6- tofu times

Christmas  1981 Adelaide  with Sacha  and wife # 1

Christmas 1981 was different than any Christmas thus far as I spent it with a wife (second year we did this together), a baby (Sacha was now almost a year old), and in a foreign country. I do not recall anything about it but I have photos of the period with a Christmas tree and many presents. Other than that, I have no recollection.

1982 

Figure 116 Light Foods Adelaide Park

In early 1982, we moved our tofu production out of the parents and into our own premise, a chicken shop factory. Our business had grown, and we were selling about 150 blocks of tofu a week. We had introduced secondary products into our business plan of conquering the palettes of Australians and we were actually turning a bit of a profit though the hours were long and the manufacturing laborious. We had tofu burgers, baked tofu and tofu cheesecake. We made our tofu cheesecakes at home in a blender.

Mix in a blender then let it set in the refrigerator.
Oh, cover with slices of mango before putting in the fridge.

We made up our own recipe which is quite simple using tofu - just replace the meat with the bean curd in a savoury dish or in the case of our cheesecake we combined tofu with cream cheese and set it with gelatin so we did not need to cook it. We could only make about a dozen per mixture full in our home blender but it did not take long to pour out a hundred cheesecakes in small aluminum containers. Once we got our own place, which was an abandoned fast food chicken shop with a cool room, we were able to make them on the premise and store them in the cool room to set for the next day’s delivery.  Our tofu burgers we made by hand as we did our easiest to make product, tofulafels. Tofulafels was our idea of falafels made with tofu instead of chickpeas as the Lebanese dish is made. Our product was a combination of tofu and the by product, okara, mixed with brown rice, carrots, herbs, and spices. I would use an ice cream scoop to form them which was much easier than making burger patties with the one-at-a-time handheld patty-making device I would use for my burgers. I then would drop the burger balls into oil to cook. With all the products on the market now more than twenty years after we started our production there is nothing to equate.

Figure 118 Astrological conference I gave a presentation at in Adelaide .
With the beginning of the tofu factory Lesia had gone back to her job that she had before taking a leave to go to the States to get married and have a baby. She was teaching and doing some administrational chores at a local technical college. I stayed home with Sacha and cooked meals and cleaned house and in the evening I would weave my tofu magic. I would learn years late that she was on administrative leave for a year and she had this all set up. I worked a bloody long shift, starting in the morning and leaving well past midnight. In the summer the shop was extremely hot. During the great February 1983 Ash Wednesday (not to be associated with any religious Ash-Wednesday thingy) summer fires when more than 208000 hectares burnt in the Adelaide Hills and the temperature was above 40 degrees Celsius. At nightfall the power went off. I was in the process of making a batch of tofu and tried to continue with the lights of my car shining through the large display window. When the lights to the car dimmed and went off and I had to wait for hours for the road service company to get my car started I just laughed. Life was like this.

I forget why we moved out of our chicken shop factory but for some reason we moved to 57 Light Terrace, Thebarton. We were on the same street as the Coca-Cola factory and situated in an industrial area. Someone in the back half of the shop boiled up bones for lard which he sold to fish and chips shops. The smell use to make me ill but once I began the tofu manufacturing I was fine as the smell of soy overtook the boiled bones odor. There was often a stream of liquids flowing from under the front door to the street. I thought eventually I would be closed down because of the liquids flowing down the street: a mixture of soymilk, whey and cleaning fluids and by midday there would be a bit of a smell but none of the neighbours seemed to mind and I was there for quite some time probably six months or more before we build our own factory on Richards Street, Hindmarsh.
In April we started presenting tofu-cooking classes at the Thebarton Further Education Centre on Sundays. We would have twenty students at ten stoves and each stove would get a recipe and we would have a feast with a cask of wine at the end. Sacha at only a year and half old would spend the day rolling lemons along the floor before they got used in the cooking or find some other equally entertaining projects to do whilst Lesia and I taught our cooking class. We even had put together our own cookbook, Tofu Cooking. Many of the recipes were basic meat ones with the meat replaced by the tofu. For a moment our tofu cookbook became a best seller in the local health food stores. We also began our tofu newsletter, Tofu Times, the Newsletter of Protein City Soyfoods, in March 1982. I have lived in more than a dozen homes and in two countries since 1982 but in a pack of papers that have survived to this day I found three of these newsletters as well as a copy of our tofu cookbook. I have very little left in my possessions from twenty years ago other than a few photographs and these few reminders of my once long ago tofu business.
One of my favourite things about the Internet and computers in general is the capacity to preserve moments. For someone who has travelled as much as I have and who has had such a disjointed life to be able to save files and memories online has no match in archival history. Since 1995 when I first started making WebPages on free servers such as Angelfire  and Geocities (June 21, 2009 - just saw that Yahoo, who took over Geocities a few years ago, will delete it at the end of this year. It is the longest I had any server, since 1995, and as transit as the web is another home, virtual that it be, will be gone forever), I have saved thousands of pages of photos and letters and stories. Few of which I would have today if it were not for the Internet. In the early 1980s I was just becoming aware of computers and I was interested in their ability to calculate astrological positions and I was saving up then to purchase one but I did not get my first computer until 1991.

