Man Dedicated To Proving Tofu More Than Bean Curds
Wipe that look off your face. Tofu isn’t icky. It doesn’t make you a hippie or a yuppie if you eat it. It’s tasty stuff, done right, and it could turn your life around.
Just ask Phil Spiegel.
“I’m doing the right thing, no doubt,” he says, flashing a quick smile in the new kitchen of his one-man tofu operation in Newport, Wash. “People are finally realizing they have to take responsibility for their own health.”
Phil is North Idaho’s connection to freshly ground and pressed soybean curds. He supplies health food stores and food co-ops from Sandpoint to Moscow.
Tofu hasn’t stopped the 43-year-old engineer from balding but it has helped keep him trim - and it’s given him some options in life.
Electrical engineering in the 1980s offered little job security for Phil. Projects would end with layoffs. Tofu had fascinated him ever since he’d picked up “The Book of Tofu” at a used bookstore in 1979.
A layoff in 1991 convinced him the time was right. He’d talked to experts, even moved to Newport in 1981 to open his tofu business. But investors backed out after their research told them the area was too “meat and potatoes.”
By 1991, Phil had savings and an urge he could no longer resist.
A tofu maker in Nelson, British Columbia, befriended him and gave him some equipment. Phil asked a Spokane woman who sold sprouts how she’d started. Her customers wanted tofu, so she leased space to Phil and added to his equipment.
Health food stores and co-ops wanted his product. But the general public still wrinkled its nose at the wobbly white stuff.
“I think soy got a bad reputation in the Depression. People had to eat beans,” Phil says. “People identify it with being poor.”
Phil cooked samples in stores and handed out recipes for tofu enchiladas and tofu cheesecake. He added garlic and herbs to some batches, jalapeno and cayenne to others. He pushed the no-fat, cholesterollowering angle among people who have no health insurance.
His orders increased.
He sells 500 pounds a week wholesale now out of his new kitchen and plans to double that amount when he starts packaging smaller amounts for supermarkets.
“I think the consciousness is changing,” he says as he stacks the white buckets that hold his tofu.
“My goal is to hang in there. I know I’m in the right place now.”
Oh, horrors
Wallace’s Sixth Street Melodrama is quaking in fear in its century-old hardware store/bordello theater that people might think it’s doomed because its founder, Sherrill Grounds is leaving.
Be still your knocking knees. The melodrama will return with “Godspell” in the fall and “Lend Me a Tenor” next spring. We’ll have to wait for next summer to find out if the hilarious melodramas disappeared with Sherrill …
Making a splash
Coeur d’Alene’s Jamie Atkins saw no reason to spend summer in front of the television.
So she gathered up friends Charlie and Bonnie Bryant and Evangeline Beechler and headed to the Division of Environmental Quality - where else?
The Lake City High girls wanted to paint warnings against dumping gunk down storm drains.
DEQ gave them paint and stencils and helped them come up with fliers that explained what the girls were doing - a good deed.
Grouch or Grouse Meadows?
Rathdrum’s newest subdivision, Deerfield, is blessed with an appealing name I can’t find any reason to pick on. Darn.
But there are plenty of other subdivisions in North Idaho with names more suitable for nursing homes.
Which ones make you wince when you drive by? Report the ridiculous to Cynthia Taggart, “Close to Home,” 608 Northwest Blvd., Suite 200, Coeur d’Alene 83814; FAX to 765-7149; or call 765-7128.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo