Soy sauce made from human hair

Tracy says: "This article is about cheap soya sauce that is being manufactured in the East as an alternative to the original. The 'secret ingrediant' is amino acid syryp, a concoction consisting of 'human hair ... gathered from salon, barbershop and hospitals around the country' which is then filtered to remove unhygenic matarials such as '... condom, used hospital cottons, used menstrual cycle pad, used syringe ...' The Chinese government has banned the production of this kind of soy sauce, although not the production of amino acid syryp." Link

Update: I forgot that I posted something about this in 2004.

Martijn says:

I've been thinking about your soy sauce from human hair entry on boingboing.net, and I just don't think it makes sense. I don't believe it.

I'm not a chemist, but throwing in some chemical addititives to make something that tastes like soy sauce doesn't seem to likely to me.

And I'm not an economist, but the cost of collecting human hair in sufficient quantity to process it industrially compared to just growing soy doesn't seem plausible to me. Who would produce a fake foodstuff when it's more *expensive*?

This also reminds me of the earlier boingboing entry on the "faked eggs" which is implausible for the same two reasons.

In addition, both articles on such fake products are hosted on the same site and are written by the same author: Alexander Tse-Yan Lee.

Link 1

Link 2

Perhaps this is a form of nefarious propaganda from one food producint company against another. I'm not sure: to me though this has the right symptoms of a crackpot at work...