From musician to tofumaker - the career of Bernd Drosihn, founder of Soyatoo!/Viana/Tofutown, isn't what you'd call a typical storybook career. And last autumn the company in the Eifel region took over part of the vegetarian delicatessen production previously belonging to De-Vau-Ge in Lüneburg.

This means that Tofutown will not be present at this year's BioFach fair - there are enough other things to be taken care of, not least in the Eifel region and in Lüneburg. In a background interview for the organic foods sector, Bernd Drosihn talks about his enthusiasm for vegetarian food and music, why he doesn't like turnover statistics, and answers the question as to whether Tofutown is striving for world domination.

Did you have a life before tofu?

Sure. My mother wasn't called Tofu, but Gertrud, so I was born as a little stinker and not a little smoked tofu. To summarize my life before tofu: I was born, grew up, went to school, did community service (alternative to military service), studied clarinet and composition at the same time as doing a thousand jobs (e.g. chlorine factory, chamber-maid, night porter, chocolate box sorter, McDonald's, health-food store assistant, dance musician), then became a graffiti sprayer, saxophonist for what felt like 100 bands, and eventually tofumaker. In brief, a self-built life.

From music to tofu...how important is music for you nowadays?

I'm a music freak and that's going to stay that way. There are two things that grip me emotionally, vegetarian foods and music. Our little company indulges in a label of its own, called "Tofumusic". Next year we're going to release more CDs and videos.

Your roots are in the alternative and cooperative scene, the roots of organic foods sector. According to legend, you were even arrested for making tofu back then...is that true?

That's true, during the early eighties of the last century we were subject to investigation by state prosecutors for making tofu. Germany is really funny: unknown white vegetarian stuff was strictly forbidden, tofu was simply too yummy for the German meat minister. I personally spent a few days in jail, but that was for being a conscientious objector, which in Bavaria they simply called "insubordination", and for spraying graffiti whilst wearing strangely colored hair. I was only once briefly arrested for making tofu. My daughter was once asked by her first grade teacher what her parents did. She answered truthfully that her Dad had already been in jail three times. That definitely put her in the lead. I like to be up-front about the sins of my youth. "Down below" is the real "up top".

You once told me, you already didn't like meat when you were a child and became a vegetarian at an early age. Now you've been a vegan for a couple of years. Are you fit?

I'm on my last legs (no, just kidding!). I have fun being a vegetarian or vegan and not such a chore as it may be for some others, because our company makes the most delicious veggie products there are anyway, and I have to test them every day. So I'm well-fed and quite fit besides. I have the cholesterol level of a baby and am flexible enough to twist myself like a pretzel - Sandra Bullock style, so to speak. 

You continue to develop products that are so deceptively like the real thing that you can sneak them past meat eaters without any problems. Isn't that contradictory?

They're not deceptively like the real thing. They're far more delicious. I have two answers to the question: German food is simply dominated by meat. When I was born, Germans consumed 5 kilos of meat per person and year. Today that's up to 100 kilos. That means that meat consumption has increased twenty-fold in the last fifty years. Both our bodies and our planet feel the consequences. It's simply a fact nowadays that Germans eat meat (or organic meat) as well as loads of other animal products. Our diet consists of meat'n'butter'n'cheese'n'sausage'n'eggs. And that's exactly what we need alternatives to.
Secondly, the products we make are partly very similar to meat: sausages, burgers, mince, spreads, pâtés, cutlets, nuggets, veggie lard and so forth, but that's just the shape. The contents are entirely different and even more delicious. It's like a CD. The disk can have Miles Davis or polka music on it. The CD is just the shape. It's the contents that are important for us. As a vegetarian you don't want to the subject of discrimination and throw a carrot on the barbeque when a snazzy tofu banger is so much cooler. Or to put it another way, "just save a few organic pigs by not buying them as dead meat all the time and everything will be hunky-dory". 

Milk and meat are basically natural foods, whereas dairy and meat alternatives made from soy and wheat are processed foods, if you want to be exact about it. What makes them healthier nonetheless?

