Soybeans for Dummies (eHow Week)

soybeans

Day three of eHow week, and there's still no shortage of candidates for Dumbass of the Day among the freelancers over at Demand Media. Random selection, however, works just fine; so let's learn what Keren (Carrie) Perles, yet another English major with delusions of competence, has to share. Carrie's topic? "How Are Soybeans Harvested?"¹ over at Sciencing.com.

Soybeans, in case you weren't aware, are big agriculture: American farmers harvest about 80 million tons of the little guys every year. The beans are used widely as animal feed, to make oil and milk, and as a vegetable-based protein source for those who choose not to eat anything with a face. In Japan, farmers harvest immature soybean pods for the dish known as edamame. That, it appears, is the only use of the beans familiar to Ms Perles, who informed her readers that:

"Most types of soybean plants produce mature beans in 7 to 10 days. The beans are ready to be harvested when they are plump and green. When the rest of the plant begins turning yellow, the beans are still edible but past their prime. If the beans themselves begin to turn yellow, they should no longer be harvested for human consumption."

Wow: we're pretty sure farmers would be ecstatic if soybeans produced mature beans in a week and a half, but they don't: it takes three to four months! That was her first mistake. Her second mistake was assuming that edamame is the only use of the soybean: at least some of the soybeans harvested "past their prime" – the point at which our staff farmer always harvested beans in the fields around his childhood home – are ultimately processed into soybean oil, soy sauce, soy milk, and... you guessed it... tofu. Friggin' tofu, Carrie! Oh, and when she said, "In warm climates, beans are spread out on a drying floor for several weeks so that the sun and air dry them naturally"? That's just plain stupid: where are you going to find space for this supposed drying floor? Dumbass!

There you go: more mindless pronouncements out of an eHow freelancer, and the internet just gets stupider. In thanks, Carrie, we hereby name you our Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how-does_4928324_how-soybeans-harvested.html

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