The Amazing, Incredible Power Of The Soybean, "Silk Milk"

I discovered something that I really like to drink in the last several months. It's soy milk. Yes, it's true! It is made from soybeans which is a stable emulsion of oil, water and protein and it is produced by soaking dry soybeans and grinding them with water. I like this stuff and there's one particular brand that I really like and it's called, "Silk." You can find it at Kroger usually on sale for two for five dollars with your Kroger card. (No, Kroger and Silk Milk are not paying me to write this).

The following information comes from the web-site, "Wikipedia.org" regarding "Silk" and soy milk.

""Silk" is a brand of soy milk and other dairy-substitute products, including soy yogurt and almond milk. The company was founded by Steve Demos in 1996 and it's distributed by Demos' company "White Wave Foods," a subsidiary of Dean Foods. The name "Silk" is a portmanteau of "soy" and "milk." Apparently, Silk soy milk sales comprise roughly three-fourths of the refrigerated soy milk sales in America."

"Some of the health benefits of drinking soy milk is that it has about the same amount of protein (though not the same amino acid profile) as the milk of a cow. Natural soy milk contains digestible calcium as it is bound in the bean's pulp, which is insoluble in humans. To counter this, many manufacturers enrich their produce with calcium carbonate available to human digestion. Unlike cow's milk, it has little saturated fat and no cholesterol. (I really like this!) Soy products contain sucrose as the basic diaccharide, which breaks into glucose and fructose. Since soy doesn't contain galactose, a product of lactose breakdown, soy-based infant formulas can replace breast milk in children with galactosemia. Soy milk is also a source of lecithin and vitamin E, lack casein, it is safe for people with lactose intolerance or milk allergy, contains far less saturated fat than cow's milk and contains isoflavones, organic chemicals that may be beneficial to health."

Believe it or not, when I drink a cold glass of "Vanilla Silk," the Mississippi Delta on sunny day comes to my mind. I can remember seeing miles and miles of soybeans being grow from the edge of the Mississippi bluff where I lived back in the late 1970's and early 1980's. The Mississippi Delta farmers probably still do grow the soy beans down there. Soybeans were literally everywhere like "Mississippi Kudzu." I'm sure the soybean was not as big of a "cash crop" back then as it probably is now for those farmers. Thank God for the Mississippi Delta and for the Chinese who discovered the soy milk around A.D. 25-220!