Halal chicken at Heron.

One of my clients works in the meat industry and he visited an industrial halal slaughterhouse. He said that it was the most horrendous thing he'd seen in over 20 years. The basic halal requirements were met (prayer, throat slit, blood immediately drained), but that doesn't mean it was humane. I'm not going to go into any more details, as what he described was truly grotesque.

However, as for anyone who refuses to eat halal meat on "ethical" grounds, unless they're going to eschew all other factory farmed and intensively reared meat, then they're just being a dick for the sake of it and are very unlikely to have any real concerns about animal welfare.

 

Supermarket "free range" chicken is often not really free range at all. They just have a bit more space than battery chickens, but the idea of them clucking around a farmyard is a complete fantasy. They definitely taste better than the intensively reared stuff, but they're still very bland compared with the chickens we buy off our neighbours at the dacha. Sometimes the meat smells so strong that someone used to Tesco chickens might think it was off, and you need to cook it quite carefully - either slow roasting, or better still take off the legs and poach them. At 2.5kg and more, just the crown is plenty enough for a family roast.

 

We shouldn't have to import any food that can be grown in the UK but we do, loads of it. I'm always vaguely amused by militant vegans preaching about the environmental damage done by beef and dairy farming (they're absolutely correct of course) while tucking into avocado and quinoa which has been imported from South America, so the food miles are immense, probably with a good dose of exploitation of the farmers thrown in for good measure.

 

Nail. Head, The. Hit. The.

 

If you care about animal welfare the only ethical thing to do is to stop eating meat and dairy. It's as simple as that.

 

Halal meat is partially stunned & would recover if their throats weren’t cut, they are still conscious. When fully stunned they know nothing. All packs of meat should be labelled to give me the option of rejecting halal and Kosher.

 

Colleague worked at a chicken processing plant, chickens were halal slaughtered, the difference was there was some Arabic writing (a prayer or summat) etched onto the spinning blades that killed the chickens, no other difference whatsoever from non halal killed chickens.

 

You've been reading too much daily mail.

 

All stunned meat would recover - otherwise the stunning process would be the method of dispatch.

stop clinging to half truths - as above, if you’re concerned about animal welfare, the method of dispatch should be the least of your worries.

 

A lot of the cheap, pre-cooked, reformed, plumped up with water, a bit of fake flavour added to it ‘chicken’ comes from Thailand. Have a look next time at a packet of sliced chicken breast.

I dread to think where KFC get all theirs from!

 

That's a valid point.

 

Watch the film Dominion,I suspect most won't eat meat again !! It's horrific.

 

Sorry for being political here but I feel it is pertinent regarding imported meat. Apparently the lobbyists for Meat and other food products from the USA are gleefully watching us crash into a no- deal Brexit. Then don’t be surprised to see laws/guidance on food labelling changed. Things like country of origin could well disappear as we accept imports that don’t meet with the Very high standards we’ve become accustomed to with the EU regulations.

 

Not good, but at least the info is on the label to allow making a more informed choice. See my other post about about food labelling

 

Having been to the USA twice in recent years, that's something I'm very worried about. The vast majority of supermarket food there is complete and utter junk.

 

For all the cow eaters (including myself in that).

 

Given that the majority of ‘Indian’ curry houses are actually Bangladeshi or Pakistani in this country, and that a high number of takeaways are halal, I reckon a high number of us have regularly eaten halal meat without realising it.

Halal slaughter, done properly, is no more barbaric than ‘western’ slaughter done properly.

Halal slaughter done more ‘barbarically’ is no worse than ‘western’ slaughter done in worse ways too. I’ve seen it first hand. Some of it isn’t nice. I’m still a meat eater and have no plans to change that.

If you have an issue with Halal meat due to the way the animals are slaughtered, then I recommend you don’t eat meat whatsoever. Don’t kid yourself buying only free range, organic meat guarantees the animal had a lovely life and peaceful ending. It might have. Probably not though.

And any product you buy in any shop containing meat, especially more processed stuff, could have a mixture of sources so could contain halal, kosher and any combination. They don’t have to declare any of this - all you can assure is that items labelled halal or kosher are 100% guaranteed (or as close as can be assured) to be from such sources.

Halal being cruel is just another bit of the Daily Heil rhetoric and general Islamaphobia.

And I’ll tell you another thing - there’s a lot more flavour in a halal chicken breast than a bog standard one from Asda. Not quite at the corn fed organic (or fresh from a local farm) standard, but still. Not generally injected with loads of water and salt either.

 

Do you have any issues with Kosher food? Just asking for a Jewish friend.

 

This. Unless you're buying free-range organic chicken from a local farm/butcher, halal doesn't make much difference to the shitty life it leads before it gets eaten.

 

Doesn’t it depend on who wrote the label? It could have been me, and I’ll tell you owt!!