Soy story: Adventures in organic soy milk

Buy a carton of cow's milk, and the ingredient list will often list just that: milk. Not so with soy milk. What is "carrageenan" and why's it in my soy milk? That's what I asked Twitter after getting home with my Silk organic soy milk, bought at Vons yesterday after much indecision. Within a few hours, I had a few tweets back:

• Curtis: "gelatinous extracts of the Chondrus crispus seaweed". Bon apetit ;)

• Zel: Silk is the Velveeta of soy milk. Or at least the Kraft American cheese. I like the Trader Joe's brand. I used to like the 365 brand until they switched to plastic containers. 8th Continent is also good and mostly natural. I could go on...

I usually shop at Co-opportunity and Whole Foods, but it was a soy milk emergency (I wanted to make pancakes) and a Vons happened to be right there. Since big grocery stores have really been getting into the organic market, I figured finding organic soy milk would be a cinch.

Sure enough, I found not just one, but two organic soy milk brands to choose from. Unfortunately, both Silk and Vons' own O Organics soy milks had a lot of non-soy stuff in their ingredients. I finally settled on Silk because it had fewer ingredients I couldn't pronounce.

Here's Silk's ingredient list:



And here's Organic O's:



Why are fewer ingredients better? Well for one thing, I don't want a whole lot of sugar and its empty calories unceremoniously poured into my soy milk. Unsweeted soy milk is nuttily sweet enough for me, thank you very much.

For another, who knows what all this stuff is? Organic O's "zinc gluconate" initially sounded scary to me, though I later discovered the stuff's commonly used in supplements and not actually dangerous. However, according to Wikipedia, "Zinc gluconate may interfere with the absorption of antibiotics, so combinations may be unsafe." Luckily, I'm not taking antibiotics, but for those who are, drinking this soy milk could cause problems, unbeknownst to the soy milk lover!

The soy milk I usually get: Westsoy Organic Unsweetened Soy Milk. Here's the ingredient list:



That's the way I like my soy milk: Free of cane sugar and carrageenan.

Silk and Organic O aren't even the real baddies when it comes to weird food ingredients. In case you missed it, Kraft even got sued for its “guacamole” which contains just 2% avocado. What’s the other 98%? Partially hydrogenated soybean and coconut oils, corn syrup, whey and food starch. Yummy.

But back to soy milk. For bargain hunters: I believe Trader Joe's brand of unsweetened soy milk is also nice and simple. Can someone with a carton in the fridge confirm that? My closest Trader Joe's is just far enough away that I only go once every month or two.

Photos by Siel

Comments

[Adam Rakunas]

Speaking of Kraft: my wife and I went to see Iron Man (what would Tony Stark's carbon footprint be?), and during the pre-trailer commercials, there was a spot from Kraft promoting their new brand that was made without preservatives or additives and contained "real food." At least they're admitting they've been selling garbage all this time.

[Cassandra]

Less is certainly more when it comes to our food, but perhaps this will help:

A) The "silk" soymilks (and most of the ones which sit in the refrigerated section) are fortified because they are seen to more directly compete with carton milk. These soy milks are usually located side-by-side with the fortified milks in the refrigerated section, and usually come in the familiar milk containers. The stuff you can't pronounce can all be traced back to adding vitamins to compete with or surpass milk's vitamin content and to adding sugar to win little Jimmy's taste buds. Note that with the two cartons you pictured Silk Vanilla and Organics Plain, but you pictured WestSoy's Unsweetened. WestSoy's plain has sugar added as well. I don't know about saying Silk is to soy milk as "Velveta" is to cheese - but it is close to being the "Kraft" of soy milk, both for ingredients value and for the publicity Silk has given to non-dairy products.

B) You can almost always find the more traditional rice and soy milks in the non-refrigerated section (this varies, but is often by the grains section, or the kosher section) of most grocery stores. In fact, you can find the WestSoy you pictured above at the 99 cents store (stores will vary - sometimes they have organic, sometimes they have "regular" non-organic).

But no matter which soy milk you choose to put in your glass, all of it is better than drinking (or producing) millk! ;)

[Grace]

Evaporated cane juice is SUGAR. I think it is really sneaky and devious to use evaporated cane juice instead of sugar in labeling.

Carrageenan is a seaweed extract that gives the milk a creamier "mouth feel". I don't get too worked up over it because I eat plenty of seaweed salad anyway.

[Hannah]

I have a box of TJ's Organic Unsweetened Soy Milk (we brought it with us on our vacation to save money on breakfast) and the ingredients are "Filtered Water, Organic Whole Soybeans"

This is the brand we buy all the time and for my tea, I like the West Soy unsweetened vanilla flavor - yum!

[Matt]

And if Soy doesn't agree with you, Blue Diamond Almond Milk is delicious, also comes unsweetened, is stocked at Trader Joes, Whole Foods, Gelsons and some other suprising places. It also has a short ingredient list ;-)