bread and human hair

Commercial breads ingredient derived from human hair 
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 
A common ingredient in commercial breads is derived from human hair 
harvested in China 
http://www.naturalnews.com 
(NaturalNews) If you read the ingredients label on a loaf of bread, 
you will usually find an ingredient listed there as L-cysteine. This 
is a non-essential amino acid added to many baked goods as a dough 
conditioner in order to speed industrial processing. It's usually not 
added directly to flour intended for home use, but you'll find it 
throughout commercial breads such as pizza dough, bread rolls and 
pastries. 
While some L-cysteine is directly synthesized in laboratories, most 
of it is extracted from a cheap and abundant natural protein source: 
human hair. The hair is dissolved in acid and L-cysteine is isolated 
through a chemical process, then packaged and shipped off to 
commercial bread producers. Besides human hair, other sources of L- 
cysteine include chicken feathers, duck feathers, cow horns and 
petroleum byproducts. 
Most of the hair used to make L-cysteine is gathered from the floors 
of barbershops and hair salons in China , by the way. 
While the thought of eating dissolved hair might make some people 
uneasy, most Western consumers ultimately have no principled 
objections doing so. For Jews and Muslims, however, hair-derived L- 
cysteine poses significant problems. Muslims are forbidden from 
eating anything derived from a human body, and many rabbis forbid 
hair consumption for similar reasons. Even rabbis who permit the 
consumption of hair would forbid it if it came from corpses -- and 
since much L-cysteine comes from China, where sourcing and 
manufacturing practices are notoriously questionable, this is a real 
concern. In one case, a rabbi forbade the consumption of L-cysteine 
because the hair had been harvested during a ritual at a temple in 
India.