Milk and meat are "natural"? That's a good one. You could just as easily say that gravity no longer applies. Cattle feed on plants, such as soy and wheat, and if they're not organic cattle then add veterinary drugs to that, and there's an awful amount of processing going on their very complex metabolism. By the way, mother cows' milk wasn't intended by "Nature" to be consumed by the mammal species known as humans, but for their own calves. Cows, including organic cows, are over-bred, constantly calving, full-to-bursting balloons of mother's milk. We humans take their children away from them and turn them into mincemeat. As I see it, that has hardly anything to do with nature. A Viana product has an average of about ten ingredients. Last week I saw an organic meat patty in a supermarket cooler which easily had twice as many. By the way, making tofu isn't a high-tech procedure, but rather a very simple, traditional process that is easy on the climate and on natural resources. People all over the world make tofu in their home kitchens, not just in Asia.

Our meat consumption is increasingly seen as an important influence on climate change. Would it help the world if we were all vegetarians?

Meat causes the emission of more climate-damaging gases than all cars and airplanes put together. "Let everybody go vegetarian and then everything will be fine" is unfortunately a rather unrealistic suggestion, but each kilo of meat or organic meat that isn't eaten will help to cool the planet. I think that the campaign "Meatless Monday" or "Less Meat, Less Heat" launched by Paul McCartney in cooperation with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a great idea. In terms of numbers we can feed the whole planet and cool it at the same time if we all eat just 15 percent less meat. If humankind continues to grow, and it will, we'll have take action and achieve even more on a longer term; but 15 percent are already an ambitious goal. If we were all to make a point of not eating meat on one day in the week, we would all benefit from it. Some towns and the Dutch parliament have already declared such a meat-free day and I expect more will follow. Plants are the secret formula for the recovery of our planet. Plants are the better animals where nutrition is concerned. We humans manage our own health and that of the planet by means of our diet. What we buy determines our common future. 

You are a convinced proponent of vegan nutrition. Which is more important for you, the personal or the global aspect?

They're both equally important - along with animal welfare. Animals are friends, not food.

By now Tofutown has 60 employees in the Volcanic Eifel region. Do they have to sign a self-commitment to vegetarian nutrition along with their employment contracts? 

Since they're paid in kind they hardly have an alternative…just kidding. About two thirds of them aren't strict vegetarians, but they all love Viana products.
 
What should I do as a Viana fan and vegan if I'm abroad?

Weep! As a consolation there are a few other manufacturers and there are even some Viana products in other countries.

Your product range now encompasses 60 products - do you really make them all yourselves or do you just buy some of them?

60 colleagues in the Eifel and 60 products. Each of the one makes one of the other. No, we like to leave the bargaining and "outsourcing" to those competent organic wholesalers and retailers.

You have just taken over the vegetarian delicatessen production facilities from De-Vau-Ge in Lüneburg. How did that arise?

In the Eifel we'd reached the limit of our capacities. Building a new annex would have been expensive, risky and difficult to finance, so the Lüneburg deal came at just the right time.

Had you had contact with De-Vau-Ge before then?

Yes, we had. We first had contact with the De-Vau-Ge and their CEO Michael Makowski in the eighties, when he conducted experiments with a crazy professor from Hannover using tofu, soy milk and soy yoghurt. Back then I had a look at the relatively large production facilities in Lüneburg. Since then we continued to keep in touch on a casual basis and despite being competitors we always had very laid-back relationship with each other. For several years now we've been producing our highly successful whippable soy cream as a private label product for Granovita, a De-Vau-Ge brand marketed via the health food chain "Reformhaus", and at present we're moderately expanding this cooperation. When the new orientation of De-Vau-Ge and the resulting sale of the vegetarian delicatessen division became a topic, it was a logical step for them to approach us.

Has the De-Vau-Ge also taken over shares in Tofutown?

No. We are independent.

De-Vau-Ge is said to be a very complex entity - have you noticed any of this?

Yes, that's the main reason for the re-orientation and concentration on their core business currently taking place at De-Vau-Ge. Even the division we've taken over - whilst microscopically small compared to the rest of De-Vau-Ge's activities - has a confusing depth and diversity of products and product lines. For instance, during my whole life as a tofumaker I've made do with two packaging formats as far as thermoforming is concerned. The packaging plants at De-Vau-Ge each have about ten different formats with varying cuts. That makes it a pleasant job to organize all that.

