valley of California, nothing but agriculture, yet when I go to the grocery store all our fruits & veggies are from MExico. Does seem a little insane doesn’t it?
We eat them. We paint with them. We make beachballs and underwear out of them.
What we don't do is harvest immature soybeans.
I never paid soybeans much attention but know they’re very usefull. When I was a kid working on the farm I know they were planted for the soil rather than for the cows.
If it’s grown here, how could it possibly be cheaper to bring in Chinese stuff from halfway across the globe? What do we do with ours?
I am sure one of the “free traders” here can concoct some type of wild excuse why the US is not using its own soybeans.
No...its not cheaper to bring in soybeans (or any other ag product) from Commie China, esp when the US can grow it themselves.
Amazing what free trade has done....it has turned an ag exporter nation like US into a ag importer. Nuts
“What we don’t do is harvest immature soybeans.”
As well we shouldn’t!!! Now if we could just go after the veal producers!
I have family that grows soybeans, I didn’t know we weren’t reaping the benefits tofu wise.
I had no idea..Thanks for the info
Let them mature and dry, then harvest them for oil, plasttics, milk, protein supplements, animal and poultry foods, etc. A very versatile crop.
American soybeans are pretty much a mechanized crop. We wait until they're ripe, then harvest the entire plant, peas and all, to turn them into STUFF!
If you want fresh, young soybeans in the United States you must grow them in your own garden.
My father always put out a row of soybeans in his garden every year so that he had fresh soybeans all the time. That's because they weren't available otherwise. That's why entrepreneurs ship them in from China.
Commercial soybeans have industrial uses well beyond the few you have mentioned and can be machine harvested after maturity.
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