Food Chain
C. Sadaruddin
Darwin, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

During lunchtime most of the people from different offices of our office block gather in a common lunchroom for lunch. I do like that one-hour lunch break specially the conversation with people from different backgrounds professionally, culturally and religiously. It was another one of those days and I was talking to a Betty Singaporean Chinese now Australian and an organic food activist of Darwin. I was fascinated by the amount of information she was providing on good side of organic food and bad side of other categories of food. I inquired a bit about the definition of organic food. And I was surprised to know that they do not use any fertilizer that is not coming from organic source and a certification body do check these before certifying the food as organic. She gave me a bit of certified organic Carrot and some salad item to test. To me, the test appears to be same but Betty was trying hard to make me understand the better test of the product. Just to keep the conversation going I asked her, if you use Urea as fertilizer do you certify the product as organic. She replied certainly not. I asked, but Urea is a natural product and produced from Natural Gas. But she says, as it is processed by means of artificial technology it is not an organic product. I asked, what about compose. She said, yes compose is the only organic fertilizer allowed to use for organic food. I asked, but if the trees and leaves used for that compose are not produced organically? How far you will break it up? She could not reply.

My wife a typical Bangladeshi Muslim and moderate religious women was busy picking up groceries from the huge alleys of the supermarket. It was another weekly shopping day and as usual I was following her pushing the overfilled trolley. She picked up some Ice cream and checked carefully the ingredients and rejected that. I, just being curious asked, “animal fat, isn't it"?
She said, “no Gelatine”.
I said, “what’s wrong with that”?
She said, “it can be made from bone marrow”.
I asked, “is it the bone marrow”?
She said, “no, but it can be extracted from vegetable or bone marrow. As I am not sure I do not consider it as Halal”.
I simply remarked if you start breaking up food up to that extend you will end up at same place that is chain of chemicals coming from the same source, can you tell me where we should stop. She could not reply.