Don't Kill the Birthday Girl (13 page)

The next day was better, in that funny way things improve when they can get no worse. My father took my uncle Jim, my cousin Michele, and Christina out for a day of horse riding—the one Texan tradition that didn't put animals on the receiving end of a bullet or a fork. There would be no talk of the first wife. That wasn't our way.

My mother and I stayed by the pool, until she was hijacked for a walking tour of George Marvin's clinic. Two hours later she returned with a box of rocks that Charles had sworn included agates and geodes, and her real quarry, which was a purse full of Benadryl and Allegra samples.

“Look at this!” she said. “Six months' worth.”

A pool volleyball game started up, complete with the ninety-four-year-old Lola in her polka-dot swimsuit. The horse riders returned. Dinner plans were announced: leftover brisket and cold-cut sandwiches.

Day three of survival eating. If I had one more corn chip, I was going to throw up. My mother disassembled a sandwich, peeling the turkey away to make a cheese sandwich for Christina. She pieced together one last, limp salad for me out of the lettuce and tomatoes that had been set aside for the sandwiches.

Watching Mom bustle from counter to counter, I realized
that Christina and I weren't the only ones struggling. She was, after all, a Pruett in a house full of Beasleys. There was quiet ferocity in the way she ripped iceberg into fork-friendly chunks. Fending for her daughters gave her a mission.

Before the annual white-elephant gift exchange that closed each reunion, my father showed slides from his army work: action shots in Afghanistan, mudslides he had surveyed in Honduras, flag ceremonies at Fort Snelling, and Norman, the nineteen-hand horse gifted to the Blue Devils Horse Platoon by the queen of England. The family clapped with a sincerity that's hard to come by in D.C., where people are quick to think of patriotism as a political strategy rather than a priority. In Texas, when people thank you for “serving our country,” they mean it. Ray presented handwoven baskets to my mother, then me, then Christina, thanking us for our service as well.

The mood of the gift exchange was giddy; what one Beasley wanted, another stole. No one really seemed to mind. The gifts ranged from exotic textiles to doilies to pens to pocketknives. I finagled my way into possession of a small toy station wagon, in the style I recognized from the home movies of the night before.

Christina ended up with a plaster frog, pale green, easily eight inches tall and flashing a beatific grin. Was it intended as a paperweight? A lawn ornament? It was hideous, but hideous in all the right ways. She smiled and patted the head of her new pet.

Watching her, I realized that her need to be The Vegetarian, even in a roomful of barbecue lovers, was selfish only in a world that revolves around food allergies. My world has to have
that focus on food allergies. Hers should not. I tapped her on the knee.

“What are you going to name the frog?” I asked.

A plane ride later, the first morning back was amiably jet-lagged. While my sister slept in, my mother cooked bacon for the omnivores. We got to work unzipping suitcases.

“Oh!” my mother called out from our kitchen. “Oh no.”

Despite careful packing amid Tupperware and towels, Christina's frog had lost its feet in the jostling of baggage claim. My parents and I surveyed the wreckage of dust and once-webbed plaster. How could we break it to her? After four days and a cross-country trip, the family finally shared a common interest, in one immediate and unspoken decision.

“I did see those on sale at Rite Aid last week,” my mother said.

“I'll get the car,” said my dad.

•  •  •

From tattoos to ritual fasts, humans have long used the canvas of their bodies to display tribal, religious, cultural, and political affiliations. The practice of vegetarianism can be traced to ancient eras. The Jains in the sixth century BCE preached nonviolence toward animals. Ashoka the Great, a Buddhist emperor who ruled in second-century BCE India, formally outlawed sacrifice and hunting and ensured that even “cocks are not to be caponized, and husks hiding living beings are not to be burnt.”

In classical antiquity, the Greek term for vegetarianism
translated to “abstinence from beings with a soul.” In southern Italy, avoiding meat was admired as following the “Pythagorean way of life.” (Not to be confused with believing that the square of your hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of your other two sides.)

Monks of Europe's Middle Ages embraced vegetarianism as part of their ascetic lifestyle, modeling themselves on Saint Jerome and Saint Geneviève. Later champions included artist Leonardo da Vinci, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and—as a headstrong sixteen-year-old—Benjamin Franklin.

