Where do those dang chemicals come from?

From Chapter 8:
"But how do you make chemicals, Linda? Where do they come from?"
"Well, I don't know. You get them out of bottles. And when the bottles are empty, you send up to the Chemical Store for more. It's the Chemical Store people who make them, I suppose... I don't know. I never did any chemistry. My job was always with the embryos."
It was the same with everything else he asked about. Linda never seemed to know. The old men of the pueblo had much more definite answers.

It's mind-boggling that this society exists in a twisted type of consumerism, right down to the chemicals that are used to keep the lower castes behaving as they are supposed to. Linda answers the boys' questions in a way that doesn't really answer the question at all but rather passing the responsibility of the answer to the different party. She isn't doing this cryptically, either, literally stating "I don't know" repeatedly through her response. It's a wonder that she doesn't leave it at that, but maybe Linda thinks she does have an explanation. If the society within Brave New World is viewed by its inhabitants as a collective consciousness of intelligence, then it's reasonable to think that its blissful to not have answers and to relish in the idea that those who are important to the making of the chemicals know what they are made from. Linda even implies that the idea hadn't crossed her mind much, that she had always done chemistry. It's kind of strange. Shouldn't she deserve to know, since those working the embryos would also be working with the made chemicals? Kids ask the darndest things; they seem a lot more curious than the adults. Deferring responsibility to the Chemical Store means that Linda can think about her own job more, something she also is seemingly implicitly encouraging the kids to do.

Right, how this relates to the bigger picture. In a lot of ways, this twisted ignorance of the processes behind consumerism aren't too far-fetched from the society that we live in today. Do we really think about what all of the chemicals in our food do or how they're made? Maybe to a degree, but we trust that the food companies and the regulatory bodies behind them wouldn't let us have anything we aren't supposed to have. Brave New World's society suffers even more under this lack of information; they don't often so much question why things are the way that they are. It just is.