User:Valereee/William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi

William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi are writers and researchers in soy foods and operate the Soy Information Center.

Early life
Shurtleff was born in California in 1941 and graduated from Stanford University in 1963 with degrees in humanities and industrial engineering. He spent two years in the Peace Corps, then earned a Master's in education at Stanford.

Aoyagi was born in Tokyo in 1950 and worked in illustration and fashion design.

In 1971 Shurtleff travelled to Japan to study Zen and Japanese, and the two met.

Early Career
After reading Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet Shurtleff and Aoyagi focussed on tofu and other soy foods as a solution to world hunger; Lappe had argued that per acre of soybean vs. beef grazing land, twenty times as much protein usable for human consumption could be produced.

The two decided to self-publish a booklet about using soy foods. In 1973 they travelled through Japan to watch and learn from traditional tofu makers in remote villages. Shurtleff apprenticed with a local tofu maker to learn the process. Aoyagi accompanied Shurtleff to his apprenticeship to record the process and make sketches, attempting to adapt the process to a home kitchen, as most Japanese did not make their own tofu. She recreated dishes served in tofu shops, adapting them also to the home kitchen, and selected recipes from The Joy of Cooking to remake with tofu and developed recipes for tofu burgers, barbecued tofu, dips, dressings, and casseroles. Her recipes used not only tofu but the intermediate products such as okara, gô, curds, and the soybeans themselves.

Aoyagi illustrated the book with detailed black-and-white line drawings of tools and processes.

Books
In 1972, a small publisher of Zen and macrobiotic books, Autumn Press, offered them a publishing contract. The Book of Tofu was published in 1975 and followed by The Book of Miso in 1976.

Multi-issue features about The Book of Tofu appeared in Mother Earth News and East West Journal.

In September of 1976 Shurtleff and Aoyagi did a 4-month 64-stop book tour. Audiences were "almost overwhelmingly young and counterculture," and tofu was unfamiliar to them. Midway through the tour they stopped at The Farm commune and stayed for two weeks while Shurtleff studied tempeh-making with Cynthia Bates. The Book of Tempeh was released in 1979.

The Book of Tofu sold thirty thousand copies in its first year of publication. Ballantine Books released it as a mass-market paperback.

Soy Information Center
Shurtleff and Aoyagi operate the Soy Information Center in Lafayette, California.

Impact
The Book of Tofu included a directory of US tofu shops, all owned by Chinese- or Japanese-Americans, in its 1975 edition. By 1982 there were 170 shops, according to Shurtleff.

According to Karen Iacobbo and Michael Iacobbo, food historians and authors of Vegetarian America, The Book of Tofu helped "creat(e) a surge in demand for tofu cuisine."

Mother Earth News said The Book of Tofu in 1977 was "already starting to revolutionize the eating habits of the Western world."

Paste said Shurtleff and Aoyagi's The Book of Tempeh helped tempeh become a "major vegetarian protein player in the US."