We Were Young
A pioneer passes
We are strong
No one can tell us we’re wrong
Searchin’ our hearts for so long
Both of us knowing
—Pat Benatar
We were young. We were stubborn and proud. We were so cravenly idealistic that we came together in rural squalor, trying to start a commune in a Tennessee forest amidst the peak of Nixon’s Vietnam debacle.
I hiked there from the Appalachian Trail. She hitched in from the coast.
Our stubborn pride would end our marriage 22 years later. Neither of us would give in to the other. Both were trying so hard to save the world in each of our own ways that we wanted—needed—the support neither of us was ready to sacrifice from our precious cause to give to the other.
And so it ended.
Not from a loss of love. We never lost that.
My only wife, Cynthia Adele Winkler Bates, passed quietly at her home on June 23, 2026, surrounded by her family. She was 78 years old.
She was living in the singles tent on Second Road when I arrived off the Trail. When I got pneumonia during Wheatberry Winter, she brought me soup and medicine. She looked like an angel, dressed in an embroidered white smock, beneath that wool blanket as she sat beside my bed, inside the thin, Korean War-vintage olive-drab canvas that separated my bed, only barely warmed by a much-too-small woodstove, from the subzero temperatures and ice outside. We married in June 1973.
In 1971, The Farm’s founders, pacifists to the core, committed to a vegan diet, and it fell to Cynthia to make sure that the more than 1,200 of us, and the thousands of wanderers that passed through each month, were healthy and well fed. We worked hard. We made healthy babies—more than a thousand of them. We fed 100,000 visitors gourmet vegan meals.
She rose to that challenge by turning to an ancient fermented food from Southeast Asia called tempeh — and in doing so, she changed the American food landscape.
We worked together on the horse crew for the first year or more. We delivered jugs of water to fifty or more houses, picked up sacks of corn and wheat from the barn and hauled them to the mill, then ran the barrels of flour and cornmeal to the community kitchen, bakery and Farm store. We hauled buckets of dirty diapers to the laundromat, brought sorghum cane from the field to the crusher. In the spring, we plowed fields, then planted. In the summer, we cultivated the rows. In the fall, we brought in the harvest.
Others joined the horse crew and I went to work at the flour mill and then to the masonry crew, raising more than 20 communal buildings. She went to the soy dairy and then to the lab. In 2011, Alexander Lyon told his daughter Melanie how it began:
The Farm community was basically a lot of young people and young couples who had been living in the city and had gotten fed up with it. And many of them had held off from having children. They didn’t want to have to deal with that in the city. So when we got out of the city into the country, there was a baby explosion, a baby boom. I think in the first year or two on the Farm there were about a hundred babies born. Well, the babies did fine. Babies do fine on mother’s milk, and of course, we were into breastfeeding. But eventually they start to grow sharp little teeth, and you’ve got to wean them. And we wanted to be very strict about the vegetarian thing. We certainly didn’t want to wean them onto any animal milk product.
[…]Well, we had heard of soymilk. And I think some of us had probably tried making it. At that time, as I recall, there was really only one soybean how-to book or cookbook available, which was called the Soybean Cookbook…. Right after the war, a Seventh-day Adventist doctor named Harry Miller had gone to northern China, which had been devastated by the Japanese. And there were just enormous numbers of little Chinese orphan kids, babies and kids. And he had to feed them something. So China grows soybeans and makes soymilk. They know how to grind the beans, extract them and so on… it was an intermediate step in making tofu or bean curd. So he thought, well, why not just take this? It’s liquid. It’s easy to handle and consume, and just feed that directly to these babies and kids? And it worked. It worked quite well.
Well, I had technical training [a Ph.D in biochemistry and genetics from CalTech], so some of the leaders came to me and said, look, could you go just research this, figure out how to make something out of soybeans? Soybeans were all over the place in Tennessee. It was a major crop. There were places not too far from where the Farm is where you could stand and look out over miles of soybean plants. But could we get those and figure out how to make something out of them that the babies can grow on?
