Tofu found on the road: City Notes on how tofu and cities have shaped one another, and the places behind the stories, pinned on the map.
Centuries ago, tofu was already quietly crossing borders. Emerging in China and widely recorded by the Song dynasty, the craft of curding soy milk travelled with Buddhist monks across the East China Sea to Japanese temples, and south with traders and settlers to the street markets of Southeast Asia. Around 1908, the Chinese scholar Li Shizeng opened a pioneering soy factory just outside Paris. Decades later, carried by waves of diaspora communities, tofu shed its status as an exotic curiosity and became an everyday staple far from home.
Every city that makes room for tofu reshapes it, turning an ancient, unassuming bean curd into a living geography of craft, migration and flavour. Tofulogue maps that geography: one city, one place, one story at a time.
Every city that makes room for tofu reshapes it, turning an ancient, unassuming bean curd into a living geography of craft, migration and flavour. Tofulogue maps that geography: one city, one place, one story at a time.
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Tofu is never made in the abstract or isolation. It takes shape within a city’s particular fabric: its soybean supply, water, immigrant communities, and changing rhythms of life. Every city that makes room for tofu reshapes it.
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