A common ingredient in commercial breads is derived from human hair harvested in China

Mike Adams
Natural News
June 16, 2011

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.

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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.

 

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Hedge Farm! Hedge Funds Buying Up Farms for Doomsday Food Price Scenario

Foster Kamer
New York Observer
May 21, 2011

On the rare occasion that New Yorkers talk about farming, it’s usually something along the lines of what sort of organic kale to plant in the vanity garden at the second house in the Adirondacks. But on a recent afternoon, The Observer had a conversation of a different sort about agricultural pursuits with a hedge fund manager he’d met at one of the many dark-paneled private clubs in midtown a few weeks prior. “A friend of mine is actually the largest owner of agricultural land in Uruguay,” said the hedge fund manager. “He’s a year older than I am. We’re somewhere [around] the 15th-largest farmers in America right now.”

“We,” as in, his hedge fund.

It may seem a little odd that in 2011 anyone’s thinking of putting money into assets that would have seemed attractive in 1911, but there’s something in the air-namely, fear. The hedge fund manager and others like him envision a doomsday scenario catalyzed by a weak dollar, higher-than-you-think inflation and an uncertain political climate here and abroad.

The pattern began to emerge sometime in 2008. “The Hedge Fund Manager Who Bought a Farm,” read the headline on one February 2008 Times of London piece detailing a British hedge fund manager’s attempt to play off the rising prices of grains in order to usurp local farmland. A Financial Times piece two months later began: “Hedge funds and investment banks are swapping their Gucci for gumboots.” It detailed BlackRock’s then-relatively new $420 million Agriculture Fund, which had already swept up 2,800 acres of land.

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