The Apprentice more embarrassingly stupid than usual

So, I'm watching the Apprentice; it's a guilty pleasure of mine. It's a show where people who incorrectly think that they are good businesspeople compete to win the approval of Sir Alan Sugar, the man who repeatedly tried to introduce overpriced, underspecced email consoles to Britain, at a time when people could buy a perfectly good personal computer for the same price. So, really, the person who makes the most absurd decisions should win.

The task was to buy a list of items in a Marrakesh souk; one of them a Kosher chicken. So... one team bought a dead chicken, then tried to have it blessed in a mosque. Because that's what Kosher means, obviously. I mean, there's stupid, and then there's, well, this.

Update: Alan Sugar was just as horrified as I was at their horrendous stupidity. The best bit; one of the members of the offending team was Jewish, and had put on the first paragraph of his CV that he was 'a good Jewish boy'. Now, I'm a not very good Atheist (of nominally Catholic background) boy, and I seem to have a better idea of what Kosher means than him. Admittedly, I do collect random information about nonsense, but still.

But is hydrolysed human hair KOSHER?!

Well, apparently yes, as long as it is not derived from hair taken from dead people. Thankfully, this is apparently rarely the case (the dead person hair thing).

L-Cysteine, you see, is an amino-acid often used in food flavouring and particularly treatment of grain for baking. It is derived from feathers, various chemical fermentation and genetically engineered bacteria sources, and, primarily, human hair.

Think about that next time you bite into a nice bread roll.

Anyway, yes, it is apparently generally kosher, though presumably not suitable for vegetarians or Jehovah's Witnesses (for whom it would surely fall under the definition of cannibalism). Islam, by the way, certainly does not allow it if it is sourced from human hair.

Isn't modern food technology fun? It is, quite frankly, a wonder that vegans, in particular, can eat at all.