The Secret Ingredient

Human hair can be found in more foods than you think.

by Trey Popp

AFTER A FLY in your soup, the last thing you probably want from the deli is hair in your sandwich. But at least they’re both relatively easy to spot, right?

Don’t be so sure.

A couple weeks ago, WHYY aired a "Marketplace" segment that made me wonder if I needed to ream out my ears with Q-Tips. It was about a Florida company that’s trying to market mats of human hair as a weed-control mechanism. As an added bonus, these hair mats would help farmers conserve water and cut back on fertilizers.

Intriguing in its own right, no doubt, but that was before the source of all this hair — the company warehouse boasted 10,000 pounds — was revealed, along with a stunning tangential aside. It comes from Chinese barbers, who market their clippings to brokers. "In China," the reporter explained, "hair is a commodity, used in wigs and even as an additive in food."

An additive in food? Was I really hearing that right?

The reporter didn't mention it again. I couldn't stop thinking about it. What recipe on Earth could possibly call for a dash of human hair?

A lot of them, it turns out. And sandwich bread tops the list, along with bagels, pizza dough, crackers and a whole bunch of other items in the baked-goods aisle.

Of course, you won’t find "hair" listed in the ingredients. The dash, in this case, is an amino acid derived from hair called L-cysteine. It's commonly used as a dough softener, but can also be used as a building block to make a variety of flavors (in which case it needn’t appear on the side of the box).

A few years ago, a Chinese company took advantage of that property to make soy sauce from human hair. Scandal ensued, and the Chinese government banned the practice.

Cysteine is also, strangely enough, one of the hundreds of chemical additives in cigarettes.

Within the last decade, chemical companies have come up with ways to produce it synthetically, but that can be more expensive. Barber clippings are cheap, as an Indian hair broker told the South China Morning Post in 2004: about one Chinese yuan per kilo, or 7 cents a pound. And given the global nature of the food-additive trade, it is not surprising that in 2007, Burger King told the Vegetarian Resource Group it "cannot guarantee" the source of the L-cysteine in its products.

But that could mean anything. Our culture's preference for the cheapest food possible may actually end up removing human hair from the menu. Recently, China's L-cysteine producers have begun turning to even less expensive raw materials: duck feathers and pig bristles.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)