Margarine, and Animal-Derived Additives

Margarine is generally a byproduct of vegetables. When it was first manufactured, it emerged out of competition among American corn growers and vegetable growers against the dairy farmers; they invented this product called margarine. It was black in colour at first, and nobody bought it; the colour was changed to pink, and still nobody bought it; changed again, and still nobody bought it. Because people kept buying butter, a natural product, the manufacturers eventually settled on a similar colour to butter and began describing margarine as spreading easily, like butter, using the word "butter" in its marketing here and there. But margarine contains a great deal besides — some doctors say that if people knew what went into it, the quantity of free radicals it contains, they would never touch the stuff. Whatever else is true of it, a Muslim needs to be sure it contains no animal byproducts: no gelatine, no lard — lard being pig fat — and no animal fat or emulsifiers. Eating it unknowingly is a different matter; eating it knowingly, once this is known, is a problem.

As already said, it is not a requirement in Islam for every Muslim to become a chemical engineer, to know what a given emulsifier numbered 7527365 actually is, or what a given colouring numbered 7251356 is — nobody has any idea of these things unless they happen to be something of a computer expert, though anyone with a phone in hand can look up a given additive on the internet immediately, and there is no harm in that. An ordinary person — a grandmother, say, who cannot even speak English — does not have to know any of this; it is enough for her to ask whether a product contains anything from an animal, any animal byproduct, or any gelatine, and to leave it there. Certain colourings, it should also be known, are made from crushed dead insects; organic, wholesome food remains the best way to avoid all these questions.