Soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.)

The soybean is probably the world’s most valuable crop, used as feed by billions of livestock, as a source of dietary protein and oil by millions of people, and in the industrial manufacture of thousands of products. It is believed to have been domesticated in China from its probable wild ancestor Glycine usuriensis, a wild plant common in eastern Asia and has been used as food and in folk medicine in China and Japan for thousands of years and has been assigned to the China-Japanese Centre of Diversity. Introduced into the United States in the early 1800s it gradually became very popular in the southern and midwestern states. The United States has remained by far the world’s largest producer of soybean for more than two decades. Soybean is such an extremely rich source of protein and fat, and such a good source of energy, vitamins and minerals that it has become the standard to which other vegetable food ingredients are compared.