Birth of Soy
In 1972, while Alexander traveled to various science libraries and read up on soyfoods, Cynthia and several other women began boiling soymilk and making tofu. Alexander said:
The crew I got was mostly women with young babies, so they had a very strong motivation to figure out how to make soymilk. And we did. And it went pretty good. I had to build most of the equipment just out of junk. It worked. And we made good soymilk.
[…] I said, okay, I think I’m going to take a little time here and see about that tempeh stuff because it was still a curiosity in the back of my mind. So in the meantime, I’ve been reading the articles, and it’s gotten more and more interesting. So, you can’t make tempeh without tempeh starter, period. There’s no way you can make tempeh without the particular mold.
So I wrote a letter to, let me see, who did I write to? I think I wrote to Dr. Wang, who’s a lady scientist who worked for Dr. Hesseltine [at the USDA Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria, Illinois]. And her name was on some of the papers, and I think maybe on one of the papers it might have said something like, please address any correspondence to Dr. Wang. So I did, and I said, blah, blah, blah, you know, we want to make this stuff. Could you send me a sample of the starter culture? So a little while later, in the mail, I got a little package. It had two little tiny freeze-dried ampules with this little plug of tempeh starter in there.
[…] So I got this mold culture, you know, revived and growing actively growing, and I forget the exact form in which I used the first starter to make the first cake of tempeh; I do remember the first cake of tempeh we made was just one half-pound flat cake, because I didn’t know whether it was going to work or not. Never seen this stuff before…. So then let’s see, I guess I kept on playing with it and making it when I got a chance. Then Cynthia came along, Cynthia Bates, and she had been working in the soy dairy. I don’t remember whether she sort of asked me or I might have asked her, said Cynthia, “You want to do a sort of special project?” Anyway, however it worked, we decided that she would take on learning how to make tempeh in larger amounts. So, let’s see. We needed an incubator box. We might have used an old refrigerator at first, but old refrigerators don’t get very good air circulation, a little clumsy.… I think maybe it was John Gabriel, who was the guy who lived on the Farm, who was handy with tools. I think maybe he built the incubator box, about the size of a refrigerator, had a hinged door and shelves. I think it used light bulbs for the heat source. You don’t need a whole lot of heat. And so Cynthia began using that, cooking the beans, dehulling them, learning how to do that, packaging them, and incubating them overnight.
She had some failures. It took a little getting used to to get the water and temperature and everything just right. A failed batch of tempeh is, I, my take on it is that it’s, I don’t know, kind of like you’re not a real tempeh maker until you’ve lost a batch, because it’s just horrible. I mean, you come in and open the door of whatever it is, your box or your incubator room, and instead of this really nice sort of a light, warm, fresh, bready kind of smell, you get this wave of just absolute, you know, dead fish, rotten cat shit stink. It’s just one of the most awful, vile stinks you’ll ever smell. And then after you sit there and sob for a few minutes, “oh no, oh my god,” then you have the job of getting rid of it, and it’s all turned into thick gray slime, just a mess. Your whole incubator box stinks. You have to scrub it out with bleach, terrible. So, like I say, that’s kind of your baptism by fire, to lose a batch. Well, hopefully people won’t lose batches. Not necessary to lose a batch.
So Cynthia began making good tempeh on a small scale regularly, and giving it around to people, and people liked it. It was well received. Then I forgot how we went through various changes there, and other people started making it, and people started eating it on The Farm. Various people began fooling with it, and figuring out recipes, and so on.
If you drive out from The Farm in any direction in summer, you can’t help passing through acres—and square miles—of soybeans on either side of the highway. Soybeans are the second-most-planted crop in the United States (behind corn). The vast majority of U.S. soybeans are consumed by the livestock industry (primarily poultry, hogs, dairy, and beef). Less than 7% is grown for direct human consumption, primarily as vegetable oil.
But soy is a near-perfect protein. Consumed directly, rather than through an animal, it could meet the protein needs of roughly 32 times as many people. Cutting down the Amazon Rainforest to supply protein to 8.5 billion two-leggeds is unnecessary. You don’t need heat or a cow’s four stomachs to unlock the protein in soy. Instead, you can ferment it.
