The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (23 page)

You have probably never noticed Kari-Out, and you probably aren’t familiar with its logo, a ditzy, wide-eyed panda. After al , there’s not real y much point in a company spending a lot on consumer brand marketing when its entire business model is built on things that are distributed for free. Kari-Out, which is owned by a Jewish family, rose to its prominence in the Chinese-restaurant business from a humble start in soy sauce. Today the factory operates seven days a week, three shifts a day, churning out mil ions of packets a year.

Look at the label on a bottle of soy sauce from an Asian company, and you’l probably find that the chief ingredients listed are water, soybeans, wheat, and salt. But look at the ingredients on Kari-Out soy sauce—or almost any other American company’s soy sauce—and you’l general y find that the most common ingredients are water, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, caramel coloring, and corn syrup.

You may wonder, Where’s the soy? Exactly, Asian manufacturers say.

They claim that American soy sauce is not real soy sauce. Soy sauce, the Asians say, should be brewed from soybeans. It’s like the difference between vanil a and vanil a extract made from vanil a beans, or real mayonnaise versus the mysterious coagulated substance cal ed Miracle Whip.

Asian “natural-brewed” soy sauce is made by a process not unlike that used with vodka or sake.

It requires fermenting a mix of wheat, soybeans, and a particular mold for weeks or even months, then refining, pressing, and pasteurizing it. In contrast, the crudest type of American soy sauce is basical y salted water mixed with a flavor enhancer distil ed from vegetable proteins. (That flavor enhancer is related to the little flavor packets that come with ramen noodles.) The food coloring and corn syrup give the liquid a vaguely soy sauce–like appearance.

At Kikkoman, the world’s largest producer of soy sauce, the managing director of soy sauce operations in Japan, Hiroshi Takamatsu, explained to me what was wrong: “Soy sauce is soy. It comes from soybeans. So the first thing is you have to use soybeans.” The Asian companies charge that American processed soy sauce is a Frankensauce chemical counterfeit created by modern science.

Because they believe that it isn’t a natural-brewed soy sauce, in 1998 they began a global campaign to prevent it from being classified as such.

The forum for international food-definition battles is the Codex Alimentarius Commission, one of those international regulatory organizations whose actions are barely noticed by the outside world. Yet the bureaucratic jujitsu performed there exercises great influence over many industries and countries. Created in 1962 by two U.N. organizations, Codex sets the international standards for foodstuffs around the world. For instance, international regulations have limited the term “champagne” to sparkling wine from a particular region in the north of France, and

“Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese” to a particular region and production method in Italy. These labels are important in cases of exporting and importing as the global food-supply chains become more far-reaching.

Codex makes the de facto rules for the World Trade Organization’s trade-dispute court. It is where hummus is defined as hummus, mineral water as mineral water, and cottage cheese as cottage cheese. The agenda for a Codex meeting often reads like a shopping list from Dean & DeLuca: whole dates, dried figs, table olives, shredded coconut.

In Japan, I paid a visit to Natsuko Kumasawa, a food advocate from Tokyo who was involved in pushing the soy sauce labeling campaign.

The problem with Codex, Natsuko-san explained as she poured me green tea in her stylish living room, was that it was dominated by foods from European and North American countries. “We feel sort of isolated. Many Asian countries felt we need some standards for Asian food. We thought of some Asian foods and we thought of soy sauce,” she said. After al , what could be more quintessential y Asian than soy sauce?

The dark seasoning’s history stretches back over several mil ennia. By legend it began to spread international y when a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk discovered it during his studies in China. He brought a version back to his native country in the thirteenth century, where he adapted it. In various forms soy sauce spread widely through East and Southeast Asia. Today, it’s a staple used in Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, albeit with local varieties.

Western cuisine was introduced to soy sauce primarily through Dutch explorers in the seventeenth century.

The Japanese were not alone in trying to codify their Asian culinary products at Codex. Around the same time, the Koreans applied for a standard for kimchee, their famed spicy pickled cabbage. The dish is such an essential part of the country’s cultural identity that Korean supermarkets in United States sel $600 kimchee refrigerators, not unlike the private wine fridges for chardonnay connoisseurs. Kimchee has a fairly narrow audience around the world. Only a smattering of countries took a vigorous interest in the kimchee standard that was proposed in 1996. After some minor tussling that beat back a Japanese attempt to get pickled
kimuchi,
as it is cal ed in Japan, included in the standard, Codex passed a kimchee regulation in 2001.

Soy sauce, however, was of a different order of magnitude. It may have been created in China, but by the turn of the second mil ennium A.D. it had made its way not only across Asia but around the world as one of civilization’s most popular condiments. In Japan it is known as
shoyu.
In Peru it is cal ed
sillao.

In China it is
jiangyou.
Malaysia and Indonesia use a version of sweetened soy sauce cal ed
kecap manis;
that term is often credited as the precursor to

“ketchup.” (The Asian varieties are tomatoless, however. Culinary historians surmise that the tomato was added when the condiment hopped over to Europe.)

In a way, Asian soy sauce manufacturers had pushed the very mainstreaming that was now causing their problems. Since Kikkoman’s earliest days in the United States, it had made grainy black-and-white television commercials urging housewives to use Kikkoman when cooking steaks, pot roasts, chicken, or hamburgers. Executives back then realized that Asians in America were going to buy soy sauce anyway; growth would have to come from convincing mainstream American cooks that soy sauce should be part of their culinary arsenal. Today, an entire department in Kikkoman’s American headquarters in San Francisco is devoted to developing recipes for women’s magazines, labels, and press releases. Kikkoman recommends adding the product to spaghetti sauce, barbecue sauce, salad dressings, and salmon marinade. The only significant resistance the public relations people ever encountered

occurred

after

they

suggested

incorporating soy sauce in Thanksgiving recipes.

