Final Paper Free Write

I plan to write my food exploration paper on tofu. While I don't dislike tofu, I do find that I don't eat it very often--even if I'm cooking for vegetarian friends, I tend to veer my recipes to more vegetable oriented dishes, and use beans or peanuts as a protein substitue, particulary when making Asian food.

I'm interested in the origins of tofu, it's inception, and basic uses in different cultures (I'll probably narrow it down to two due to paper length--probably the US and China or Japan) and how it is processed, and whether or not the procedure in which it is produced is any different in Asia than in the United States. I also want to explore where the soybeans are coming from--are they genetically modified? Obviously, all of these is still in the inception phase, but since so much of this class has been focused on processed and "new" foods, that's definitely the direction I'd like to take it in.