Working with Hesseltine and Wang at the NRRL and Dr. Keith Steinkraus at Cornell University’s Agricultural Experimental Station, Cynthia developed reliable, replicable methods for producing tempeh starter cultures at a commercial scale. She also pioneered non-soy tempeh varieties — chickpeas, black beans, hemp, oats, okara, rice and other ingredients — so that people with soy allergies, or living where soy doesn’t grow, could enjoy tempeh too.
The First Lab
Alexander and Cynthia opened the Tempeh Lab in a small, cramped house trailer with a linoleum floor. That was the first business in the world dedicated to supplying pure tempeh cultures to producers. Other members of the soy dairy team—John Pielarczyk, Deborah Flowers, Laurie Sythe, Diane Darling, Suzi Jenkins, Ramona Christopherson, Randy Bowen—came to help and learn. In 1974, it moved to the middle floor of the sorghum mill, where it enlisted the help of the Farm’s machine shop—which Doug Cobb, Gerald Boyer, Anthony Gaudio, John Gabriel and others had relocated to the lower floor—to make equipment like autoclaves, boilers and centrifuges from metal scrap. That lab moved to better spaces but has never closed. Since 2018, it has been owned and run by her daughter Gretchen. Cynthia’s friend Betsy Keller wrote:
We got to know each other while I was working with her at the Tempeh Lab in 1976…. Cynthia amazed me with her ingenuity and tenacity. At a time when it was very hard to get money for projects, she was determined to build the Tempeh Lab. We would go into the boneyard and she would tell me to look for a certain part and I was just totally fascinated as I watched her build a centrifuge from old pipes and pieces of steel!
Together, we experimented with growing tempeh in large quantities. We paid close attention to how thick we laid out the tempeh, the temperature, and in regulating the moisture. As far as we know, Cynthia was the first person to grow tempeh on a large scale in North America. She worked very hard and was very humble.
For my part, I worked with the other flour millers to develop a split-bean product that we could package into one-pound kits for home-kitchen production. To do the dry dehulling, I designed, built, and patented a spiral vortex cylindrical separator, something like a Dyson vacuum. Cynthia and I developed simple instructions in cartoon form and labels for each of the products: starter, kits and fresh or frozen tempeh. I recall Cynthia taking me to meet Dr. Steinkraus at Cornell. Alexander Lyon recalled:
He thought it was outrageous that anybody in the world was hungry. He ran a graduate program, and he sought out students from other countries, from what they call third world countries, mostly tropical countries, that had problems with the food supply, either not enough food so that there was starvation, or bad food with a lot of spoilage and improper sanitation. So there were foodborne diseases, malnutrition and that sort of thing. So he would seek out these students and he’d invite them to come and study with him and earn a degree, and then they go back to their home country and apply the modern techniques and knowledge to improve the food program in their home countries.
Oh, he also liked soybeans. He appreciated that soybeans had a great potential for feeding the world, but that nobody was really doing much with them except extracting the oil and feeding the oil meal to cows and then eating the meat, which was inefficient use. So he had an Indonesian student, and I guess they were talking or something, I don’t know the details, and this Indonesian student mentioned they made this food tempeh that the islanders, you know, the indigenous people, the peasants, made directly out of soybeans. He [Steinkraus] was very interested. He said, “Well, how do they do that?” He [the student] said, “Well, they have some kind of a starter, some kind of a powdery thing they crumble on, they cook them, and they kind of crumble this stuff on and wrap them in banana leaves, and the next morning they had this tempeh.”
So the student smuggled some in the pocket of his overcoat because they were just little crumbs. I guess if they looked at his overcoat pockets, they’d look like cracker crumbs or something. So he got it in, and he gave it to Dr. Steinkraus.
