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alternative to dairy milk. In the small food plant connected
with the hospital, where several soyfoods were already
being produced for use in the lacto-vegetarian diet, Miller
began a few basic soymilk experiments in 1925.” Continued.
Address: Lafayette, California.
424. Shurtleff, William. 1981. Dr. Harry Miller: Taking
soymilk around the world (Continued–Document part II).
Soyfoods 1(4):28-36. Winter.
• Summary: Continued. “Pioneering Soymilk in China
(1925-1939): In 1925 Miller accepted the church’s invitation
to return to Shanghai to develop a network of Adventist
health care facilities, the fi rst of which was the Shanghai
Sanitarium and Hospital, which opened January 1, 1928,
with Dr. Miller as medical director. Deeply touched by the
high infant mortality rate caused by malnutrition, Dr. Miller
began again in 1926 to turn his attention to soymilk, working
on it steadily in his spare time at a small food plant located
behind the hospital building. A growing number of orphaned
infants began to appear at the hospital. Their only hope of
fi nding food was to fi nd a wet nurse or to be fed cow’s milk,
which was very expensive in China and which not all infants
tolerated well.
“Dr. Miller was determined to develop a soymilk that
had good fl avor and digestibility, could be formulated
to nutritional equivalency to mother’s milk, was low in
cost, and had a good storage life. Preparing his soymilk at
the small soy plant in the typical Chinese way, with cold
extraction of the soymilk from the okara, followed by
cooking, he began to study ways to remove the beany fl avor
and make the soymilk more digestible.
“On his medical travels in other parts of China, and
in Korea and Japan, he visited tofu shops and studied their
methods. He believed that the beany fl avor resulted from
natural oils in the soybean; perhaps if the soymilk were spray
dried and then reformulated with fresh soy oil, the fl avor
would improve.
“In the early 1930s, returning to America on furlough, he
purchased the necessary equipment for a small soy dairy and
had it shipped to China; a motorized stone mill, an American
extractor, and a small homogenizer. Soon he was making
improved formulated soymilk for the babies, patients, and
staff at the Shanghai Sanitarium. The Chinese, too, liked the
fl avor. Some friends cajoled that it was ‘undignifi ed for a
talented surgeon to be always playing around with beans.’
Miller was undaunted, yet the beany fl avor persisted.
“One day, in the mid 1930s, the breakthrough came as
he was standing in the kitchen of the compound working
with slurry from a tofu maker. He later wrote: ‘I heard a
divine voice behind me that said “why don’t you cook it
longer with live steam?” No one had ever thought of that
before. Soon the staff and patients noticed the improved
fl avor and digestibility, and he added some soy oil or peanut
oil during homogenization to make it even better. With
HISTORY OF SOY YOGURT & CULTURED SOYMILK 171
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new enthusiasm he began more baby feeding experiments.
Soymilk was added to what was called the sanitarium’s
‘Universal Diet,’ which also included whole wheat bread and
half polished rice, plus other soyfoods. During a trip to the
Philippines at this time he learned from refi ners of coconut
oil that steam distillation and fl ash pasteurization improved
fl avor of foods containing fats by driving off volatile oils and
gases.
“So promising was the new product that Miller began
to move forward on three fronts: controlled feeding studies
on infants, establishment of a commercial soy, dairy,
and application for a U.S. patent. In 1932 Dr. Miller had
established the Vetose Nutritional Laboratory for furtherance
of his research. For two years (1936-37) he fed formulated
soymilk to several hundred small children at the Shanghai
Clinic, running control tests with fresh cow’s milk and
various types of American and European prepared baby
foods. The study turned out well and the results were
published in the April 1936 issue of the prestigious Chinese
Medical Journal, an English-language publication read
widely in the U.S. and China. Here it was offi cially noted
that babies could be nourished from birth fully as well with
soymilk as with animal milks. This led to increased interest
in the product. Dr. Miller later wrote: ‘I regarded that work
as of far greater importance than the building up of the
sanitarium because it had to do with the preservation of
thousands of lives that otherwise would be lost if they did not
have a proper substitute for mother’s breast milk, since cow’
milk is beyond the economic level of the Chinese people
and almost all Oriental races.’ In later years follow-up infant
feeding studies were done by other researchers using Dr.
Miller’s soymilk at the Indigent Hospital in the Philippines,
at Tokyo University, and at Ohio State University at the
Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
“In January 1936 Dr. Miller and his oldest son,
Willis (who did much of the plant design and equipment
construction and was the production manager), opened a fullscale
soy dairy, the fi rst of its kind in the world, on Pingliang
Road in Shanghai, not far from the Shanghai clinic. The milk
was cooked with live steam in open-top kettles. Soon a fresh
liquid beverage, called Vetose Soya Milk, was available in
natural, chocolate, and acidophilus fl avors, in half-pint and
quart bottles. The tangy acidophilus, cultured, bottled (but
not sterilized) and delivered chilled was a real favorite. Ice
cream was sold to institutions and meat analogs were under
development. Production skyrocketed, doubling each month.
Eventually the entire city of Shanghai had a soymilk route
with thousands of families receiving door to door deliveries
(by three- wheel pedicycles with carts behind them) of 3,000
quarts and 4,000 half-pints a day. The commercial product
sold for less than dairy milks and cost less than one-fourth
as much to produce. The soymilk proved so successful that
it was soon included in rations for the Chinese army. A
system for making dehydrated soymilk was also set up using