AGAIN with the Soy Controversy

Sooo many people have asked me if I worry about feeding my son soy. To be honest, sometimes I do.

Although I don't buy into the soy controversy so much that I've cut soy out of our lives, I do think that too much of any one food can be bad for your health, and I don't like how much highly processed soy has found its way into the average vegan diet in recent years. It's possible to transition to a vegan diet and still eat all the same foods you ate before, only made from soy instead of meat and dairy. We're talking soy three, four, or more times a day: soy milk in your coffee and on your cereal in the morning, soy lunch meat and soy cheese on your sandwich at lunch, a soy protein bar for a snack, soy chicken with rice and vegetables for dinner, and some soy ice cream for dessert.

This style of eating is easy for most Westerners to transition to. It's nonthreatening, marketable, tasty, and animal-friendly, but to be honest, I worry that it's just too much. All that highly processed soy can't really be good for us in the long run, especially when it takes the place of other foods that we could be eating instead: fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, etc.

In our kitchen I try to strike a balance. We stopped drinking soy milk quite a while ago; instead I rotate through several different varieties of nondairy milk like almond, rice, oat (our favorite), hazelnut, and I even just bought my first box of hemp milk. I make fruit sorbet and smoothies instead of buying soy ice cream. I make Magical Loaf patties instead of buying soy burgers.

But I also love tempeh and tofu, and although I never touch them myself I do buy my son his favorite soy hot dogs, deli slices, chicken nuggets, and Silk yogurts. We both enjoy veggie burgers occasionally when we go out. So there you go: I'm not entirely one way or the other about soy; I'm just somewhere in the middle, I guess.