Resurrected Grain Beats Soy Beans on Most Counts
by Kate Ross, NEW YORK TIMES, November 16, 2011
Lupin seeds have been used as a high-protein food for over 3,000 years around the Mediterranean, and as for as long as 6,000 years in the Andean highlands of Latin America. For human consumption, however, lupin has never achieved the broad market acceptance of soybeans: it is more commonly used as a livestock fodder and grazing plant, sown as a cover crop and soil enhancer, or plowed back into the field while still green or just after flowering.
Jaap Korteweg, whose family has farmed in the southern Dutch province of Brabant for generations, aims to change that.
Mr. Korteweg grows organic lupin as a food crop. In October last year, he and two partners, Marco Westmaas, a chef, and Niko Koffeman, an animal rights politician, opened De Vegetarische Slager, or The Vegetarian Butcher, in The Hague, selling vegetarian meat substitutes. In the year since, it has expanded its reach into 45 restaurants and retailing outlets across the Netherlands, with two more in the pipeline.
Alongside conventional soy-based products, De Vegetarische Slager promotes its own line of lupin-based meat-free foods, including lupin “meatballs” and croquettes and a lupin-flour bread.
A critical reason for choosing lupin is that it thrives in temperate to cool climates and can be grown locally in Europe, Mr. Korteweg said in an interview. In 2009, at least 147,250 tons of lupin seed were grown in Europe, according to recent but incomplete statistics from the Food and Agricultural Organization, or F.A.O., a U.N. agency.
Soybeans, which prefer a warmer subtropical or tropical climate, are also grown in parts of Southern Europe, but far more extensively in the United States, South America and Asia.
To meet the demand for domestic consumption and export products, European Union member states imported 13.5 million tons of soybeans last year — much of it through Rotterdam, Europe’s busiest port and home to a major oilseed crushing industry — according to trade statistics from the European Commission.
Soybean production and trade have major social, ecological and economic consequences, including deforestation, land conflicts and soil degradation, said a report published last year by the Dutch Soy Coalition, an environmental and social activist organization that opposes the current methods used.
In contrast, E.U. members imported just 2,146 tons of lupin in 2010, the commission’s trade figures showed.
“Lupin is a very good alterative crop,” said Greg Olwig, marketing manager of the U.S. Soybean Export Council, “but the major challenge facing the industry is their very minor production.” He added that the productivity of farmland is greater with soybeans than with lupin, as soybeans provide a higher level of protein units per area of cropland.
Mr. Korteweg said it was not just its suitability to the climate of Northern Europe that marked lupin as preferable to soybeans. “Lupin plants are great for the soil,” he said. “They convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into nitrogen compounds in the ground.”
As a robust, native plant, moreover, it can be grown without fertilizers, chemical pesticides or protective genetic engineering, he said.
In contrast, about 70 percent of all soybeans now on the market have been genetically modified to resist the herbicide Roundup, the Dutch Soy Coalition’s report said. While broadly accepted in the United States and much of the rest of the world, genetically modified soy continues to face consumer resistance in much of Europe, with concerns focused on the possible risks to health, biodiversity and the environment.
Lupin seed is also nutritionally superior to soy in several respects, according to some researchers. A comparative study of lupin seeds and soybeans published by the F.A.O. in 2003 found that lupin seeds had a higher protein content, at 35 percent to 40 percent, against soybeans’ 24 percent to 32 percent. [Read rest of story]