For the Codex regulations, the Japanese were hoping to adapt a standards system long used in Japan. It would divide soy sauce into long-term brewed, short-term brewed, nonbrewed, and mixed. Natsuko explained that they first tried to build consensus among the Asian countries, so that they would arrive as a united front. The Japanese didn’t have nonbrewed soy sauce, but they added the category to accommodate the other Asian nations’ concerns. “It’s an Asian food,” she said. “First we thought no countries except Asian ones wil be interested in it.”

They were wrong. As politicians would delicately put it, by this point, the soy sauce industry had a lot of stakeholders.

You wouldn’t think that American soy sauce manufacturers would care about labels used in exporting soy sauce. But they do. For example, La Choy, the largest American bottled soy sauce manufacturer, exports its soy sauce to fifty-six countries around the world. The top five markets are Jamaica, Haiti, Greece, St. Martin, and Belize.

“They didn’t think that this kind of confusion would come up,” Natsuko told me. “Because many countries in Europe and North America are interested, we decided to move it to the Processed Foods and Vegetables Committee at the International Association of Consumer Food Organizations.”

That’s where things got more and more hairy, Natsuko said: “The discussion, it became too heated.”

What makes Chinese food taste so good?

Part of the answer lies in soy sauce. Brewed soy sauce natural y has what is known as the “fifth flavor.” After the easily identified ones—sweet, bitter, salty, and sour—comes “umami,” which means

“savory” in Japanese. It’s hard to describe umami; it is a hearty or meaty taste. It’s the low note on a three-note chord. Or, to use another metaphor from music, umami is the subwoofer of taste. It’s what gives Parmesan cheese, ripe tomatoes, and mushrooms their hearty flavor. Umami was first identified by Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University, who found it while probing the strong taste in seaweed broth in 1908. That flavor, which came from glutamates, was isolated as a salt and patented in 1909 by the Ajinomoto corporation as the chemical monosodium glutamate, more familiar to Americans as MSG.

Today Ajinomoto is the world’s largest MSG

producer, control ing about one-third of the global market.

MSG’s reputation has since become

tainted. Fear of it began in 1968, when the concept of

“Chinese restaurant syndrome” was introduced in the
New England Journal of Medicine
in a chatty piece by Dr. Ho Man Kwok. “I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant, especial y one that served northern Chinese food,” he wrote. “The syndrome, which usual y begins 15 to 20 minutes after I have eaten the first dish, lasts for about two hours, without hangover effect. The most prominent symptoms are numbness at the back of the neck, gradual y radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitations.”

Final y, in 1992 the FDA asked the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, an independent body of scientists, to review the available scientific data on adverse reactions to MSG. The report identified two groups of people who might develop “MSG symptom complex.” One group was made up of people who couldn’t tolerate large doses of MSG, general y more than three grams. The second group included people with severe, poorly control ed asthma who experienced temporary worsening of their asthmatic symptoms after consuming MSG. But for most people, MSG was safe at normal levels, the report concluded. Scientific studies fol owing the test have not been able to ful y support the report’s conclusions.

Despite the fact that the nonbrewed soy sauce category would include the processed American version, the American delegation began a protest.

Suddenly, the International Hydrolyzed Protein Council appeared on the horizon. The United States Department of Agriculture, the lead American agency at Codex, argued against any labeling at al .

Natsuko and the other Asian representatives were dumbfounded. “The International Hydrolyzed Protein Council and the American government thought the distinction was not necessary,” she said.

Martin J. Hahn, a Washington lobbyist for the International Hydrolyzed Protein Council, explained the situation to me quite reasonably: “We were trying to make certain that the Codex standards would al ow and maintain some degree of flexibility.” The products had been manufactured and sold as soy sauce in the United States and in other parts of the world for decades without complaints. Why shake up the system now? Washington lobbyists have a way of sounding incredibly reasonable while simultaneously making new regulations seem unreasonable. He added, “Let’s maintain some flexibility. Let’s recognize that in different countries, it is common to use hydrolyzed proteins and cal it soy sauce.”

The Japanese delegation was confused by hydrolyzed vegetable protein, which they had never heard of in the context of soy sauce. They asked for a sample and were confused when they saw it was just a white powder. As Natsuko explained, “We didn’t think it [was] a food.”

America has simplified—or corrupted, depending

on

your

perspective—and

mass-

processed many refined foods from around the world: beer (ask Germans what they think of American beer); chocolate (the Swiss grimace when they bite into a waxy Hershey’s chocolate bar); cheese (whoever branded the processed orange substance with “American” should be boiled in it). But it was quite another matter for Americans to apply their industrial standards to a product that was so distinctively Asian.

“That’s black water with salt,” Natsuko said about the sauce in a packet. Real soy sauce is actual y reddish-brown. It becomes more brown and less red the more contact it has with oxygen. Soy sauce traditionalists point out that the brewed product has a different chemical profile than the nonbrewed stuff. The brewing process also generates alcohol and aroma-contributing esters that contribute a refined tartness to a good soy sauce.

Hydrolyzed vegetable protein is actual y a chemical and industrial relation to MSG, only without the stigma of that acronym. (The connections run deep. When I mentioned to the International Hydrolyzed Protein Council representative that I was looking for a contact for the MSG industry group, he told me it was he.) To create hydrolyzed vegetable protein, a combination of corn, wheat, and soybean meal is boiled in hydrochloric acid for the better part of a day, to isolate the amino acids. American food companies explain that this is simply a sped-up version of what happens during the natural fermentation process. This acid stew is then neutralized with sodium carbonate or sodium hydroxide. When it is filtered, the result is hydrolyzed vegetable protein.