7/2708 
While talking to people at our demo table at the Clintonville Block Party (Columbus OH) yesterday, we noticed that many people do not really understand the difference between soy food and traditional fermented (cultured) soy food, like tempeh.
Because of all the advertising over the last few years, people have come to believe that soy food is beneficial to your health. Perhaps it is better than whatever else one might be eating but the truth is that large scale food manufacturing does not produce wholesome food. They like to combine certain ingredients and put them into huge machines that then stamp out something called food - but is in reality just a bunch of more or less useful ingredients and lots of advertising then is employed to convince people that it is good for them.
The soy ingredient in a machine made soy burger might merely be a bit of protein extracted from a soybean, everything else that was contained in the original soybean has been captured for other purposes. It's like taking the original whole wheat kernel and making bleached white flour out of it, perhaps adding one or two ingredients back in and then calling it wheat flour, good for making bread. Actually it was created to satisfy the demands of the machines that make the bread, not because you want to make a healthy bread for people to eat. This reminds me of an interview I saw on the tube with a baker who was key to bringing artisan bread to the USA ( in San Francisco) and he was asked what was so different in his process and made the bread taste so much better than the regular method of making it. His answer was that the regular process makes bread fast so that the machines can make lots of it - but good bread takes time to get itself ready for baking and the commercial bread makers will not give it the proper time.
And so it is with tempeh. It takes it's time to become a healthy food and the fermenting process makes it even better than the original soybeans if they were just cooked.
If you want to find out more about the benefits of traditional fermented foods - just google this phrase!
9/1/08
Betsy at the Green Living Fayre, Flying J Farm, OH where many people showed great interest in making Betsy's Tempeh for themselves or possibly as a small business. The local SLOW Food Group was interested in a future workshop.
9/19/08
We attended the Stinner Conference put on by the Ohio Food Systems Collaborative and the consensus seems to be that the demand for locally grown and processed food is large. Everyone is trying to think of ways of meeting this demand.
We talked at the conference and with people we have met since about getting Betsy's Tempeh off the ground and we seem to agree on a "small is beautiful" franchise model. Perhaps a production facility could be designed that would employ up to four owner/operators and could be located either in the city or countryside. Soybeans to be produced locally. Possibly a small deli type outlet near locations in the city with lots of foot traffic to serve tempeh burgers , tacos, chili etc.
This model could then be easily duplicated in other locations without everyone having to reinvent the wheel.
What do you think?