This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: U.S. farmers will produce a record-breaking harvest of 4.52 billion bushels of soybeans in 2026, according to projections from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
At 60 pounds (27 kilograms) to the bushel, that is roughly 800 pounds (360 kilograms) of soybeans for every American. Most people don't think of themselves as soybean consumers. Few sit down to a plate of soybeans, but soy is hiding in plain sight throughout the American diet.
Soybean oil appears in salad dressings, mayonnaise, baked goods, infant formula, snacks and fried foods; soy lecithin emulsifies chocolate and bread; and soy protein fortifies energy bars, breakfast cereals and canned soup. As an environmental historian who studies agriculture and food, I seek to understand a peculiar transformation: How did a plant that most Americans barely ate a century ago become a ubiquitous food ingredient without people noticing? Chinese farmers domesticated the soybean (Glycine max) from its wild ancestor, Glycine soja, between 6,000 and 9,000 years ago.
By the first millennium B.C.E., it ranked among the "five grains", the staple crops recognized in early Chinese texts. Soybeans came to North America much later. In 1764, an English sailor named Samuel Bowen arrived in Savannah, Georgia, with a handful of soybeans, a souvenir from several years spent in China.
The following spring, Georgia's surveyor-general Henry Yonge planted Bowen's unfamiliar "Chinese vetches" and harvested three crops in a single season. In 1767, Bowen received a British patent for his method of producing soy sauce, a fermented condiment resembling the soy sauce already imported from Asia. The enterprise faded into obscurity after Bowen's death, and soybeans remained little more than a curiosity in North America.
That changed around 1900. Department of Agriculture plant explorer Frank Meyer collected dozens of soybean varieties in China, many of which government researchers Charles Piper and William Morse planted at the department's Arlington Experimental Farm in Virginia. They compared imported varieties for such traits as maturity, yield, plant form and suitability for seed or hay, selecting strains that showed promise for cultivation in the United States.
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