So, on the heels of my celebrating my abecedarian status in the Chinese kitchen, a friend sends me this thing. I'm honestly not sure if this discovery from the Internet Journal of Toxicology is more admirable than it is disturbing.

The title sort of says it all:

Alexander Tse-Yan Lee: "Hair Soy Sauce: A Revolting Alternative to the Conventional." The Internet Journal of Toxicology. 2005.

Hair soy sauce is exactly what it sounds like. 2005 is last year. This is a study out of Hong Kong.

As far as I can tell it's a legit thing and not an internet mockup -- it's a genuine site that has real published studies from actual research journals.

So. Here's the thing. Soy sauce is popular in China. Traditionally, it's made by fermenting soy and wheat together in a process that takes a long time to complete. There's a quickie way to do it using hydrochloric acid and some other unappetizing ingredients, but it tastes funny that way. In 2003, the Hongshuai Soy Sauce company marketed a cheap, tasty condiment “blended using latest bioengineering technology.” Investigative journalists (still kind of a new thing in China) found out that they did it by buying amino acid powder, mixing it with water to make syrup, then blending it with various acids and other chemicals to make something that tasted basically like old-fashioned soy sauce.

Then, they discovered where the amino acid powder came from:

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, etc (figure 1). After filtered by the workers, the hair would then cut small for being processed into amino acid syrup.

Figure 1 is really worth seeing. It's a photograph from the factory floor in Hubei. (I'm beginning to get the sense that Hubei is to China what Florida is to the United States.)

From a chemical standpoint, I think it's pretty much a genius move. I'm not so keen on the sanitation angle, and when Mr. Lee refers to lead and arsenic being present in hair of unknown origin, I kind of wonder how the lead got in the hair (likeliest answer being through the person who grew the hair, as the savvy adoptive parent will have guessed, what with the lab tests and all for lead levels in orphanage babies).

So, the Chinese government has cracked down on this stuff, after a public outcry led to certain brands being, like, banned in Europe, Japan and the U.S. But it's still sort of an issue because, well, of human ingenuity.

In June 2004, the Hong Kong Customs and Excise Department found over two hundred bottles of faked soy sauce in the market. The manufacturers labelled the faked products under the most famous and popular local brand – the Pearl River Bridge.

I guess the final lesson here is: Know your soy sauce.