Plant
Soybean
Glycine max
Also known as: Glycine max, soya
An annual legume domesticated from wild *Glycine soja* in East Asia ~5,000 years ago. The single most-grown legume in the world and the source of more vegetable protein and oil than any other crop. Cultural and culinary foundation of East and Southeast Asian fermented-food traditions (tofu, miso, soy sauce, tempeh, natto); industrial workhorse of the modern global feed system.
Scientific
Glycine max is a member of Fabaceae (the legume family) and like most legumes fixes atmospheric nitrogen through its root-nodule symbiosis with [[rhizobia-inoculant|Bradyrhizobium]] japonicum bacteria. This nitrogen-fixing capacity makes soy a key rotation crop — many maize-soy rotations across the American Midwest depend on the soybean year for soil nitrogen recovery.
Mature seeds contain ~36% protein and ~18% oil — extraordinarily high values for a single crop. Soy protein is one of only a handful of plant proteins considered nutritionally complete.
Cultural
East and Southeast Asia developed a sophisticated soy-fermentation tradition over millennia. Tofu (China, ~2,000 years ago), miso and soy sauce (Japan/China), tempeh (Indonesia), natto (Japan), gochujang and doenjang (Korea) — all are soy-fermentation lineages, each with distinct microbial ecologies. The fermentation step transforms soy from a hard-to-digest raw legume into a far more bioavailable food.
Global production
Top producers: Brazil, USA, Argentina, China, India. The majority of the global soybean crop is now grown for animal feed and oil extraction, not direct human consumption — a 20th-century industrial reorientation of a plant that was, for most of its history, a fermented food staple.
See also
Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.
- Shares approach with: [[peanut]] · [[lentil]] · [[common-bean]] · [[chickpea]] · [[wisteria]] · [[wheat]]
- Member of: [[plants]]
Sources
- FAO Crop Statistics
- Wikipedia — Soybean
A plant entry in the 0mn1.one [[directory]].
What links here, and how
Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.
Scientific
shares approach with
- Adzuki bean fellow East Asian pulse with sweetened and fermented preparations; both central to Japanese and Korean foodways
cousin of
- Peanut Fabaceae kin — both are nitrogen-fixing legumes with major oilseed economic roles. Peanut is South American origin, soybean East Asian — but the two are now the global oilseed/protein backbone.
substrate of
- Yangtze Basin soybean was domesticated in the Yangtze and Yellow River basins of China; the Yangtze basin remains a major soybean region
Practical
shares approach with
- Sunflower Co-leading global oilseed — sunflower is the world's #3 oilseed after soybean and rapeseed; both are commodity-scale oil crops with parallel industrial processing pipelines.
General
shares approach with
- Common bean auto-linked via shared tag: domesticated
- Cucumber auto-linked via shared tag: domesticated
- Dogwood auto-linked via shared tag: east-asia
- Hosta auto-linked via shared tag: east-asia
- Kudzu auto-linked via shared tag: east-asia
- Lentil auto-linked via shared tag: domesticated
- Pear auto-linked via shared tag: domesticated
- Wisteria auto-linked via shared tag: east-asia
12 inbound links · 7 outbound