KUALA LUMPUR, June 22 — “It was as if a pig had fallen into a vat of chocolate,” a Malaysian religious officer said at a forum about halal issues on Friday, when expressing his annoyance over the major uproar against Cadbury chocolates recently.

Muslim NGOs had declared “jihad” on Cadbury late last month after a leaked preliminary report by the Health Ministry showed that traces of porcine DNA was found in a sample of the chocolates.

Further tests by the Malaysian Islamic Religious Department (Jakim) refuted the initial leaked result, and it was business as usual for Cadbury afterwards.

But that was after their products were recalled, causing the company to suffer losses.

That was after the above threat for jihad, boycott, and plans for a lawsuit against Cadbury for allegedly trying to mislead, betray and weaken Muslims with its “pork-tainted chocolates”.

Selangor Perkasa chief Abu Bakar Yahya, for example, said that Cadbury put “haram elements” in its food to weaken Muslims. Meanwhile, Perkid president Masridzi Sat said most social ills and apostasy cases in Malaysia could be blamed on Muslims eating non-halal food.

While on the surface, these statements might seem laughable, it is important to understand how a lot of Muslims believe that a person’s attitude and faith can apparently be affected by what he eats:

While a lot of Prophet Muhammad’s hadith mentioned avoiding food which is declared haram because of the way it is produced, a lot of Muslims take it to literally to mean consuming meat decreed as haram: Such as pork, carcass, and improperly slaughtered animals.

They believe that haram food will turn a Muslim away from his faith, pave the way towards committing sins, and affect his attitude negatively in many ways.

Scientifically and physically, this is of course impossible, just as eating fried chicken does not make you behave differently from if you had eaten a fruit salad instead.

What is the difference between beef slaughtered the Islamic way and not, in a physical sense? There is none.

When you come down to molecular levels, they are both composed of the same sort of material: On average nearly three-quarters of them water, then protein, a little fat, carbohydrates and others.

To extend the argument further, any meat, be it a halal chicken or the haram pork, breaks down to similar nutrients when they are digested by our stomachs.

Enzymes secreted by the stomach and pancreas will break down protein into amino acids. Enzyme, and bile from liver break down fat into fatty acids and glycerol. While carbohydrates are broken down into sugars: glucose, sucrose, or lactose.

When you zoom in, all meat is pretty much the same, and they end up being indistinguishable as soon as they get digested. Most of us learned this in secondary school.

Similarly, when one consumes the DNA, it will be broken down into smaller molecules too.

What difference is there exactly between consuming porcine DNA compared to bovine DNA?

Members of Malaysian Muslim Wholesalers and Retailers Association (MAWAR), a non-governmental organisation, throw Cadbury chocolate products into a dustbin as a protest and officially announced their boycott of Cadbury products, after their news conference on stopping the supply of Cadbury chocolate products to retail shops, in Kuala Lumpur May 29, 2014. — Picture by Reuters

While it is true that the presence of DNA proves that contact has happened, it does not prove the presence of pork at all. In short, just because there is a trace of porcine DNA in a food, it does not mean that there is pork inside the food.

Despite that, the hysteria induced by the Cadbury finding was akin to some Malays finding out after all these years that the candy bars were actually bacon dipped in chocolates.

This is where one more thought experiment can be taken: It is clear that pork is prohibited in Islam, after all it is mentioned in one verse in the Quran (2:173). But is consuming pork the same as consuming its DNA?

Chains of DNAs can be found in chromosomes – a structure containing DNA and RNA, among others. Chromosomes, on the other hand, can be found in the nucleus of a cell. And cells, of course, are the building blocks of our tissues.

Humans, for example, have around three billion pairs of DNA contained in 46 chromosomes, which carry our genes. And we are made of trillions of cells.

It might be hard to imagine it, but my point here is that DNA is very, very, very, very tiny.

It is ludicrous to think that your whole life would be ruined by something that tiny, but many people believe it all the same. Because it is very much easier to understand rather than understanding the building blocks of life.

To put it into an analogy, even if you are forbidden to eat red velvet cake, are you also not allowed to eat a vanilla cake stained by a drop of red flavouring used to make the former?

Frankly, I find it ridiculous that Muslims in this country are being subject to halal scrutiny even at the molecular level.

A lot of resources are currently being spent to make sure that food for Muslims are safe even from DNA contamination, even when it is not really prescribed in the holy texts.

Therefore the question needs to be asked: Who benefits financially from this? It is also a known fact that the halal industry is booming and we are one of the industry leaders.

Some might argue that such strict scrutiny would inadvertently allay the fears of Muslims, to protect them from ever consuming haram food. I would then argue back that these fears were never there in the first place.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.