[…] And he worked out, he’s the one who worked out the basic details, you know, studied pH and temperature and timing and incubation and, you know, how much heat it produced, metabolic heat was released and calories and just all the science. But then he knew he had an impure culture, a mixed culture, so he sent some of that to Dr. Hesseltine, who was a whiz at that. That was his forte: precise microbiology. Hesseltine took that and found, I have to look up that paper, but it was funny to read it. [The crumbs from the shirt pocket had] like, 27 kinds of yeast and 85 species of bacteria and all kinds of mold and so on. He tested each one and found that tempeh was a particular strain of the mold Rhizopus oligosporus. That’s the species name. NRRL 2710.
Tempeh unlocks plant protein much like ruminants do, not by “digesting” it but by colonizing it. Rumen microbes turn feed protein into microbial biomass, ammonia, and other intermediates inside the animal that are then digested in the abomasum and small intestine. In fermented soyfoods, microbes reduce protein complexity and remove some antinutrients, so your stomach and small intestine have less work to do. Meaning: no stomach aches from eating undercooked soybeans.
In 1977, Cynthia took the story to the other side of the world when Dr. Steinkraus invited her to present her research at the World Symposium on Indigenous Fermented Foods in Bangkok. There, she presented a paper titled “Utilization of Tempeh in North America” that launched an industry.
Her recipes appeared in The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook and in popular national magazines including Organic Gardening, Vegetarian Times, East West Journal, Prevention, and Mother Earth News. As The Book of Tempeh author William Shurtleff later wrote, “This early media coverage for tempeh was a veritable blitz for a largely unknown food.” As the ‘70s drew to a close, there were 13 commercial tempeh shops in operation in the United States, one in Canada, and four in Europe (all in the Netherlands). By the 1980s, tempeh burgers were appearing in grocery stores and restaurants across the country, and Cynthia Bates had played no small part in getting them there.
When she wasn’t working shifts, Cynthia studied body work—Rolfing, NLP, reiki, and more. She set up a massage studio at home and began helping the hundreds of former college students with aching backs and tired muscles from four-season farm work. She loved to bead and embroider. She beaded a patch for my jacket that showed a humpback whale blowing a bubble net.
Vickie Montagne remembers:
So, so talented! I worked in Tempeh Lab with her for a couple of years and learned so much from her. She dived into photography, built a wooden kayak, rode around The Farm on a (250cc) dirt bike doing security, and did amazing body work.
Allan Brown posted:
Susan (a natural scientist) worked with Cynthia in the Tempeh Lab. 6 years later, we started Noble Bean in Canada. We supplied the natural food marketplace for 34 years with the best-tasting tempeh in the nation, with Cynthia’s culture, before retiring 13 years ago. The company lives on in Montreal now, grossing over $2 million a year. Thank you, Cynthia!
The Blob
Alexander Lyon had to explain to his daughter, who was born in the 1970s, what The Blob was.
In the early 50’s, there was a teenage horror movie called The Blob, with Steve McQueen. And it was about this alien thing—creature thing—that was like a little lump of jelly, fell to the Earth. And it would just latch onto people and absorb them and get bigger and it would latch onto another person and absorb them and get bigger. And it could seep through cracks and keyholes and stuff. So I think what’s happening right now is that tempeh is starting to blob through the cracks and the keyholes into the more general world. It is starting to change from being something esoteric that only vegans and New Agey people know about. And health food stores and so on. Its starting to be used by other people in the food industry and more generally recognized; more people are aware of it. So it’s going to be interesting in the next, I would say, the next ten years. It will be interesting to see what becomes of tempeh.
If it does blob out [it could] become like tofu—tofu did the same thing, you know? It was unknown. It was bean curd. You only found it in Chinese restaurants. Most people don’t like it. You certainly couldn’t buy it in the grocery store, and then it caught on and got promoted—a little here, a little there—tofutti, tofu ice cream, one thing or another. Magazines say, “ Hey, this stuff is good for you, got lots of calcium, blah blah blah.” And now you can buy tofu in the Safeway. You can buy five kinds of tofu at Safeway in three firmness grades. And so on. It’s a household word. So I think the same thing may happen to tempeh, but it’s just starting now. It’s going to be about 30 years later than tofu, that tempeh sort of blobs. Or maybe I should say blossoms, that’s nicer.
