Scientists are stepping in to make sure Muslims and others who want to keep pork off of their plates and out of their personal items can rest assured.
Halal
(permitted) and haram (prohibited)
consumer products have been a major concern for a long time in
majority-Islamic countries around the world, as well as other nations, and keeping pork out of products is a huge market-driving force.
Now, scientists at the Dubai Central Laboratory (DCL) in the UAE
are piloting a Halal Testing
Service to help identify pork in cosmetics and
personal care items, including lipsticks, soaps, and lotions and creams. Such a scientific step would be a leap forward in guaranteeing items are halal, since up to now testing largely has consisted of
inspecting factories to make sure that meat was ritually slaughtered
and to observe whether any pork was physically put into
products.
Officials told Reuters that the DCL would be available to help
with legislation and programs aimed at protecting Islamic consumers
and communities from prohibited products.
“The new service is useful to the customers of these
products, traders, and statutory and regulatory bodies, DCL Director Ameen Ahmad said. “It is one of the
regulatory requirements of the Gulf Standard Specifications, which state that
these products are free of pork fat and its derivatives.”
Ahmad said the DCL started this program because so many
other initiatives have centered halal inspection
only around food products. The UAE lab uses a process called Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to spot the presence of pork fat in products, then follows up with gas chromatography mass spectrometry.
At press time, the DCL had not returned calls to talk about intent
and methodology, but the Gulf News Journal spoke with Harry
Keller, a scientist and educator in California, about
how these high-tech scientific methods can assure Islamic consumers they’re not
using products with pork in them.
Keller said infrared
spectroscopy is commonly used to test various kinds of chemicals in laboratory
settings.
“Spectroscopy is the science of illuminating something with
electromagnetic radiation,” he said.
Each fat has specific chemicals and
a molecular structure that can be examined in this way.
With infrared, he said, scientists can look at how specific
substances absorb parts of the electromagnetic spectrum — fat, for
example, would look different under infrared light than it does to the
naked eye.
Fourier transform, Keller said, is used to separate specific
signals from background noise. Keller used the example of NASA technology that separates incoming space signals from cosmic noise.
“It’s a tricky process.” Keller said, describing how a Fourier method helps with “teasing apart complex fingerprints” of chemical
compounds.
“You have to separate out the signal that’s specific to the
fat,” he said.
constituents of a substance are floated up through a tube for
observation.
The use of these very modern scientific processes to test products
for pork ingredients represents a compelling interaction between the frontier
of the scientific world and religious and cultural practices going back many
centuries in human history. It’s another step in the evolution of
traditional religious practices in today’s modern world, and how they adapt according to technological advancements.
