How to eat soy flour

Ms. Utako Nonaka, Communications Secretary for the Atami Women’s Association, must have struggled to find the right words in English. It was early 1946, and she had been tasked with writing a thank-you note to Lt. Ethel Weed, Women’s Information Officer for the U.S. Army occupying forces in Japan. Women had just been granted the right to vote, and Lt. Weed had provided them with information on the upcoming general elections. What Nonaka wanted to say was that she and her associates might starve to death before they had a chance to exercise their new right. 

“I express my sincerest gratitude for what you have done for Japanese women. Since we met you last time, women of Atami have been working hard to study democracy. But as we have to spend all our energies on how to get food, it will take a long time for us to think and work on what we should really do…” 

Nonaka noted that they had received nothing but mixed grain flour as a ration for their families for the past month, and with few other ingredients to be had, they were growing desperate. Additional foods had to be grown in home gardens, collected outdoors, or purchased on the wildly expensive black market. People were reduced to boiling grass and eating grasshoppers.

Nonaka attached a report prepared by the Association entitled How to Eat Soy Flour. The members compared various ways of cooking with soy flour, and concluded that at least some additional grain or starch was needed, such as grated potatoes. Soy flour alone was almost unusable, and they were far more accustomed to improvising with rice.

Extreme food insecurity was not confined to Atami. In the first year after the end of World War II, almost everyone in Japan was hungry. Nonetheless, women still found the energy to exercise their new franchise: 13.5 million women cast ballots in the April 1946 general election—sixty-six percent of those eligible—and several were elected to Diet seats. 

Knowing how my knees knock when I’m an hour late for a meal, I try to picture those women, some with babies on their backs, standing in polling lines. Their stomachs growled, they were exhausted from years of privation, and sick with worry for their families. 

So, I want to call out the brave Atami Women’s Association and never take the food on my table, or my right to vote, for granted.

Original substack post: https://substack.com/home/post/p-153495362