The Au Naturel Tofu Manual: tofu recipes for families was published in Montréal in 1983. This cookbook is an important historical source because it gives insight into what people ate, diet trends, culture, and even politics at the time when the book was published. The theme of the book is as the title suggests, easy tofu recipes for families. This cookbook showcases tofu in unusual ways, such as using tofu as the main ingredient in sweet dessert recipes. The authors give easy and healthy recipes for the everyday homemaker to incorporate into the ever-changing diet of the average family.

It is interesting and notable that the cookbook focuses solely on tofu, and this tells us that in the 1970s and 1980s tofu was part of a growing trend in popular media and culture surrounding health and diet food. In addition, it can give some insight into soybean agriculture in Canada. Soybeans are Canada’s third-largest field crop, making Canada one of the world’s top soybean producers and exporters. 1976 was a very notable year for soybean agriculture when varieties were developed that could tolerate Canada’s climate. Soybeans in Canada are grown for tofu, soy sauce, miso, edamame, and several other products.

Although tofu has been around for thousands of years, it was only introduced in North America in the late 1800s and did not really gain much of a popularity among Caucasian North Americans until around the 1960s. People were quickly gaining an interest in healthy and natural foods, protein alternatives, and vegetarian diets, and tofu was on its way to becoming a household name in the 1980s. In the 1980s, evidence was emerging that showed a protective effect against obesity, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes with a vegetarian diet, which contributed even further to the popularity of healthy eating and meat alternatives.

The healthy tofu-focused recipes in this cookbook are perfect for the time that they were created for, as the health and weight loss movement was in full swing around this time. The period of the 1960s-1980s is one of the most notable times in history that trendy weight-loss diets and health food were popular when more and more people were trying to get on the bandwagon of living a healthier lifestyle. Weight Watchers was started in the early 1960s and is still one of the most popular weight loss brands today. Aerobics and Jazzercise became popular in the 1970s and 1980s, and the popular Beverly Hills Diet came out in 1981. In 1977, for the first time, the meat and fish section in Canada’s Food Guide was revised to include “protein alternatives”, like beans, lentils, and nuts, a reflection of the broader acceptance of vegetarian diets. In 1980, some of the main dietary guidelines for Americans were to “maintain an ideal weight” and to “avoid too much fat, sugar, and sodium. As eating healthier and including more meat alternatives like tofu in the everyday diet was gaining popularity, regular people were looking for easy recipes to incorporate these changes into their lives. These easy recipes were perfect for beginners that were trying to implement more healthy vegetarian meals into their diet.

The authors owned a health food store at the time when health foods were gaining stronger popularity, so although many people had heard of tofu, using it to feed their family was likely unfamiliar territory. As the authors mention in the cookbook, “one of the most common complaints of women who shop in our store is that their husbands are ‘meat and potatoes’ men and have no interest in changing”. This tells us that at this time vegetarianism, although popular with animal rights activists, was still foreign to many, and the authors were trying to help these women incorporate tofu in an easy way, to not “shock the system” of their families. This cookbook tells us that the general population was just starting to get interested in tofu, and that the authors were interested in creating the book to possibly fill this growing need for guidance. As science and culture evolves, what is popular, trendy, and even ‘correct’ also changes, and people look for advice on how to integrate these changes into their daily life, and this includes changes to diet, health, and lifestyle. This evolution is reflected in primary historical sources like cookbooks, and health and wellness are particularly exemplified in this book.