Other than the tofu making 1982 was a year that I almost do not remember except for September 1982 when Lesia and I went to the States to look at tofu factories. I have a Tofu Times from August and though I do not remember that period I can count on the Tofu Times to enlighten me:

https://neuage.org/tofu_times.pdf

The makers of your fresh Adelaide Tofu are going on a fact-finding mission to North America and Canada. We will be visiting 14 cities and looking at the range of tofu production from the small-scale traditional tofu shop to large automated plants and soy dairies. What this means to you, the nutritionally enlightened tofu eater is that you will be without fresh tofu for a little more than six weeks, beginning in about the middle of September. This, we admit, is a truly unfortunate situation since it comes at a time when an increasing number of people are discovering the joys of tofu. But we promise you will benefit in the long run.

So what we will do in the weeks before we leave is produce as much tofu as people may want to store. This is a good time to discover that tofu can be frozen, and that freezing turns it into virtually another product. We have also found that tofu cheesecakes and tofulafels freeze very successfully. Cheesecakes become a wonderful frozen dessert and tofulafels become firmer when thawed. You can order extra cheesecakes in both large and small sizes, and also stock up on tofulafels.

We put these newsletters93F together in hopes of course to raise a bit of money for our journey but I do not remember selling much more than we already were. We even had a special offer that if a customer bought five blocks of tofu we would give them an extra one for free but I doubt anyone took us up on such an incredible offer. A decade later I would begin university and get a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism. Maybe the Tofu Times should have begun after my degree in journalism. I think that I was so homesick that the tofu factory trip was just an excuse to get back to the States. I had hoped that I would be able to convince Lesia that we should move to the USA perhaps living in San Francisco where she could do her TM trip or even in Iowa or Ohio or wherever the TM College was located. I did not care where we lived I just did not want to live in Australia any longer. Australia is not that different from the USA except for geographic issues, and people and it is so far from Adelaide to anywhere like Melbourne or Sydney or Paris or Clifton Park; those groovy places of the world.

What I like the most about living in America are the many cities each so different and so many are within an hour or two of each other. For example, now we live in Albany. New York and Boston, New York City, Montreal and many smaller cities are within three-hours of us and each is so different from one another. I also was use to American mannerisms but that would be the same for anyone living in another country. I felt very isolated in Australia and my whole time there I could never really make friends and here I am in 2004 after living in Australia for twenty-one years with no one other than Sacha in Melbourne that I have any contact with or that I would ever see again except for my current wife’s family.

7 - sex

Book 1: Leaving Australia, 'Before the After'

• Focus: This book covers the earlier part of Neuage’s life, detailing his journey from childhood through various phases up to a significant transition point. It explores his experiences as an adoptee, a hippie in the 1960s, a member of the Holy Order of MANS cult in the 1970s, a single parent in the 1980s and 1990s, with a 10th grade education until the age of 44; then a student pursuing higher education from 1991 to 2010, culminating in a PhD and being a professor and teacher in New York, Australia, China.
• 

Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 77.