These days it’s fashionable for supermarkets to list ingredients down to the molecular level. In the spirit of openness and transparency, some lists read like the whole periodic table of elements reshuffled.
And yet I believe they conceal one important fact: unbeknown to us, all their beef is halal. This conclusion is conjecture, but it’s not baseless conjecture. I simply trust the comparative evidence before my eyes.
I started gathering it in 1974, when I settled in Texas where I was to spend the next 10 years. And in that state beef isn’t just a staple meat. It’s an object of veneration and pride. It’s a cult, with the steak sitting atop the totem pole of beef worship.
Perhaps half a million square miles in Texas are taken up by pastures and feeding stations. The latter, as I recall, do little to improve the olfactory environment. Driving west out of Houston one has to go through 20 miles of dung stench, piercing enough to defeat the capacity of any air conditioner to cope.
I don’t know if Texans take an oath of allegiance to beef, but they are certainly prepared to go to war against its enemies. This they proved at the end of the 19th century, when sheep farmers dared to move into the state.
When I was little, I read O. Henry’s Western stories where every gung-ho cowboy was prepared to shoot any ‘shepherd’. I couldn’t understand the nature of that hostility until Texans told me about the Range Wars.
Those were shooting wars with hundreds of casualties. They were fought for control over ‘open range’ used for cattle grazing. Before oil made Texas rich, cattle farming was the state’s main industry, which is why the ‘shepherds’ threatened the livelihood of the indigenous population.
Hostilities broke out, people died, and the ‘cowboys’ won. Since then no self-respecting Texan will touch sheep’s meat, which I found out the hard way when trying to serve leg of lamb to the boss of my first ad agency. He apologised most courteously but still refused to touch the offensive substance. Mercifully, the supermarkets were open late and I could pop out to buy some steaks.
Texas steak houses competed for custom, but none believed that size didn’t matter. The restaurant next door to me offered three sizes: one pound (for children), two pounds (for women) and three pounds (for Men, always implicitly capitalised).
Not only were the steak houses particular about who should eat what size but they also dictated how the steaks should be ordered. “The management isn’t responsible for steaks ordered well-done” was the ubiquitous sign. Steaks were supposed to be cooked rare or medium-rare, and that’s how I grilled them at home perhaps three times a week on average.
My favourite cut was ribeye, two inches thick and weighing only about a wimpish pound. Once the steaks were grilled, one was supposed to let them rest for 10-15 minutes to make sure the juices spread evenly throughout the fibres. However, no matter how long a steak had to rest, some blood always squirted out when the knife went in.
Now, by that meandering route, we’ve finally reached the point of my detective story. You can follow its plot by buying a steak from a British supermarket or butcher, cooking it rare and then cutting into it immediately – without letting it rest.
Committing that sacrilege in Texas would result in a geyser of blood squirting up to the ceiling. However, doing so in Britain will be a bloodless experience. Not one drop will come out.
You are welcome to offer your own explanation, and I promise to listen. But until then, I’ll be able to think of only one possible answer to the question “Where did the blood go?”. It was drained into the ground because the animal was slaughtered the halal way. (Since Muslims outnumber Jews 12 to 1 in the UK, it has to be halal rather than kosher butchering.)
The reason for this is fairly obvious. Since Muslims make up some six per cent of Britain’s population, much of the meat has to be halal anyway. Hence supermarkets benefit from the economies of scale by using a single halal abattoir, rather than different suppliers for halal and haram meat.
Though I dislike cruelty to animals, I’m not a great champion of animal rights. In fact, I question the validity of the term. Rights are dialectically linked to responsibilities and, since animals can’t have the latter, they aren’t entitled to the former.
I do, however, support essential freedoms. Hence, if some religions demand that cattle be slaughtered in a cruel way, then by all means adherents to those creeds must obey. Moreover, I don’t have a strong gastronomic objection to halal meat, which I prove with gusto when eating at Turkish or Lebanese restaurants.
But I object strongly to purveyors of food not informing us that the food they purvey is halal. If Muslims have a right to eat halal meat, we have a right to know that the steak we buy conforms to the standards of a religion other than our own.
Is this an attempt to sneak Islam in by stealth? I doubt it, and in general I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories. In all likelihood, supermarkets’ motives are pecuniary rather than subversive. However, something about it all isn’t kosher. It’s halal.