Now this was tofu -- spongy, slippery, brown-speckled gray, oozing juices and reeking so badly you couldn't hold it 12 inches from your face. You absolutely couldn't eat it. I couldn't. The best I could do was prod it with chopsticks and declare: This -- this fermented block of soybean extract, prepared by monks in a bamboo forest, served from tiny black bowls on tatami mats in Japan -- is the most remarkable tofu I will encounter.
I was wrong.
Way back in Virginia, slumped in a tray on the Newcomb salad bar, trading serving spoons with bacon bits and kidney beans, is tofu even more peculiar. You'll find it at Runk and O'Hill too, sometimes "marinated" or folded into fried rice. Oh yes, it's plain-looking -- just the blocky white standard -- and, mercifully for us all, it doesn't smell like much. It just tastes like protein, like egg whites or cottage cheese, or maybe, in the very mildest way, like soybeans.
But this is not just tofu. This is utopia.
The story? It starts with B.F. Skinner. It was his book, "Walden Two," that inspired the dream that inspired this tofu. The book describes a small-scale paradise: 1,000 people living, working and learning together, culturing bliss through behaviorist psychology. The scene sounded good to Kat Kinkade. She was 36, restless and discontent. The year was 1967, a good time for discontent-bred dreams. So Kinkade did the only unreasonable thing: She started her own paradise.
Thirty miles east of Charlottesville, Kinkade and a few fellow optimists started the Twin Oaks Intentional Community. Read that as "commune" and you've got the idea: a self-supporting group of people who share space, chores, income and governance. In the four decades since, Twin Oaks has seen everyone and everything, except possibly paradise. They've had drifters, Ivy Leaguers, Quakers, pagans, infants and bearded almost-gurus. Together, more or less, they've endured growth, crisis, birth, suicide and the overlap of more than 600 lives.
And they're still making tofu. That, along with hand-crafted hammocks and book indexes, is what keeps the place running. It's quite the business, shuttling blocks of soy curd all over Charlottesville. The dining halls are only one stop; there's also Bodo's, Revolutionary Soup, HotCakes and C'ville Coffee. Whole Foods, Rebecca's, Integral Yoga and Foods of All Nations stock Twin Oaks products too. It seems the whole town is eating the utopia output, and not all of it in the flavor of 'unadorned white.' 'Fine herb' and 'Italian herb' add a few speckles -- still far from the Japanese kind, to be sure.
Production is intense. It must be, to meet that demand. The Tofu Hut runs 16 cycles a day, four days a week. That churns out more than three tons of tofu per week, almost every week of the year. Each cycle starts the night before, with a vat of soybeans left to soak in well water. Before dawn the next day, a hardy worker arrives to light the wood furnace that boils the water that cooks the beans. Beans are cooked all day -- for 8 to 9 hours in batches stirred and ground up by rotating shifts of four Twin Oaks residents. Finally, the slurry is poured into moulds, swaddled with cheesecloth and pressed.
It's a few hours wait while the product condenses in cool water, and at last it is pasteurized, cut up and sealed in pouches. One-pound pouches make it to grocery store shelves, but it's whole 12-pound slabs that find their way to Newcomb. That's a decent slice of would-be paradise.
And an eminently edible one, at that. Presumably it would ferment if left long enough, but there's little worry of that here. For one, people eat it before it goes gray. But more to the point: This variety doesn't need the embellishment. It's got quite a story already.
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