In 1850, the American Vegetarian Society was formed by an alliance between the Reverend William Metcalfe and Sylvester Graham, the man behind the eponymous cracker. They acquired the support of Ellen G. White and the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In this latter half of the nineteenth century, vegetarianism was manifest of zealotry and associated with the cultural initiatives of anti-vivisection and temperance.

In the twentienth century, vegetarianism went mainstream. By 2002, a CNN poll would estimate that 4 percent of adults in the United States self-identified as vegetarians, and of these, 5 percent further identified themselves as vegans. The term
vegan
signifies abstinence from any animal by-product—not only meat and cheese, but wool, silk, and, for some, honey and beeswax—and was created in 1944 by the Englishman Donald Watson, who pronounced it “the beginning and end of
veg
etari
an.
”

The rise of vegetarianism in America has corresponded with the rise of soy. Tofurkey is a legitimate Thanksgiving dish; a request for soymilk at Starbucks is as commonplace as a request for half-and-half. Though fermented soymilk has been
around since the Han dynasty, soy's ascension in American cuisine can be attributed, in part, to the unlikely threesome of George Washington Carver, Henry Ford, and John Kellogg.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg had been involved with the Seventh-day Adventists since James White (husband of Ellen) had paid a visit to the Kellogg home in 1864, when John was twelve. After receiving his medical degree from Bellevue Hospital, he became the administrator of the Adventist sanitarium and the editor of
Good Health Magazine
, in which he continually promoted a diet of fruit, nuts, and grain, no meat required.

He is often regarded as a quack nowadays, thanks to caricatures such as T. C. Boyle's novel
The Road to Wellville
and the subsequent movie it spawned. Yet in 1906, his Battle Creek Sanitarium hosted seven thousand of the country's most influential citizens (plus or minus a few neurotics). Kellogg prescribed generous consumption of water with all meals. He expressed an aversion to reliance on cow by-products, preferring milks made from almonds and hazelnuts, that would prove prescient to our understanding of the lactose intolerance that became steadily more common in the years to follow. It's a cruel irony that the cereals that bear his name brand—as trademarked by his brother, Will—have mutated into sugary bowlfuls of denatured wheat, “best” drenched in milk.

In a 1938 letter, the scientist George Washington Carver declared, “Every intelligent person interested in health, I am very certain, appreciates what Dr. Kellogg is doing. He really is my ideal.” In 1911, Carver was preparing a five-course luncheon of fourteen dishes all made with peanut products (including soup, bread, creamed chicken, and dessert cookies), which he would serve to a table of the Tuskegee Institute's luminaries
that included Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee's head physician, and their wives. As later enshrined in history, the meal was meant to prove the legume's value. Kellogg was the person Carver chose to send an advance copy of the menu.

Their correspondence ranged from a celebration of peanut milk to a debate over the tastiness of alfalfa salads. Kellogg feared them too bitter. “I have tried mine with several dressings,” Carver wrote to him, “but I like the French dressing best. I certainly thank you for calling my attention to the lemon juice instead of the vinegar. It is delicious.”

Though Carver is known for his work with peanuts and sweet potatoes, his personal tastes were far more diverse. Decades before Terra (i.e., taro) Chips became a popular boutique brand in the 1990s, he wrote to a professor at the University of Hawaii's Agricultural Experiment Station: “I grew a few Tara [
sic
] plants and I like them very very much. I am especially fond of the chips made from them … better than I do those made from the Irish potato.” Since 1903 Carver had labored on using soy to create everything from ice cream to cheese to coffee to flour. In a 1936 interview, he described the soy bean as “almost, if not quite, as versatile as the peanut with its three hundred products.”

This was music to Henry Ford's ears. Since 1928 he had been a student of “farm chemurgy,” which sought to link farm crops to industrial products. His mission had grown particularly pointed in the wake of the Great Depression—and, as determined by the Ford Motor Company's top researchers, soy was his best prospect. At the 1934 World's Fair in Chicago, Ford had invited reporters to a fourteen-course meal (possibly
in homage to Carver's earlier luncheon) in which every course consisted at least partially of soy, from soybean bread to pineapple rings with soybean cheese and soybean dressing. Not coincidentally, the very next year was when the Glidden Company in Chicago, Illinois, built the first commercial plant for industrial-grade soy proteins.

