Very sadly, tofu maker and German tofu pioneer Bernd Drosihn has recently died.
Bernd Drosihn (16 December 1959 to 24 July 2025)
Bernd Drosihn, the founder of one of Europe's largest tofu making companies (or maybe the largest), Viana/Tofutown, grew up around and in Cologne, western Germany.
As a youth he sported a colourful Mohawk, played in punk bands, and spray painted Cologne's walls with stencil graffiti. He played saxophone in jazz bands in New York City, where he got to know tofu at a Zen macrobiotic restaurant.
Back in Germany, he founded the revolutionary tofu maker collective Soyastern (soya star) together with various (and varying) friends, making tofu, soya milk, and tofu burgers in what had previously been a butcher's premises.
He was an ethical vegan, was inspired by Buddhism, collaborated with well-known pop stars in Germany and tofu pioneers worldwide, appeared on TV several times, spoke out for organic food and against greed and selfishness, fought the law (and won), and turned Viana/Tofutown into a household name in Germany and a multimillion-Euro-turnover business, that was still not based on greed.
Everything that Tofutown (Viana/Soyatoo/etc.) make is vegan and organic. The Tofutown website cites Bernd as saying:
"We make what people like to eat and drink, without the painful detour via the animals."
Below you can see some quotes from his 2010 book "Tofu". The book is in German, and I translated them into English.
"One should be very careful with advice from older gentlemen."
"Equipped with the newly published Book of Tofu [by Bill Shurtleff], the sannyasin and avowed vegetarian "Svadesha" produced the first tofu in Germany, in his rural commune in the Bavarian Forest [near Czechoslovakia] sometime in the mid-1970s. He lit a fire under the outdoor swirling kettle, which had previously been used to dry marijuana plants, and boiled soya milk. He pureed the soaked soya beans with a coffee grinder. He filtered the hot soya milk through a bedsheet. He simply buried the filtrate, called okara, somewhere in the forest, as he had no use for it. He used plain lemon juice to curdle it [the soya milk], and then pressed the curdled soya protein using heavy stone slabs. For him, making tofu was a slow art, a devotional exercise. He transported the finished tofu pieces in open buckets of water all the way to Munich to sell them to shared apartments [a typical place for students to live], communes, macrobiotic groups, Tai Chi classes, and vegetarian restaurants [There probably were very few vegetarianrestaurantsin Munich in the 70s.]. The water buckets spilled over in his the Citroën [car], ruining the upholstery and floorboards as well as the driver's nerves."
"At the very first organic trade fair, the Frankfurt Körner Congress (FKK) [Körner = grain], which took place in 1983 in an abandoned mill converted into a cultural center, Auenland GmbH made a phenomenal appearance. The barely two-year-old company presented a huge product range, from soya yoghurts to various types of tofu and tofu burgers, spreads, sweetened soya milk, and soya ice cream. The entire rest of the tofu industry [see footnote] (Svadesha and us) was deeply shaken."
[footnote:] "At that time, there was another tofu maker [in Germany] in Munich who was also a Tai Chi teacher. His name was Giorgio or something like that, but he didn't participate in the Frankfurt Körner Congress."
"After a few years, Svadesha became so tired of driving from the Bavarian Forest to Munich that he set up a small tofu shop in the Werkhaus, a self-managed alternative center in the centre of Munich. He was assigned an unused corner of the premises of the whole-grain bakery there and acquired an old butcher's kettle and some other equipment from defunct commercial kitchens. [...] When he finished setting it up, he was so exhausted that he had to spend six months with his guru, Bhagwan, in India. Beforehand, he had hired a passionate vegetarian activist named Alexander Nabben as a stand-in to run the shop during that time."
"Start a tofu company! (Or a vegetarian fast-food place, which might make even more sense.)"
"But saving the planet is difficult to do alone. So we [tofu makers] visited each other regularly and got to know many companies throughout Europe and later overseas, as well as many foreign tofu makers who came to our small tofu factory. It was always about learning from each other. Everyone was very helpful. We proudly and naively showed our production facilities in Siegburg even to corporations like the Vandemoortele family (Alpro/Provamel). Of course, they never let anyone have a look at their facilities."
"Since mid-2007, the value-added tax on plant-based milk (soya, rice, oat, etc.) in Germany has been raised from 7 percent to 19 percent. Cow's milk, of course, remains at 7 percent, and this step is intended to politically give it an advantage."
"[...] one can believe that organic farmers and organic butchers caress their animals to death or jabber [talk] their animals to death so that the animals then abdicate [die] half-voluntarily, but one doesn't have to [believe this]."
"The UN General Assembly regularly votes on when global hunger and global thirst must finally be halved. Unfortunately, this cannot be achieved by a show of hands alone."
"We've all become visual vegetarians. It [the meat on our plates] shouldn't look like an animal. We don't want slimy innards, dead chickens yet to be plucked, but ready-made burgers, schnitzels, and delicious sausages—but couldn't they just as easily be made from plants, especially if they're perhaps even tastier?"
Minor side note: The first half of his book "Tofu" is a wonderful historical document. He does mention at the very beginning that he left out some details. The reader may wonder why Taifun Tofu, apparently founded around 1986/1987, is not mentioned. The second half of his book contains information about the benefits of plant foods and harms of animal-source foods - it's a bit rant-like and, from a nutrition science perspective, I am unable to agree with most of it. To me it seems a bit like a mixture of "typical vegan beliefs about nutrition" (that have been promoted by celebrity vegan medical doctors and some organizations) and "typical beliefs among organic food enthusiasts" (in the vein of the "mother nature takes good care of us, provides everything we need, and everything unnatural must be unhealthy"). Totally unrelated to his book, this is also reflected in the anti-vegan, anti-animal rights (and at times "esoteric") views of many organic food enthusiasts (hello, Demeter) and the refusal to fortify plant protein foods (such as meat alternatives) at least with vitamin B12. The latter makes them - in this regard - nutritionally inferior to meat from animals, which is a massive obstacle in the way of animal-friendly progress.