Among this next-gen crowd of plant-based milk analogs, soy milk, the first widely available nondairy milk, stands apart as the unfashionable older sister—a bit dowdy, a bit behind the times. But within the family of soy foods, soy milk is a relative newcomer, with a thin history prior to the 20th century. Other soy foods, such as tofu, tempeh, and yuba, have long been used in a variety of ways in multiple East Asian cuisines, but soy milk played only a limited role in traditional diets in China. The liquid produced from ground-up soybeans that were soaked overnight, it was sometimes served as part of a Chinese breakfast, warmed up and sweetened; seasoned with salt, it became a dipping sauce for youtiao, or fried crullers. Most often, it was not a final product but an intermediate step in the production of tofu.
Unlike the ubiquity of miso or soy sauce, the popularity of soy milk in the US is not the result of the adoption of a traditional foodstuff by a widening group of consumers. In the hands of American technologists, Adventist missionaries, hippie environmentalists, and East Asian entrepreneurs, soy milk was always viewed as a food of the future, a salvific beige fluid that held the solution for all our nutritional, spiritual, and environmental travails. For decades, soy milk’s acolytes in the US waited for its time to come, believing that a world that embraced soy milk was a world where the future could overcome the woes of the past. But, although soy milk’s day did arrive at last, its moment in the spotlight of American consumer affections now seems vanishingly brief.
Imagine that the language you speak with your friends, with your family, with people on the street, a language unique to your country and objectively very interesting and cool, is, officially, considered lesser and unworthy. This kind of thing has happened around the world throughout history: African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers in the United States, for example, have also had their language marginalized and demeaned by the ruling power. Now, it’s happening in Singapore.
Singapore is an immigrant country with four official languages: English, Malay, Tamil, and Mandarin. Officially, English is the most commonly spoken language in Singaporean homes, having recently and just barely edged out Mandarin. Unofficially? That’s completely wrong. Because what’s likely the actual most common language spoken does not appear on the census. That language is called Singlish.
Elyse has eaten this way for as long as she can remember. But until a therapist diagnosed her eating disorder last year, nobody knew why. When she was growing up, doctors and family friends told her parents they just needed to be more strict. But when her parents did try to force her to eat, Elyse gagged or vomited up every bite. She avoided sleepovers or birthday parties. Sometimes the other kids’ parents pushed her or thought she was being rude.
“I was always so ashamed of how I ate. When you navigate those weird questions and stares every day, it becomes part of your identity that you are weird and wrong in some way,” says Elyse, who asked me to change her name because she fears the stigma attached to her eating habits. “All my life, I’ve been told that eating this way will kill me. People said I wouldn’t live to age 30.”
Elyse says the people around her making such comments never meant them maliciously. Sometimes it was said as a joke — her pediatrician liked to say that Elyse “lived on air” — sometimes, in desperation, by a loved one who despaired of her food choices. “I suspect, often, they just weren’t thinking about how terrifying and shameful it is for a kid to hear I might die for something that’s ‘all my fault’ but feels impossible to change,” Elyse says. “I’ve never known what it is to not be afraid of food.”
Many doctors have been distinguished writers — Anton Chekhov, William Carlos Williams and Abraham Verghese, to name a few. But we haven’t heard enough from nurses, whose world is just as arcane and important. Christie Watson helps close this gap. “The Language of Kindness” could not be more compelling or more welcome: It’s about how we survive, and about the people who help us do so.
Even though Central Park, like the rest of Manhattan, is largely man-made, not natural, it is a place to experience in person, not secondhand through images, regardless of their authenticity, nor through narratives, no matter how illustrative.
That said, Stephen Wolf, who teaches literature and humanities at Berkeley College in New York, offers up a combined guidebook and autobiography that’s the next best thing to being there.