Alexander relocated his family from The Farm to work with Seth Tibbott at Turtle Island Soy Dairy in the Pacific Northwest. It went on to have great success with a product called Tofurky. Melanie Lyon wrote to Gretchen:
I last saw your mom when I went to TF in 2014 to bury my dad’s ashes in the woods. She was really kind to me, she came with me to the spot and sprinkled soybeans there 🙂 She told me how it had been her dream to run a lab, any lab, and Alex had trained her and set her up to do that.
Tempeh blobbed out in the United Kingdom in 2025. Annual sales of the top tempeh brand increased by 736%, and the second-ranked grew by 128%. The global tempeh market, currently valued at $6.64 billion, is projected to reach between $7.6 billion and $9.4 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate now estimated at 5.8%-9.2% in North America and Europe and at 12.4% in Asia/Pacific.
As a natural product, tempeh offers many nutritional and health advantages over ultra-processed meat alternatives. Tempeh is a minimally processed product—Cynthia grew her first batches on a shelf above a woodstove in our tent-house; in Indonesia, it is cultured in banana leaves and sold on the street like steamed tamales. You only need good starter. Alexander said:
See, what had happened is we had started making it, and people came to the Farm in those early years. Every year, the Farm would get thousands and thousands of visitors come through, curious, mostly young people, and so there was a lot of dissemination of ideas, and so on. So tempeh began to spread, and other people in other places, other cities wanted to learn to make it, and there was no starter, so they would write to NRRL, the huge government laboratory in Illinois, to Dr. Wang and ask for the sample.
She was an oriental lady with a strong sense of duty. If someone wrote and asked her for a sample, since she worked for the government, well, the government was owned by the people. If the people wrote and asked for something, then they got it for free. That was the government’s duty. But it got out of hand, and she was getting thousands of requests.… So we said, “Okay, we’ll make it and sell it,” and that’s how that happened, and it did quite well.
Rebirth
When the Farm decollectivized in 1984, Cynthia’s entire enterprise was upended. Farm Foods was sold to Barricini for the Ice Bean brand and the Foundation told us that deal would include the Tempeh Lab unless we could make a better offer. Our family swung into action and begged and borrowed enough money to pull off the purchase. Today our daughter Gretchen runs the Tempeh Lab, which supplies starter cultures to four continents.
Allan and Susan Brown’s story is not unique. Not only did Cynthia provide pure starter culture to tempeh shops all over the world, but she also either directly trained or strongly influenced many of the young industry’s startups that have become million-dollar businesses and familiar brands today.
Cynthia is survived by our children, Gretchen and Will; granddaughter Brianna; and great-grandson Jeremiah, who still carry on the family’s tradition of living with purpose. Jeremiah is a 14th-generation North American and a fifth-generation Farmie. A service was held at the family home, followed by a scattering of her ashes to Lake Michigan, where she grew up. Those wishing to honor her memory may send donations to Swan Conservation Trust, PO Box 162, Summertown, TN 38483.
What Cynthia’s life tells me—should tell us all—is that the young idealism of your 20’s needn’t be wasted on going to jail over protest, risked in the army, or frittered away by endless pleasure-seeking. If you try something hard—something really hard—you might fail. It might stink. But keep trying. Just do it. Today you could be turning sargassum into biochar and saving whale sharks and sea turtles. Tomorrow you could be replanting kelp forests with the Climate Foundation or reseeding a desertifying altiplano with the Ecosystem Restoration Camps. For Cynthia and me, it was an ecovillage in Tennessee—a hippy commune fleeing the Haight—and a place where we could dream big, live large, and aspire to save the world.
गते गते पारगते पारसंगते बोधि स्वाहा
Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā
—Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya
Sorry to hear news of Cynthia’s passing. Your eulogy of her was heart warming and called me back to those inspirational times when hippies were “out to change the world”. She certainly left footprints to follow. And it seems there is much more that needs doing.
What a heroic story she lived. Millions of us have benefited from her good works and perseverance. Thank you for sharing this, Albert!