William Shurtleff

William Roy Shurtleff (born April 28, 1941) also known as Bill Shurtleff^[1] is an American researcher and writer about soy foods. Shurtleff and his former wife Akiko Aoyagi have written and published consumer-oriented cookbooks, handbooks for small- and large-scale commercial production, histories, and bibliographies of various soy foods. These books introduced soy foods such as tofu, tempeh, and miso on a wide scale to non-Asian Westerners, and are largely responsible for the establishment of non-Asian soy food manufacturers in the West beginning in the late 1970s.^[2] In 1980, Lorna Sass wrote in The New York Times, "The two people most responsible for catapulting tofu from the wok into the frying pan are William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi."^[3] In 1995, Suzanne Hamlin wrote in The New York Times, "At the turn of the century there were two tofu suppliers in the United States. Today there are more than 200 tofu manufacturers...and tofu can be found in nearly every supermarket."^[4]

In turn, the new availability and cultural acceptance of tofu and related foods enabled the creation of new manufactured soy-based foods such as Tofutti and Tofurkey, and arguably gave a push to the natural foods and vegetarian movements that had begun with the counterculture of the 1960s.