In 1934, Ford had struck up a correspondence with Carver. In March 1938, Ford toured Carver's Tuskegee lab for the first time. (Later, after declining health impaired Carver's mobility, Ford would pay to have an elevator installed on campus so he could continue his experiments.) Ford asked Carver to create a nuanced color stain—he had proposed a soy-derived mixture that mimicked cherrywood—worthy of the floor at the Powerhouse of Ford's seventy-five-thousand-acre estate in Ways Station, Georgia.

As Ford charged ahead with his efforts to manufacture a 1,400-pound car, made significantly lighter with the addition of soy plastics, Carver could not help but notice his new client's obsession. In a letter to a friend, Carver mentioned Ford was “now wearing a suit of clothes made from the soybean, so his secretary tells me.” (This synthetic soybean-based silk, called Azlon, ultimately lost out to DuPont's nylon product in the commercial market.) Although they enjoyed an enduring friendship, Carver soon hit a plateau of formal involvement with Ford's vision for a soy-driven future.

“My work I endeavor to keep so that the man farthest down can profit by it,” he told a South African colleague in 1940. “I am not so much interested in factories.”

Ford's cars, which utilized compounds of resin and isolate
based on soy's cellulose fiber structure, proved lightweight and sturdy—Ford tested the doors with the swing of his own ax. But much to his chagrin, the panels were never 100 percent waterproof. Soy's role in the automotive industry would not be fully realized until the next century, when there was a renewed interest in biofuels.

Yet enough groundwork had been laid. Going into World War II, soy was singled out as a valued commodity. While traditional coffee beans were rationed, soy coffee, backed by Ford, flourished in popularity despite its lack of caffeine. As a high-yield, versatile crop that could enrich soil through its nitrogen fixation, soy captured the brass ring of government subsidy. By 2000, the United States produced 75 million tons of “garden” (edible) and “field” (industrial oil) soybeans.

As Michael Pollan notes in his book
In Defense of Food
, soy has become second only to corn in its prevalence in the American diet: “75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy,” he notes. “Corn contributes 554 calories a day to America's per capita food supply and soy another 257.”

Soy flour is used in fast-food hamburger buns, not to mention pizza, doughnuts, and most mass-production loaves of bread. Soy protein appears in everything from hamburger meat to canned tuna to chocolate. If a child demonstrates an allergy to cow milk, soy-based infant formula is the go-to substitute available in liquid, powdered, and concentrate forms. Because of the recent positioning of edamame as a “superfood,” handfuls of the immature soybean show up in everything from frozen stir-fry mixes to Applebee's salads.

When you're allergic to soy, as I am, it's a little nightmarish. In restaurants, this is what I often encounter:

Phase 1: “I have allergies I need to warn you about,” I say. Waiter tenses up.

Phase 2: “Beef, dairy, egg …” I begin the list. Waiter noticeably relaxes. “No problem!” I hear. “We've got a variety of healthy vegetarian options.”

Phase 3: I explain that actually, because of my soy allergy, I need to avoid all tofu, tempeh, and “textured vegetable protein” (the stuff of veggie burger patties). No soy mayo. No dairy-free margarine.

Phase 4: “And I'd like a carnivorous option, please. But no beef or shrimp.”

Phase 5: “I'll see. I'll see what we can do.” The waiter walks back to the kitchen to talk to the chef, shoulders slumped. I have managed to outfuss the
vegetarians
.

Fortunately, for now, those with IgE sensitivity to soy tend not to be as reactive as those with allergies to peanuts and shellfish. It often takes exposure to upwards of 400 milligrams of soy before an attack is induced. Dipping my sushi in a bit of soy sauce doesn't seem to bother me, and while I try to steer clear of soy oil, I can make do when I have to (which is often, since many restaurants use it exclusively in their cooking).

As a culture, we're playing with fire. For centuries Asians have included soy in their diets with little ill effect, sure. But there we're talking about primarily fermented products such as miso and
natto
, at an average of 9 grams a day. Here, we're talking about soy shakes that serve up twice that daily amount of unfermented protein in one to-go cup, complete with bendy straw. No one knows why peanut allergies have ratcheted up so rapidly in their severity. If the same happens with soy—which,
unlike corn, is already one of the “big eight” allergens in terms of its prevalence—we'll have put ourselves in a culinary chokehold.