I recently learned that bagels, beer and the silver foil on mithai (hammered flat in goat intestine) aren’t quite vegetarian. Now we can add cheap soy sauce to the list. Like many bagels, one inexpensive soy sauce brand is made with amino acids from human hair (via Boing Boing):

You like-a the sauce, yes? The sauce, it is good, yes?

In late 2003, [a new] soy sauce named “Hongshuai Soy Sauce” [was launched] in China… The Hongshuai Soy Sauce was sold at a relatively low price in mainland China and became very popular among the public. The people found its taste to be similar to other brands…

The Chinese journalists went to the food seasoning manufacturer… They were told by a manager that the soy sauce was made from… amino acid syrup… When asking how the amino acid syrup (or powder) was generated, the manufacturer replied that the powder was generated from human hair…

Because the human hair was gathered from salon, barbershop and hospitals around the country, it was unhygienic and mixed with condom, used hospital cottons, used menstrual cycle pad, used syringe[s], etc. … After [being] filtered by the workers, the hair [was] then cut [into small pieces and] processed into amino acid syrup. [Link]

Soy-lent Black is people!

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