Halal Food by Febe Armanios & Boğaç Ergene

Author:Febe Armanios & Boğaç Ergene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

“No Bacon Here!”: Magazines and Blogs

“Cuisine” can be defined as a style of cooking and eating but also as the reliance on a creative toolbox of techniques, specific ingredients, and recipes as well as an awareness about food’s place within certain cultural or geographic boundaries.10 Food historians have noted, in the context of nineteenth-century France, that cuisine became articulated and defined through the expansion of print media by way of journalists, novelists, and philosophers.11 That is, it was constructed primarily through a vast textual discourse, wherein culinary “writings extended the gastronomic public or ‘taste community,’ ” as French food scholar Priscilla Ferguson writes, “well beyond immediate producers and consumers.” Those texts helped transform a fundamentally “culinary product”—food—“into a cultural one,” much like art or music.12

Halal cuisine evokes a cooking “style” in the sense that it uses or avoids specific ingredients, but it is not necessarily tied to a certain region or set of dishes.13 “Cuisine,” in that sense, could evoke an aspiration, a way for Muslim food connoisseurs to elevate “Muslim cooking” or “Muslims’ cooking” to the level of other bona fide cuisines and, by doing so, to attain international recognition and affirmation. While it’s difficult to pinpoint when this phenomenon emerged, the remarkable proliferation of websites, blogs, newsletters, cookbooks, and visual forms since the late 1990s and early 2000s reflects the demands of a young and more affluent generation of Muslims—most of them based in non-Muslim countries—who are eager to participate and take pleasure in the international “food rave” and to profit from global food trends.14 Increased attention to halal cooking and eating also coincides with the numerous developments of the 1990s and 2000s discussed in previous chapters: the rise of halal-oriented consumerist and market-driven trends as well as the increasing numbers of Muslims culturally adapting to varied diasporic settings.

So what might one find in a halal cookbook, blog, newsletter, Facebook page, or TV show? What do Muslims’ visions of a halal cuisine look like? A quick look at Halal Consumer, a print and online newsletter issued by the American halal certification agency IFANCA, provides some initial clues. Since the mid-2000s, this publication has included a regular section showcasing dishes and recipes drawn from different parts of the Muslim world in order to educate its (mostly American) readers about a sophisticated and perhaps unfamiliar palate. A typical collection of recipes might include a sweet Arabian pancake called qatayef; an Iranian-Iraqi date-filled pastry called klaicha; Beef Rendang, a Malaysian dish of spicy beef; and South African Curried Lamb Meatloaf. IFANCA presents these dishes as illustrating “an abundance of diverse tastes and culinary traditions” from Islamic lands rather than showcasing specific flavors or techniques.15 That is, IFANCA associates traditional recipes from the Islamic world—foods that Muslims have made, dishes that Muslims have historically innovated—with the essence of halal cooking culture. A later issue of Halal Consumer, however, goes further, offering a recipe for “halal top sirloin with avocado sauce” and specifying that readers should use an IFANCA-certified halal beef product. Here it’s

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