The Eco-Halal Revolution

A little over a year ago I read “Kosher Wars” by Samantha Shapiro in the Sunday Times Magazine. The extraordinary piece explored a nascent Jewish food movement looking to integrate contemporary notions of sustainability and social justice into traditional kosher values. But for some characters in the story, namely Andy Kastner, who was then about to begin his third year at an Orthodox rabbinical school, it wasn’t a question of integration as much as it was one of interpretation. For Kastner there is a natural juncture where the precepts of Kashrut – the kosher dietary laws and the sustainable food movement meet.

In part, it was the novelty of the topic that intrigued me. I don’t mean to belittle or trivialize the movement at all. I simply mean that I was somewhat tired of reading about and wowing over futuristic models of vertical urban farms, New Yorkers rearing chickens in their tiny New York back gardens and the next best farmer’s market. Even then, mention “food security” and “Michael Pollan” in certain social situations and you were likely to receive a roll of the eyes in response. Sad but true, the notion of eating responsibly had already become a somewhat hackneyed concept.     

And so “Kosher Wars” got me excited and it got me thinking. The idea that religious principles can help people make more salubrious choices about the food they eat and consequently go some way towards fixing some of society’s most pressing social and environmental problems (obesity, inhumane farming practices etc.) struck me as somewhat revolutionary. Where else was this happening? It seemed a natural next step to look for the seeds of a similar movement amongst American Muslims. Eventually, I moved on from conceiving and conceptualizing to actually doing something about these mental ramblings. After some online research and a trip down to Union Square Green Market, I found not just seeds; but robust seedlings.

For the last 15 years Zaid Kurdieh, an American-born Muslim in upstate New York, has fed his family only meat from pasture raised poultry and livestock which he has slaughtered himself. It isn’t the fact that the meat the Kurdiehs consume must be halal that led to this habit. If a meat product is free from pork, which the Koran forbids, and if it has been ritually slaughtered in the zabihah way — a process governed by a set of precise rules set down by Islamic law and tradition — it meets the basic criteria for being halal. Most Muslims believe that consuming meat that meets this requirement fulfills the onus placed on them by their religion toward this part of their diet. Where the meat comes from and how it was reared is largely considered irrelevant. But not for Kurdieh, who runs a 35 acre organic farm, Norwich Meadows, and sells his produce in Union Square. He interprets Islam in a way that renders the environment and the manner in which an animal is raised from birth until death paramount. For him, it’s not enough that the meat is emblazoned with a halal certification stamp. He believes that food should be produced according to the the complex and often neglected Islamic principle of tayibb, which he defines as meaning “wholesome” and “pure.” As such he refuses to buy the factory farmed meat that is sold in Muslim butchers near his home because it does not fulfill his criteria.  

And it does not end with Kurdieh. It was not long before I was exchanging emails and having long conversations with young American Muslims across the U.S. keen to share their stories of  their organic, halal meat cooperatives – initiatives they had joined or started because they didn’t believe that the mass produced halal meat met with the precepts of their faith. Clearly I was on to something. For these  young professionals frustrated by the lack of transparency in the commercial halal meat industry and by the intensive farming methods these enterprises support, trying to build an alternative halal food system based on a local economy of farmers and growers seemed the only alternative.  

To read more about this fascinating drive for clean food for Muslims, check out my story The Eco-Halal Revolution at Culinate.com.