Ive found my loaf of bread! Yay Vogels!!

Synthetic L-cysteine is made from vats of fermented mutant shit. Not figuratively, I mean literally, a genetically-engineered mutation of the fecal bacteria e. coli. During fermentation, the e. coli actually excretes L-cysteine, so in a sense it’s the shit of the shit. Somehow, the end product is considered kosher, halal, and vegan. The only marketing downside is that it’s ridiculously unnatural. The US FDA considers cysteine derived from the hair of imprisoned Chinese dissidents to be “all natural,” and in comparison to centrifuging the shit out of shit, that actually sounds reasonable.

So anyway, yeah, remember to thank these companies for making their bread shittier. And I mean it figuratively there; cysteine speeds up dough mixing by breaking gluten’s disulfide bonds, but makes a denser, less pleasant bread. Various oxidants (ascorbic acid, azodicarbonamide, calcium bromate, calcium peroxide, potassium bromate, potassium iodate, etc.) are needed to counteract the negative effects of cysteine, which is how you can wind up with 25 ingredients in place of “flour, water, sugar, and yeast.”