The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (24 page)

To be fair, at one point Japan also made socal ed chemical soy sauce, but that was after World War I , when many supplies, including soybeans, were scarce. Other countries have also depended on the shortcut process now and then. But as Asian economies have grown, food manufacturers have shied away from such additives. That has left the United States as the largest such soy sauce producer in the world. The largest American bottle brand is La Choy, founded in 1922 by two men, neither of whom had Chinese roots. Wal y Smith, a Detroit businessman, and Ilhan New, who was born in Korea, met as students at the University of Michigan and joined forces to form a business that would sel the bean sprouts that had become so popular in chop suey. By the late 1930s La Choy was distributing a broad array of Chinese food products, including kumquats, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, brown sauce, chow mein noodles—and soy sauce. La Choy has since been acquired by the gigantic food conglomerate ConAgra.

But as for the little packets, that market is dominated by Kari-Out. The company was founded in the late 1960s by Howard Epstein, a lanky Bronx-born businessman who had a passion for what he cal ed

“smal -unit packaging.” At different points in his career, he experimented with packaging dry soup mixes, frozen ice pops, hotel toiletries, and chemicals before discovering the joy of soy sauce in 1968. His timing was fortuitous: Chinese takeout started its explosion shortly after President Nixon returned from China and Americans fel in love with pandas. Kari-Out was right behind, pushing packaged soy sauce on a national scale with its newly designed panda logo. Chinese restaurants were among the first to adapt to working women and two-career families by pioneering takeout and delivery. Patronage at

“Oriental takeout” restaurants jumped during the 1980s, growing 131 percent between 1982 and 1987

alone, according to a survey by the National Restaurant Association. During that same period, fast-food restaurants grew only 26 percent. Today, about 60 percent of Chinese restaurants in the country are takeouts.

Chinese takeout’s biggest rivals for speed and convenience have historical y been pizza and fast food. But Chinese food has one advantage: the significant presence of vegetables makes parents feel a bit less guilty about ordering in for dinner. Once upon a time, the whole point of eating restaurant food was going out—dining out was a luxury. Somewhere along the line, however, with more singles and more working mothers, home cooking from scratch instead became the luxury—though judging by the number of richly photographed cookbooks and the popularity of the Food Network, you wouldn’t guess how little we actual y do of it.

The packets were such a success that by 1972 Howard had added duck sauce and hot mustard to his Kari-Out lineup. He handed the company down to his three sons, who helped grow the business into the largest Chinese-restaurant supplier in the country. Perhaps no single family is as intimately acquainted with the ins and outs of American Chinese takeout as the Epsteins. The sons talk about industry minutiae with the joy that comes from a family-run business. They can discuss the subtleties of the Chinese takeout container. They know fortune cookie shelf life. They converse knowledgeably about the shades of fried rice favored in different parts of the country, and the food coloring that is needed to create those shades. Fried rice tends to be brown in Boston, yel ower in New York, and darker in Miami.

A visit to Kari-Out’s soy sauce factory natural y produced no soybeans. But their product is stil soy sauce, Paul Epstein explained, pointing out that it’s actual y more sanitary. The natural version involves mold, he said, shaking his head.

Indeed, I encountered both a lot of smal organisms and a lot of soy when I visited Kikkoman’s main soy sauce factory in the United States. It is even located in the middle of soy and corn fields in Walworth, Wisconsin—a site the company chose in 1970 for its confluence of access to water, soybeans, transportation, and labor. “Microorganisms working every day,” said Masaaki Hirose, a senior vice president, with a smile as he gave me a tour. The Kikkoman soy factory looks a lot like a petrochemical factory—massive tanks, running pipes, and glaring fluorescent lights—only with the musky aroma of soy sauce permeating the air. A display case hangs on the wal in the manufacturing area. It has three jars: one each of soy, wheat, and salt. “These are the three main ingredients of soy sauce,” said Mr. Hirose.

“Unlike chemical soy sauce.” Next to the display was a large flowchart of how the soy sauce is made, with boxes

featuring

the
koji

culture,

the
shikomi

fermentation, and soy cakes, a by-product that is turned into cattle feed.

We walked into a room fil ed with rows of large tanks that reached to the ceiling. This was the fermentation room, where the soy sauce changed color. “Sugar gives color to soy sauce,” Kuniki Hatayama, the general manager, said. “They discovered more than three hundred flavors in the soy sauce,” he told me. “It’s natural y occurring.” He ticked some of them off: vanil a, coffee, fruit flavors. He noted that it is possible to extract vanil a flavoring from soy sauce, adding, “These flavors are different than chemical soy sauce.”

When air is pushed in from underneath the fermenting
moromi
sludge, it looks like bubbling lava.

T h e
moromi
paste is then layered in a zigzag formation between pieces of cloth, where it spends three days having the soy sauce pressed out of it.

During that time, a stack of
moromi
that starts out at more than thirty feet high is compressed down to about six feet.

What is left after the soy sauce is extracted is soy cake, which looks like a cross between wood chips and beef jerky. “Is this edible?” I asked, picking up a few of the brown flakes in my fingers.

“Edible, yes, but it doesn’t taste so good,”

Hatayama said.

I put some into my mouth. It tasted like salty cardboard.

Kikkoman personnel served as unofficial advisers to the Japanese government during the great soy sauce debate. At the Kikkoman headquarters in Tokyo, Hiroshi Takamatsu explained what was wrong with the American chemical soy sauce world.

“For me it’s not soy sauce, for the Japanese it’s not soy sauce. Because if you look at the ingredients, it’s not soy,” he said. He didn’t understand what had happened when soy sauce first went overseas. “These places have no history of soy sauce. Real soy sauce, the fundamental soy sauce, came from China and Japan. Then people have started adding things, changing things.

