Akiko Aoyagi

Biography

Akiko Aoyagi was born in Tokyo, Japan, on January 24, 1950. She attended the Quaker Friends School and then the Women's College of the Arts, where she studied Fashion Design; her thesis project explored 'designing clothing for children with physical and mental deficits.' After graduation, she worked as a fashion designer in Tokyo, where she lightened her hair and wore 'tie-dye maxi-skirts,' but found herself in 'a pressure-packed, highspeed job' that was 'superficial, very exhausting.'

She wanted to go to Africa with the Peace Corps and also thought of becoming a Catholic nun. In 1971, her sister set Aoyagi up on a blind date with William Shurtleff, an American student of Suzuki Roshi at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center who was in Japan to help Roshi set up a center. They shared interests in Zen meditation. Aoyagi 'sold all her clothes, quit the fashion company, and moved in with him,' and they began hitchhiking together throughout Japan, talking about traveling to India to visit ashrams.

That same year, Shurtleff read Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé, which argued that soybeans were a superior source of protein. Aoyagi introduced Shurtleff to 'Kyoto's Haute cuisine Tofu restaurants' where a 12-course meal was about three dollars. During one of these meals, they decided to create 'a tofu cookbook that would show Westerners how to prepare tofu.' Aoyagi began experimenting with cooking tofu, 'dredging up memories of dishes that she had grown up eating or had read about.'

Over the next few years, they traveled, visiting tofu factories, ashrams, and 'grandmothers who still remember the old ways.' In 1972, they signed a book contract with Autumn Press. Shurtleff apprenticed with 'tofu master' Toshio Arai, and Aoyagi tested methods of reproducing the process at home, taking 'more than one hundred times to get a reliable, reproducible method.' She began 're-creating the recipes she would see in tofu shops, finding uses for soybeans at all points during the process,' documenting each recipe in a mix of English and Japanese, and creating illustrations. The Book of Tofu was published by Autumn Press in 1975.

According to The New York Times, it was 'received so enthusiastically' that Ballantine Books picked it up for a mass market edition the following year; the original 5,000 copies sold out within the first month, and 10,000 copies were printed in 1976. They next produced The Book of Miso (1976). They came to the United States and traveled around the country in a Dodge Ram van to publicize both books, making sixty-four stops in four months—a schedule Aoyagi remembered as 'grueling.'

They visited The Farm, a vegan-based intentional community, and studied tempeh production there. In 1979, they published The Book of Tempeh (1979). In 1975, they co-founded the New Age Foods Study Center (in Tokyo and California). In 1976, they co-founded the SoyInfo Center, intended to be the 'world's leading source of information on soy.'

In 1978, they co-founded the Soycrafters Association of North America, which held conferences attended by countercultural food companies. Aoyagi and Shurtleff were married but later divorced in the early 1990s; they have a son.

Legacy

Food writer Jonathan Kauffman states in Hippie Food: How Back-To-The-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat (2018) that Tofurky developed due to the influence of Frances Moore Lappé, Aoyagi and Shurtleff, and The Farm. He also credits the rise of tofu shops, tofu cookbooks, and vegetarian cookbooks that use tofu in the West to Aoyagi and Shurtleff. Steve Silberman, discussing Kauffman's book, refers to Aoyagi and Shurtleff as 'pioneers' who 'placed tofu at the center of millions of vegetarian tables in the West after falling in love with the snowy pressed soy curds as Zen students in Kyoto.'

American author and professor Rynn Berry interviewed Aoyagi and Shurtleff for a chapter in the 'Visionaries' section of his 1995 book Famous Vegetarians and Their Favorite Recipes: Lives and Lore from Buddha to the Beatles, alongside Bronson Alcott, Sylvester Graham, John Harvey Kellogg, Henry Stephens Salt, and Frances Moore Lappé. Berry asserts that in 1975, 'few Americans had even the vaguest idea of what it [Tofu] was,' but by 1995 it was sold in countless supermarkets and health food stores, and credits William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi as co-authors of The Book of Tofu, which 'has become the bible for tofu enthusiasts.'

The Rynn Berry Jr. Papers at North Carolina State University Libraries contain the transcript of an interview by Berry with the couple and the original illustration used in Famous Vegetarians.