Natto: Friend of Foe!?!

Natto is a made by fermenting soy beans and has been eaten in Japan for hundreds of years. Famous for its bad smell and stickiness, it is very much an acquired taste. No one knows exactly where natto came from, but the most popular story about its origin involves a famous general named Minamoto no Yoshiie, who lived from 1041-1108. While camping in northern Japan, probably in Miyagi prefecture, Yoshiie’s army was attacked, and hurriedly packed the beans they were cooking for their horses into straw sacks called tawara. Straw contains large amounts of the bacterium that ferments beans, bacillus subtilis, and when the tawara were opened several days later, they found that the beans had fermented. The soldiers apparently tasted the beans and enjoyed them, and a culinary tradition was born. There are other stories about natto originating in China or during the Yayoi Period (300 BCE to 300 CE), but the Minamoto theory is the most appealing for two reasons. One, there is more evidence for it, and two, it give foreigners a chance to inform natto lovers that the food they are eating originates in rotten horse feed. The horse connection is also the answer to the question of why people in western Japan don’t like natto. There is an almost perfect correspondence between the main type of livestock raised in a prefecture and whether or not its people eat natto. Basically, in prefectures where horses were raised in the past, people eat a lot of natto, and in places that raised more cows, they don’t. This is because prefectures that raised horses produced a lot more soy beans (the dregs of which were used for horse feed) than places that raised cows. Hokkaido, Tohoku (northern Japan), and the area around Tokyo were horse raising areas and people, but as soon as you hit Osaka, consumption falls off rapidly until you get to Kyushu were, once again, people used to raise horses and people can’t seem to get enough natto.