“There is a breakdown,” he said sadly.

The discussions dragged on. In October 2004, the Codex Processed Fruits and Vegetables Committee decided to move the soy sauce discussion to the Cereals, Pulses, and Legumes committee—a bureaucratic punt.

In 2005, Mr. Takamatsu explained, the Japanese government looked at the resistance the Americans were putting up. They looked at the ever-expanding definition of soy sauce and realized it would take a long time to sort out al the competing standards. “It would take decades,” he said. At this point, they decided it was better to wait. They quietly withdrew their proposal, biding their time until Americans understood the subtleties of soy sauce.

The Americans lobby and its al ies had triumphed.

There was no need for whole soybeans to make soy sauce.

Natsuko said there was an odd, comforting irony in having the definition of soy sauce wrestled away from them: “We should be proud of it in one way: soy sauce became an international food.”

To be fair, Americans are also pushing the envelope on the soy sauce front. Kari-Out introduced its own significant innovation in 2005: gluten-free soy sauce for people who suffer from celiac disease, a digestive condition. And it’s not as though the American companies haven’t considered the virtues of natural y brewed soy sauce. In 2004, when ConAgra was thinking of reinvigorating the La Choy brand, it conducted a series of blind taste tests across the country, according to Shannon Bridges, the brand manager.

The results of the soy sauce taste tests were somewhat surprising, she told me during my visit to ConAgra offices in Napervil e, Il inois. Despite Kikkoman’s significant inroads into the United States, half of the consumers liked La Choy, and half liked the natural y brewed soy sauce. Further research led the team to come to a conclusion: “When you think about preferences, it’s real y what people grew up on and what they know and love,” she said. Since lots of people had grown up with La Choy in the household, there was a built-in consumer demand and comfort level. Shannon herself had grown up with La Choy products in her home.

La Choy’s soy sauce formula stayed the same.

When told of La Choy’s taste test, Kuniki Hatayama, of Kikkoman’s Wisconsin factory, nodded sagely. “Taste is a funny thing,” he said. “If you grow up with it you tend to like it.”

Waizhou, U.S.A.

By the time John and Jenny heard about the modest Chinese restaurant for sale in Georgia, it had already been through the hands of at least four different owners. The restaurant had first opened as Wong’s Kitchen, though Mr. Wong had long since moved to Temecula, California, where he now worked as a high school physics and chemistry teacher. Stil , its various owners had changed little but the restaurant name in eight years. The staff played the same tape of Chinese zither music as customers ate on the same Chinese zodiac place mats, which lay atop the same seven dark wooden tables. Before diners left, their waiters brought them fortune cookies, which were stil stored in a big box under the cash register.

You can learn a lot about a community by reading its advertisements and seeing which goods and services are for sale. Chinese newspapers, like their English counterparts, have classified ads for real estate, used cars, and jobs. Unlike their English counterparts, they have an additional section devoted entirely to the buying and sel ing of Chinese restaurants. Sometimes the ads wil cover half a page, sometimes a ful page. But they are always there.

Much as there is a natural churn in the housing market—job relocations, empty nesters, divorces—there is a natural churn for Chinese restaurants. It is considered easier to buy a restaurant than to start one. Construction permits, credit card merchant

accounts,

and

health

department

inspections mean you need to know English to open a Chinese restaurant. You don’t necessarily need to know English to run one. Some entrepreneurs move around the country opening Chinese restaurants and then sel ing them.

Newspaper readers accustomed to the sterile language of American commerce find the ads astoundingly personal. Owners try to explain why, if the restaurant is so desirable, they are sel ing it: “Had a fight with my partner, so must sel the restaurant.”

Or:

“New wife. New kid. Must move.”

“It’s too lonely in this town for a single person, but it would be good for a family to run.”

“Old. Retiring. Must sel .”

“Death in family. No money down.”

And unlike cars or houses, the buying and sel ing of Chinese restaurants is a nationwide market.

Even in the New York City edition of the
World
Journal,
the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the United States, the restaurants listed for sale are as far-flung as Arizona, Ohio, and Florida.

Chinese restaurants are like hermit-crab shel s: the owners come and go; the restaurants, like the shel s, are passed along—largely indifferent to the identity of their occupants. Oftentimes when they are sold, there is no remodeling or “Grand Opening” sign announcing a change in ownership. One day, the customers look up to see a different girl behind the cash register and a different cook banging on the wok. A few years later, the faces may change again.

John and Jenny hadn’t read about the seven-table restaurant through a newspaper ad.

They’d learned of it by word of mouth, the other way that restaurants are commonly bought and sold. In the country-sized vil age of the Fuzhounese community, someone always knows of someone who was just working at a restaurant and heard about another restaurant being put up for sale. The two were divided on whether to buy the restaurant, because like many couples they differed on the trade-off between money and lifestyle. Jenny had come to America to make money. She had been the first of the pair to leave China, at a time when vil age women heading overseas was stil rare. Focused and excitable, Jenny spoke in a sharp, shril voice that pierced the air even when I moved the cel phone away from my ear. With her slight frame and her hair always up in a ponytail and bangs, she resembled a high school student. You had to look closely to see the slight lines around her mouth, the hints that she was in her mid-thirties and a mother of three.

In contrast, John had pale skin, large limpid eyes, and a soft delicateness that was unusual in people from rural China. He considered himself a learned man and always spoke in flowery language punctuated with Chinese idioms characteristic of the wel -read. John was not out to get rich. He wanted a comfortable life. His immigration to America had produced the opposite effect. In China, he had been a local government accountant; he’d held a predictable, low-stress, relatively wel -paying job in an economy where money was tracked by an incessant shuffling of pieces of paper—and the occasional and emphatic red stamp. To this day, Chinese accountants stil often use the abacus to calculate transactions.