Beware of "uric acid" in indian snack mix

I've never been much for believing bigoted rumors. My grandmother was a very pious and loving lady. She used to tell me that hindus were good people, she lived in harmony with them in India.

She always treated her hindu servants with respect and they used to tell her that even her own fellow hindus never treated them as humans, due to their lower caste. My grandmother also had hindu friends and yet she mentioned that one topic always brought up awkward moments: FOOD.

So they used to cleverly pretend that these issues never existed. As a muslim she was unwelcome in the kitchen of her hindu friend, of course my grandmother had no such qualms about hindus in her kitchen, she told me.

As she used to relate these stories to me, I once asked her: "didn't it make you angry that you weren't welcome in your friend's kitchen?".
Her response surprised me. "No. I Don't want to be around all that cow piss...it's very unhygienic".

I loved my grandmother, but as I grew up, I thought of her as quite bigoted. I mean seriously, what nonsense?

When I moved overseas, I eventually became friends with some great folks. My best friend in uni were an Israeli jew and an Indian hindu. The Israeli couldn't take the weirdness of North America and returned to Israel after a couple of years. My hindu friend and I remained good friends for the next decade.

Once we were discussing the weirdness of religion and "back home" culture and he mentioned how I would not be welcome in their own family's kitchen back home (they were brahmin). We both laughed. Then I told him about my grandmother's bigotedness about cow piss as holy water, and cow piss in sweets and food. I laughed and said "what a joke right?". He went quiet and didn't elaborate.

I let it slip my mind.

Recently, on chowk, our hindu friends have confirmed that indeed...the use of cow urine is quite common for "purification" purposes. The custom of smashing a coconut, marking a swastika, and sprinkling cow piss on a new car purchase is indeed a still practiced tradition. That the prashad offered at temples has some cow piss in it, and finally, that sweets too are sometimes purified with cow urine.

They told me I was naive to think it was a lie. I, of course, thought that they were pulling my leg.

So I researched it.

Apparently...my poor grandmother, God rest her soul, was not bigoted after all. What she stated was a fact. There is a strong tradition of using cow urine for various traditions, remedies, etc, in the hindu culture.

I'm not one to judge what may be right for one culture...but if I were you, I would look carefully at the ingredients on the snack mixes you buy at the local indian store. That ingredient "uric acid" is exactly that: piss.

Sometimes it's also marked as citric acid.

No wonder I always used to get an upset stomach when I ate indian snacks. A true momin's stomach will automagically reject pork and all pork products, and all cow urine products.

Always.

Alhamdulillah.