For Mike Fitzpatrick, the saga of soya began in Monty Python-style with a dead parrot. His investigations into the ubiquitous bean started in 1991 when Richard James, a multimillionaire US lawyer, turned up at the laboratory in New Zealand where Fitzpatrick was working as a consultant toxicologist. James was sure that soya beans were killing his rare birds.
"We thought he was mad, but he had a lot of money and wanted us to find out what was going on," Fitzpatrick recalls.
Over the next few months, Fitzpatrick carried out an exhaustive study of soya and its effects.
"We discovered quite quickly," he recalls, "that soya contains toxins and plant estrogens powerful enough to disrupt women's menstrual cycles in experiments. It also appeared damaging to the thyroid."
James' lobbying eventually forced governments to investigate. In 2002, the British government's Committee on Toxicity (COT) of chemicals in food published the results of its inquiry into the safety of plant estrogens, mainly from soya proteins, in modern food.
It concluded that in general the health benefits claimed for soya were not supported by clear evidence and judged that there could be risks from high levels of consumption for certain age groups. Yet little has happened to curb soya's growth since.
More than 60 percent of all processed food in Britain today contains soya in some form, according to food industry estimates. It is in breakfast cereals, cereal bars and biscuits, cheeses, cakes, dairy desserts, gravies, noodles, pastries, soups, sausage casings, sauces and sandwich spreads.
Soya, crushed, separated and refined into its different parts, can appear on food labels as soya flour, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, soy protein isolate, protein concentrate, textured vegetable protein, vegetable oil (simple, fully or partially hydrogenated), plant sterols, or the emulsifier lecithin. Its many guises hint at its value to manufacturers.
Soya increases the protein content of processed meat products. It replaces them altogether in vegetarian foods. It stops industrial breads shrinking. It makes cakes hold on to their water. It helps manufacturers mix water into oil. Hydrogenated, its oil is used to deep-fry fast food.
Soya is also in cat food and dog food. But above all, it is used in agricultural feeds for intensive chicken, beef, dairy, pig and fish farming. Soya protein -- which accounts for 35 percent of the raw bean -- is what has made the global factory farming of livestock for cheap meat a possibility. Soya oil -- high in omega 6 fatty acids and 18 percent of the whole bean -- has meanwhile driven the postwar explosion in snack foods around the world. Potato chips, confectionery, deep-fried takeaways, ready meals, ice creams, mayonnaise and margarines all make liberal use of it. Its widespread presence is one of the reasons our balance of omega 3 to omega 6 essential fatty acids is so out of kilter.
You may think that when you order a skinny soya latte, you are choosing a commodity blessed with an unadulterated aura of health.
But soya today is in fact associated with patterns of food consumption that have been linked to diet-related diseases. And 50 years ago it was not eaten in the West in any quantity.
In 1965, the earliest year for which the Chicago Board of Trade keeps figures, global soya bean production was just 30 million tonnes. By last year, the world was consuming nine times that a year, at 270 million tonnes.
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