Staff Writer| The Columbus Dispatch
Soybeans are a top crop in Ohio, but good luck finding any locally grown legumes to eat.
Soybeans -- usually marketed under their Japanese name, edamame -- are an increasingly popular health food, but nearly all those sold in local grocery stores are grown in China.
Ohio farmers do grow some soybeans to be eaten instead of processed for other uses, but the majority are exported and used to make products such as tofu.
The problem for local diners with a taste for the bean, experts say, is that soybean farmers are not equipped to grow and harvest edamame, which are immature beans. And vegetable farmers have not yet responded to demand for the product by growing more.
Adding to the problem is concern over the safety of products from China.
Edamame and other imported foods have come under scrutiny recently after numerous product recalls. Trader Joe's recently said that by April, it will stop selling single-ingredient food items from China, including edamame.
"We feel confident that all of our products from China meet the same high-quality standards that we set for all of our products. However, our customers have voiced their concerns about products from this region, and we have listened," Alison Mochizuki, a Trader Joe's spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Trader Joe's now gets its edamame from Thailand.
Kroger sells frozen edamame from China, and Giant Eagle sells organic, fresh edamame from China.
Whole Foods Market carries domestic and Chinese edamame. The store-brand edamame is grown in China, but the natural-foods grocer also sells Columbia River Organics frozen edamame, which is grown in the U.S., said Cathy Cochran-Lewis, a spokeswoman.
That doesn't ensure availability of domestic beans, however.
"Consumer demand for this product has been strong, and it is likely we will sell out of the frozen pods this spring," Cochran-Lewis said. The supply will be restocked in the fall.
Kaz Obrietan, a Columbus woman whose family ate edamame four times a week for five years, said she stopped buying the beans when she realized that most came from China. The beans might be good for you, but the way they are grown might not be, she said.
"We just decided it was something we didn't want to consume anymore," she said. "Considering we grow so much soy in the state … I'm not sure why we couldn't produce (edamame) in this environment."
Part of the difficulty is that the vast majority of soybeans grown by Ohio farmers are intended to be processed into animal feed, vegetable oil and other products. Almost half of Ohio's soybeans are exported, and the crop is the state's top agricultural export, said Kirk Merritt, director of international marketing for the Ohio Soybean Council.
Merritt estimated that 5 percent to 7 percent of Ohio soybeans are consumed as food, and the majority of those beans are exported to countries such as China, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia.
In fact, Honda pays a select group of farmers in Ohio and Michigan to grow a premium variety of soybeans that are exported to Japan to make tofu and soy milk.
Further, cultivating edamame is different. It's considered a horticultural crop, and requires a more intense system for growing and processing, said Matt Kleinhenz, an Ohio State University Extension vegetable specialist.
For one thing, it's difficult to know when to harvest edamame because the pods mature from the bottom of the plant upward, so one plant can have pods at different stages of maturity.
"It's a different process than our (mass) producers generally are set up to do," Merritt said.
Some smaller Ohio vegetable farms -- perhaps a dozen -- are growing edamame and selling it directly to consumers, Kleinhenz said. He theorized that people interested in buying locally grown edamame have not yet connected with the farmers who have it, and assume it's not available. And growers don't realize that consumers want it.
"Until they meet each other, we have this situation," Kleinhenz said.
Lisa Schacht, a Canal Winchester farmer who runs an on-farm market, said that about four years ago, she grew and sold edamame. But "it's such a specific clientele" wanting the beans, and harvesting them wasn't efficient, so she stopped growing them.
Schacht said if someone else is growing high-quality edamame, she'd gladly buy the beans to sell at her market.
The availability problem could change. Some large fresh-produce distributors are considering selling domestic edamame, and if that happens, supply probably would increase quickly to meet demand, Kleinhenz said.
mcuret@dispatch.com
