[4] Ultimately, Shurtleff did not return to Tassajara, and Aoyagi “sold all her clothes, quit the fashion company, and moved in with him.”[5] They began to hitchhike together throughout Japan, and talked about traveling to India to visit ashrams.
[5] During that same time period in 1971, Shurtleff read the (then) recently released Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé, which argued that soybeans were a superior source of protein.
[12] Aoyagi later remembered the experience of sixty-four stops in four months as “grueling.”[13] They also visited the vegan-based intentional community, The Farm, as Shurtleff had previously been in communication with them about Tempeh production, and had a chance to study it while there.
[4][7] In 1975, Aoyagi and Shurtleff co-founded the New Age Foods Study Center (in Tokyo and California), where they tested recipes and distributed information on soy.
[7] The next year in 1976, Aoyagi and Shurtleff co-founded The SoyInfo Center, which they intended to be the “world's leading source of information on soy, especially soyfoods, new industrial uses, and history, in electronic database, online and printed book formats.”[15] Barry states that via the Center, Aoyagi and Shurtleff were able to act as “consultants to the growing international soyfoods industry.”[4] Finally, in 1978, Aoyagi and Shurtleff co-founded The Soycrafters Association of North America that held conferences attended by countercultural food companies.
[14] In discussing Kauffman’s book, San Francisco Chronicle journalist Steve Silberman refers to Aoyagi and Shurtleff as “pioneers” who “placed tofu at the center of millions of vegetarian tables in the West after falling in love with the snowy pressed soy curds as Zen students in Kyoto.”[17] American author and professor Rynn Berry interviewed Aoyagi and Shurtleff for a chapter in the "Visionaries" section of his 1995 book Famous Vegetarians and Their Favorite Recipes: Lives and Lore from Buddha to the Beatles.
Additional "Visionaries" include Bronson Alcott, Sylvester Graham, John Harvey Kellogg, Henry Stephens Salt, and Frances Moore Lappe.
"[3] “The Rynn Berry Jr. Papers” in North Carolina State University Libraries’ Special Collections and Research Center, contains his research journal with “the transcript of an interview by Berry with soy food specialists William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi” and the original illustration of the couple used in Famous Vegetarians.