Today is Thanksgiving Day in the US. It commemorates the colonization of New World and was a day dedicated to thanking God for its success. It was proclaimed a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. The day has changed from a semi-religious holiday to a mostly secular one, when people are supposed to realize their gratitude for the good things in their lives. Thanksgiving Day is celebrated with a feast, usually involving a roast turkey, at least for non-vegetarians.
The Butterball Company is the largest producer of turkeys in the world, producing over a billion pounds of turkey annually. Butterball is a business. Businesses stay in business by meeting customer demand, but also by following whatever best-practices provide the optimum combination of efficiency and economy. Butterball seems to be doing it right.
But lo! It seems that Butterball’s best practices also permit it to produce turkeys that meet the requirements for halal food. That is, its whole turkeys are deemed permissible for Muslims to eat.
This, apparently, has caused Islamophobe Pam Gellar to go berserk. She somehow sees the fact that Butterball turkeys are halal as a stealth attempt to convert Americans to Islam. I won’t – on principle – link to Gellar’s writing, but here’s an indirect link through Outside the Beltway. Yes, she’s as nuts as that post makes her seem.
Gellar has some really strange beliefs, quite laughable ones.
She appears to believe that if one eats a halal turkey, one mysteriously becomes a Muslim. Or gets tugged toward Islam. Or something.
If this is true, it creates an interesting situation…
If I were to become Muslim by eating a halal turkey, then it logically follows that I would become Jewish by eating a Kosher pickle or hotdog. What would happen if I ate both at the same meal? Would I explode? Would I suddenly become Palestine, at war with myself?
I have, in fact, eaten both halal and Kosher foods. I’ve also eaten foods prepared, and ritually blessed, according to Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, and Animist religions. What does that make me? I can only assume that Walt Whitman got it right: “I am multitudes!”
Happy Thanksgiving to all who observe it. And I am thankful for the people in my life, present and departed, who have helped make me who I am and helped make the world a better place for all.
UPDATE: Just to close the story, Butterball gave the following comment to MSNBC regarding the issue…
Our domestic products are not halal certified and thus, do not require any additional on-package labelling. As is common within the industry, when we started to export our products overseas we applied for and med the necessary requirements of halal processing for a segment of our business.
So, those turkey intended to go to Muslim countries get certified; those intended for the domestic market do not.
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November:24:2011 - 08:46
Haha!
November:24:2011 - 16:52
I had trouble believing that the column wasn’t listed under “satire”. Poor paranoid Pamela.
November:25:2011 - 04:53
Christians are prohibited from eating food that has been sacrificed to idols.
http://bible.cc/acts/21-25.htm
November:25:2011 - 08:18
Thank you for being “multitudes”, John !
November:25:2011 - 08:46
They are also enjoined to avoid sexual immorality in the same verse. I think neither prohibition is followed terribly closely these days.
More importantly, though, the Christian God and Allah are the same god, not idols. I do realize that some Christian fundamentalists do not agree with the previous statement.
November:25:2011 - 10:37
Alas, that we are surrounded by sin and sinners…
I do know some Ethiopian Orthodox who do not touch halal meat because they do not know what words were said over it at the slaughter…and some Arab Christians who will not touch meat that is not halal, saying the quality and taste are superior.
Myself, I go with “The devil can cite scripture for his purposes,” and “it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth”.
November:25:2011 - 11:22
It is all so silly that one can object to meat being halal.
One might object to it being unsavoury or unhealthful, but for a carnivore who adheres to no particular food restrictions to object to halal meat is bisarre.
November:25:2011 - 12:00
@Dakota: When I lived in Tunisia, I was surprised to find that Kosher butcher (clearly labeled, in Hebrew) were extremely popular and had their shops on the ‘high street’ in downtown Tunis. Now, perhaps the Tunisians are the Italians of the Muslim world, dolce far niente and all that. I also so, in the market, prosciutto made of boar meat (delicious!). The Tunisians–as the Turks–find a difference between boar and pig, with one being permitted and the other haram.
November:25:2011 - 14:22
@John, I don’t think your experience is unique, I have heard of Skokie kosher butchers with regular Muslim clientele. But boar…my last experience with a boar ended with antibiotics; if there’s one critter that should be banned, that is it. Apparently the Hindu prescription against eating living things is not universal either, a Hindu friend who eats meat says he is of the Kshatriya caste, which has a tradition of eating anything that could be found while on military expeditions.
@Andrew, you never know what power people believe the spoken word to have. For example, have you ever thought about what happens to communion elements that are not used? Old bread can be thrown in the garbage, but not consecrated bread, the aversion to that is almost universal. In one church at least, it gets fed to the birds. And all because it was blessed in a ceremony.
November:25:2011 - 16:53
@Dakota: For Catholics, of course, that bread is no longer ‘bread’ once it’s been transubstantiated.
