The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject, with 445 photographs and illustrations. Plus an extensive index.
The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive index. 372 photographs and illustrations. Free of charge in digital format on Google Books.
The world's most comprehensive, well documented and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographical index. 615 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.
The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and will illustrated book on this subject. Extensive subject and geographical index. 146 photographs, maps and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books
This book examines the changing roles and functions of the soybean throughout world history and discusses how this reflects the complex processes of agrofood globalization. The book uses a historical lens to analyze the processes and features that brought us to the current global configuration of the soybean commodity chain. From its origins as a peasant food in ancient China, today the protein-rich soybean is by far the most cultivated biotech crop on Earth; used to make a huge variety of food and industrial products, including animal feed, tofu, cooking oil, soy sauce, biodiesel and soap. While there is a burgeoning amount of literature on how the contemporary global soy web affects large tracts of our planet’s social-ecological systems, little attention has been given to the questions of how we got here and what alternative roles the soybean has played in the past. This book fills this gap and demonstrates that it is impossible to properly comprehend the contemporary global soybean chain, or the wider agrofood system of which it is a part, without looking at both their long and short historical development. However, a history of the soybean and its changing roles within equally changing agrofood systems is inexorably a history about globalization. Not only does this book map out where soybeans are produced, but also who governs, wields power and accumulates capital in the entire commodity chain from inputs in production to consumption, as well as identifying the institutional context the global commodity chain operates within. The book concludes with a discussion of the main challenges and contradictions of the current soy regime that could trigger its rupture and end. This book is essential reading for students, practitioners and scholars interested in agriculture and food systems, global commodity chains, globalization, environmental history, economic history and social-ecological systems.
The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographic index. 188 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format.
One of the world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographic index. 104 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format.
The world's most comprehensive, well documented and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographical index. 145 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.
The world's most comprehensive, well documented and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographic index. 152 photographs and illustrations - mostly color, Free of charge in digital format on Google Books.
The humble soybean is the world’s most widely grown and most traded oilseed. And though found in everything from veggie burgers to cosmetics, breakfast cereals to plastics, soy is also a poorly understood crop often viewed in extreme terms—either as a superfood or a deadly poison. In this illuminating book, Christine M. Du Bois reveals soy’s hugely significant role in human history as she traces the story of soy from its domestication in ancient Asia to the promise and peril ascribed to it in the twenty-first century. Traveling across the globe and through millennia, The Story of Soy includes a cast of fascinating characters as vast as the soy fields themselves—entities who’ve applauded, experimented with, or despised soy. From Neolithic villagers to Buddhist missionaries, European colonialists, Japanese soldiers, and Nazi strategists; from George Washington Carver to Henry Ford, Monsanto, and Greenpeace; from landless peasants to petroleum refiners, Du Bois explores soy subjects as diverse as its impact on international conflicts, its role in large-scale meat production and disaster relief, its troubling ecological impacts, and the nutritional controversies swirling around soy today. She also describes its genetic modification, the scandals and pirates involved in the international trade in soybeans, and the potential of soy as an intriguing renewable fuel. Featuring compelling historical and contemporary photographs, The Story of Soy is a potent reminder never to underestimate the importance of even the most unprepossesing sprout.