Here’s how to declare chocolate non-halal
Have you ever looked at a magnified image of your skin or hair? Do you remember it as a horror moment or as a wow moment?
Rama Ramanathan
Have you ever looked at a magnified image of your skin or hair? Do you remember it as a horror moment or as a wow moment?
If you remember it as a horror moment, you may be very disturbed by what follows.
Those who remember it as a wow moment are often technologists: people who accept reality and use science to control and check processes.
For instance, milk technologists control temperature, time and pressure to pasteurize milk; then they use microbiological tests to check whether the process was effective.
Technologists know perfection is rarely achieved, so they’re not troubled by this fact: US Grade ‘A’ pasteurized milk is allowed to have bacteria up to 20,000 cfu/ml.
In testing, speed is often critical. Customers want factories to ship fresh product, not wait for days for test results.
Results of slow, “traditional” microbiological tests performed for years are analysed before establishing specifications. If manufacturers use the same slow tests to release product, customers will not get fresh product.
Rapid microbiological tests became available in the late 20th century. Rapid tests have many drawbacks: it’s hard to show rapid tests are equivalent to the traditional tests which were used to establish the specifications – ask anyone who has been through a regulatory audit; rapid-tests are costly; samples which fail rapid tests often pass traditional tests.
Milk must pass non-microbiological tests, e.g. for drug content – since animals are fed drugs to heal them and to keep them healthy. EU pasteurized milk is allowed to contain drugs up to 0.0039 microgram/ml.
Milk must not be diluted, must not be off-white, must not be radioactive, must not contain toxins (remember Dioxin?), must not cause mad-cow disease, etc.
Some tests are done only once a year. The fact that we have the technology doesn’t mean we can or must use it; we have to consider cost and time.
It’s not possible to test for every possible risk. It’s hard to be confident that a sample represents the whole: does 1 blade of grass represent all the grass in a football field?
Without extensive data, we cannot set achievable specifications: if your goal is “zero bacteria,” you’ll rarely ship milk to customers; instead, you’ll frequently ship milk to waste treatment plants.
With that as background, I can now discuss testing for porcine (pig) DNA in chocolate.
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