It's amazing how much tiny little beans can do.
Though they're only the size of peas, the light-brown seeds of the soybean plant are one of the food wonders of the world. They are, too, indispensable to Japanese cuisine, and though they only rarely appear raw and unadulterated in the nation's kitchens, for most Japanese hardly a day passes without them dining on some form of the bean.
In fact, for all the millions who start their days with a typical Japanese breakfast of rice and miso soup, there's that bean already before their bleary eyes in the steaming contents of their soup bowl -- since miso is a fermented concoction of boiled soybeans, rice and salt.
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