Our research project provides a thorough investigation of the journey of the soybean, from a key food staple in ancient Asia to today’s expansive biotech agriculture in South America producing the fundamental ingredient behind “cheap” meat. Over its long history, emperors, botanists, nutritionists, industrialists and traders have hyped different qualities of the soybean. It has been called a “miracle bean” for its outstanding flexibility of uses, nutritional qualities and hardiness to poor agricultural conditions. However, it has also been portrayed as a “curse” - as the ultimate symbol for increased corporate control and financialization of agriculture, enabling animal confinement, accelerating biodiversity loss and increasing displacement of farmers. We view the soybean itself is neither a miracle, nor a curse, but exceptional in the sense that it is a highly versatile and adaptive crop that has taken on a broad variety of functions and meanings throughout history depending on how and where it was produced, for what purpose, by whom, etc. 

Through a mapping and analysis of the functions, uses, places, production methods, values and meanings of the soybean throughout world history, we explore the widely shifting roles and meanings it has held. This study thus includes an exploration of the spatial reconfigurations of production, trade and consumption of the soybean, as well as its changed social-ecological relations and modes of production and commercialization practices over history. To examine the evolving dominant structures and processes of the agrofood system and the social-ecological effects of these changes over time we complement and integrate theories and methods in political economy with resilience thinking in a world historical and transdisciplinary way. In this way, this project will add nuance to the complex picture of agrofood globalization, while also advance theory and methods related to the evolution and sustainability of agrofood systems. 

Institutionens forskare i projektet: Matilda Baraibar, Janken Myrdal och Ulf Jonsson. Övrig forskare: Lisa Deutsch (Stockholm Resilience Center och Latinamerikainstitutet). Finansiär: Vetenskapsrådet.