November:26:2011 - 02:50
And how many Catholics tip-toe over to one of the Protestant churches that offers communion on the major holidays in order to avoid the long lines at the more well-known cathedrals? Perhaps transubstantiation is being abandoned faster than sexual morality.
November:26:2011 - 03:03
By pure serendipity, I have just run into this:
—Lowell Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia, 1924
November:26:2011 - 08:27
@Dakota: Well, those would be considered ‘Bad Catholics’, of course! When I was a kid, the Catholic nuns would warn us of the spiritual dangers of even entering a Protestant church!
November:26:2011 - 17:27
@John, Your nuns didn’t know the half of it. These days we have Muslims running all over the place; they are usually invited on Sept. 12 to talk about religious tolerance, and again in January when the Wise Men From The East are supposed to visit the Baby Jesus-it’s the new ecumenicalism (but they don’t usually make it for that one–I think they’re snow-challenged). Plus I bring some of my friends by from time to time. And there were the Abraham groups with the Bruce Feiler book.
One day I was sitting at a multi-faith dinner and the Muslims at my table told me that my parents’ church had provided them with a space for their weekly services until they could build a little mosque for themselves.
Hey, I wonder if any of the mosques here would set aside a little space for some of the expats….
My favorite Catholic professor says everything in the Catholic church is changed now. He says, completely deadpan, “We’re allowed to read the Bible now.” I’ve never seen him do it though.
November:26:2011 - 19:18
@Dakota: When I was growing up, there just weren’t any Muslims in my area, western Massachusetts. We did have Jewish students in the school, however, and there was no fuss about it. As it was, there were seven Catholic churches in a city of 40,000, mostly identifiable with particular ethnic groups–Irish, Anglo, Polish, Italian, French-Canadian, Greek. By the time my generation came around, the exclusivity of ethnic quarters had largely broken down, however. About the most ‘exotic’ religion at hand was Jehovah’s Witnesses. Oh, and atheists, frequently confused with ‘Godless communists’.
‘The past is a foreign country.’
November:27:2011 - 05:58
Dakota, where are you living please ? That’s just to know where a church has procided Muslims with a space for their weekly services;
it’s just by chance that I watched a documentary last night about Stockholm ang saw the same situation: a mosque is just being built next to a church and the faithful use the same corridor to enter either the mosque or the church !
November:27:2011 - 13:25
Michel, I live in Riyadh. My suggestion about the mosques is a joke, since we are not allowed to practice our religion here except illegally and in secret. The church is in the U.S. There would have been a separate entrance and they probably paid some kind of rent for heat and cleaning. This is not an uncommon arrangement for churches in the U.S. I am familiar with, but usually the religious group hosted has a similar religious philosophy, i.e. mainstream Protestant,… sorry John, you guys just aren’t ecumenical enough for us
.
John, we had the Witnesses as well, and they went door to door back then too, the competition was to see who could think of the line that would get rid of them the fastest when they showed up at your door. There was also a group of LDS, maybe 8 families, we were amazed when they were able to afford to build a small building. Besides that there were university students with turbans and such we would drag to our church youth group and ask about their religion. I’m not sure they gave any coherent answers, at least that we could understand, but it was interesting. There was one Jewish family; he was the local DJ, so we heard his voice on the radio every morning when we got up, but they didn’t socialize with anyone. There was a town atheist; the father of a local professor who helped with the Boy Scouts for a while, it was only later I heard the Boy Scouts have to believe in God. There were Scientologists too, with their own “reading room” off of Main Street. They were the only ones who didn’t believe in doctors.
November:27:2011 - 13:53
A little tid-bit about Pam Geller. She used to frequent a popular blog that I once read. We had a back room chat area of sorts where people used to hang out and solve the world’s problems. Well … Pam dropped into the chat room one night to join the fray. Maybe she had been drinking but she posted some of the most incoherent stuff that I’d seen in a while. Her spelling was atrocious, too! When she left, folks just were floored at what they had witnessed and wondered how she got to the prominent spot that she had obtained (at that point).
November:27:2011 - 17:06
@Dakota: I forgot about the Christian Scientists! They had their own place, never proselytized. We occasionally ran across their tracts.
My hometown has changed. In the 60s, there was a big influx of Puerto Ricans. In the late 80s and 90s, very many Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims. I’m so old, though, that Scientology was still an idea in L. Ron’s head at the time.
November:28:2011 - 16:35
Oops, I’ve conflated the Scientologists with the Christian Scientists, it was the second we had, officially named Church of Christ the Scientist, I believe. I knew someone who converted after contracting cancer, stopped going to the doctor, then died. Our only tracts were from the Temperance Union. Yes, they were still around at that late date, meeting schoolchildren in the parks. I can still remember their pledge. Of course it comes in very handy here. :~)