Has the takeover had any consequences for the parent company in Wiesbaum? How did colleagues and local residents react?

Positively. Of course there were mutual visits between operatives very early on, and there was a good rapport. Only our Eifel bankers are a little wary of strangers, but apart from that there have been refreshing reactions. The new colleagues are really likeable people with a lot of experience, too. The mindset at both sites is similar, and in Lüneburg there is also a real pioneering and entrepreneurial spirit. We're now 110 hands on deck instead of the 60 we had before, which certainly is quite an increase, but not an excessively crazy inflation.

What do the new colleagues in Lüneburg think about Tofutown and you personally?

I suppose I could say that they're used to funny bosses, because the people at De-Vau-Ge were also on a mission. As I see it, we all get along wonderfully and all the potential new employees we spoke to actually joined us, although they could have stayed with De-Vau-Ge. They were all very enthusiastic and also felt a little liberated, and they already feel at home. They have all taken an enormous leap of faith with regard to Tofutown and me, and for that I would very much like to thank all the new colleagues. Above all, that has made the takeover especially easy, convincing and logical for me. All of us "old" Tofutowners have the impression that everybody is very happy to be able to keep his or her accustomed workplace and is now keen to take off under a new flag. That means we can get up to speed very quickly. By the way, those who couldn't join us were able to stay on at De-Vau-Ge at comparable conditions.

What about turnover statistics?

We traditionally don't talk about them. There are no independently gathered, reliable figures for "vegetarian products" or "organic tofu", just self-serving claims of a few market participants, and we've never wanted to be part of that choir, nor do we want to join in in the future. Of course we celebrate the "greatest" and the "leaders", no matter whether they're national, international, European or world leaders. And by the way, I really do think it's great that you can now buy tofu or soy milk in practically any store in the world!

Where do you see yourself in the big picture of the organic foods sector?

We've grown so rapidly in our Eifel premises that we really can do with the new staff and equipment in Lüneburg. Of course, the takeover means we have additional turnover, but with 110 staff members we are and remain a manageable business. I would put it like this: We aren't and weren't previously a tiny producer, but not a giant either. So far, we've been able to hide between the naïve undergrowth and the crazy arrogance of our organic foods sector. I guess that won't be quite so easy in the future. The marketplace won't notice our new acquisition too much, though, as it doesn't lead to additional capacities or the existence of a new producer. Instead things will stay pretty much the way they are. What counts is what our company portrait says: We are the best-looking tofumakers in the world (the new colleagues in Lüneburg all look fantastic, too). I personally think this whole constant winner-loser business is stupid. I was a total failure at school and I still haven't picked up my painfully scraped-by school-leaving certificate. Later on I was a saxophonist, and now I'm a tofumaker, with a wealth of experience and a wonderful life that hasn't been shaped by standard procedures, above all not by turnover.

Let us talk about Lüneburg again - you've only taken over some 50 employees and haven't taken over the baby foods department, which was made in the same premises that you haven taken over. What were the reasons for that?

"Only" is good. We don't know anything about baby foods, which is why it makes much more sense that it be continued by specialists. We've taken over "only" 50 employees, as you call it, because we also haven't taken over all the products or customers. It's very important not to take on more than you can deal with. We only do what can do well.

You've been doing this for over twenty years and you're obviously still having fun doing it. What's your secret?

It's 30 years now. I need tasks and I love friction. Pelting Germany with tofu and dousing it with soy milk, free jazz, punk and graffiti is simply great fun. Besides, I'm an active relaxer and I'm no good at lounging around the house. I prefer the wild and dangerous life.

You've written a book about your early experiences as a tofumaker. When will it be published?

In spring, according to the publisher.

Where do you see yourself and Tofutown in twenty years? Are you striving for world domination?

Great idea, I'll have to think about that. The soft, the weak and the meek will overcome the rigid and inflexible. Not good news for German civil servants and "military defense politicians". But first I'll have to start tomorrow morning by taking control of my self. No, seriously, I regard my task simply as offering good vegetarian products as an alternative to meat and dairy. I don't see any personal educational mission for me or Tofutown as a whole. Humans want to be free. Animals do too, by the way. A veggie diet means freedom in many ways, that's what it's all about.

Interview: Jeanine Tovar