How Can I Figure Out What's Halal At the Grocery Store?

The question we have here is an interesting one.
It says, “

I’m a new Muslim, and I’m finding it very difficult to figure out what’s halal and haram in terms of ingredients.
When I go to the store, I spend a lot of time looking up ingredients, and it’s getting frustrating.
Do you have advice about what’s haram and what’s not?
What about things like bread, ice cream, and cheese?”

Understanding the Basics of Purity in Ingredients

Yeah, so let me start from the bottom, and then we look at, you know, more general considerations.

The simple thing that Muslims need to bear in mind is that the, you know, small ingredients in larger containers of things do not render the whole containers to be impure, if the small ingredients themselves are impure. So that’s one major consideration.

In our classical books of Islamic jurisprudence, we’ll find discussions.

For example, what if you have a vat of water, and then, you know, an animal falls in and dies in that, right? It could be a tiny animal, a rodent or whatever. So you take that out. This is what it is they prescribe.

You take that out and take out so many buckets of water from that larger container and add new water to it.

So what are they prescribing here? That you’re diluting whatever effects have been left in that water due to the impure substance falling into it.

But you’re not gonna condemn the whole vat of water just because of this one little mishap, okay? If you did, then you would make life impractical for people.

So, you know, the scholars were wise enough to see that Islam has this flexibility about it. But common people don’t seem to know this.

Common Misunderstandings and Practical Wisdom

You know, it just seems to them, and sometimes some popular preachers as well would, you know, bandy about some narratives that says, you know, like, if something impure, is in there, then it makes the whole thing impure, something of this nature.

But practically, this is not easy to live by, and the Sharia, the Islamic law, was never meant to be impractical or stifling.

The Quran says, very plainly.

“We have not revealed the Quran to you ˹O Prophet˺ to cause you distress.”

Surah Taha – 2

So it’s to give us freedom and vitality, and, you know, make things practical and easy for us.

The Quran says .

“God desires ease for you, not hardship.”

Real-Life Scenarios and Balanced Judgment

Now, coming back to this practical issue. So one consideration is that if it’s a small ingredient in the larger whole, that does not render the whole thing impure.

Now, if I bring this down to the practical experience of people, let’s say you bought a loaf of bread, you cut into it, and you found that there is an ant baked into this bread. What are you gonna do? You’re gotta throw with the whole loaf? No.

Common sense tells you you’re gonna pinch out that part and throw away the ant with a little bit of bread along with it, but you can eat the rest of the bread.

– It depends how, you know, if someone’s squeamish.
– How grossed out you are, right?

Yes. If somebody is squeamish, that’s fine. I mean, that’s up to you personally. And of course, depending on your affluence and so on, if, to you, like, $3 for a loaf of bread is no sweat for you to throw away, I mean, that’s up to you.

But if we’re talking about, you know, an average person on the ground for whom $3 is a lot of money, and then, you know, they might wanna save the bread.

So you don’t wanna come in with Islamic law and says, “No, you better throw away this bread,” because then you’re gonna hurt the person and break their heart and make them feel sorry that they’re a Muslim for a moment here.”

The Principle of Transformation

So one consideration is the size of the ingredient relative to the whole. Another consideration is that things change their form over time.

Like, if there is a slab of meat, and you go, you know, pinch off a piece and you eat it, and you know that this meat is impure because it wasn’t slaughtered in the proper Islamic manner, and so on, then this definitely is haram, impermissible. Nobody will disagree with that.

And now you take that pinch of meat, and you put it through a chemical process. You transform it. It becomes something else. You look at it, it’s no longer a piece of meat. And nobody desires to eat it as a piece of meat.

It’s fulfilling some other function now, like, you know, to stabilize certain processes, chemical processes that are used for production of food, and so on. It’s no longer a piece of impure substance that you’re eating. Now it’s a chemical ingredient.

Now, we know from classical Islamic law that things may change their nature.

A classical example of this is grapes. While grapes by themselves are permissible, if they’re pressed into wine, the wine is impermissible. But if the wine changes into vinegar, the vinegar is permissible.