New Soy Scorecard Highlights the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A little while ago I posted about two helpful online resources for finding the most sustainable dairy. Whereismymilkfrom.com tells you exactly where your milk comes from, and the Cornucopia Institute's scorecard tells you whether that farm is sustainable or not. Where Is My Milk From also traces soy milk, but if you are like me, the information is of limited use since I don't know a great deal about which soy providers are really sustainable. Well now the Cornucopia Institute has done for soy what it did for dairy, releasing a soy scorecard and, as Tara Lohan mentioned, a comprehensive report.

The Institute paints a grim picture for a food with a good reputation. Many people buy soy products as an alternative to meat or dairy, thinking that it is more healthy and environmentally friendly — but depending on who you're buying your soy from, that may not actually be true. For one thing, many companies import soybeans from places like China, where food regulations are notoriously lax, and Brazil, where the impact of soybean agriculture has been environmentally devastating and is one of the top reasons for the rapid loss of the Amazonian rainforest. In both of these locales, worker abuse is rampant.

If you are concerned about GMO's, again soy is a problem. The majority of soy in the world and more than 90 percent of the soy grown in the United states is genetically-modified. In most cases, to eat soy is to support the likes of Monsanto, whose numerable sins should be quite familiar to anyone who has spent any time reading this blog.

Even when a consumer goes out of his way to purchase organic soy products, some companies are much better than others. The Cornucopia scorecard is as comprehensive as I could have hoped, looking at everything from whether the company exploits loopholes to use non-organic ingredients to whether the business is family-owned to whether they use real food as flavorings instead of the ubiquitous and obfuscating "natural flavors," which are usually not natural at all.

Finally, the Institute reports extensively on the use of the neurotoxin hexane in making soy products.

It's tempting to try and use broad rules like "all soy is better than all animal products" as a solution to often tricky problem of finding good, sustainable food, but there really is no substitute for buckling down and doing the research to find out where your food really comes from. What you eat often matters less than how it was grown. When you buy your food directly from the farmer, this is as easy as asking a few questions while you shop. But when that's not feasible, I am relieved and grateful that we have organizations like the Cornucopia Institute making the research much easier.

Photo credit: Vanessa Yvonne via Flickr