Today, the word tofu is widely known – the Corpus of Contemporary American English ranks it among the top 11,000 most used English words, and Google Trends indicates that it receives a similar number of searches as the word pickle. However, it was not commonly used until the 1970s when it gained popularity among hippies promoting it as a vegetarian meat alternative. The first recorded instance of an American mentioning tofu was Benjamin Franklin in a 1770 letter, where he mistakenly referred to it as Chinese cheese. The actual term “tofu” was first used in 1876 and originates from the Japanese word tofu, which can be traced back to a Chinese word similar to doufu with the same meaning. This Chinese word stems from the Middle Chinese words duw, meaning “bean”, and bju, meaning “fermented” or “rotten”.
