All over the UK today, supermarket chains, shops and restaurants are selling halal meat.
We may find it on the menu at our children’s school or the local hospital, or be offered it when we go to a sporting event. If we go for a meal with Muslim friends, any meat we are served will probably be halal. It can be hard to avoid eating this meat, especially as it is often not labelled and little information is available to the consumer.
Halal meat is prepared according to Islamic shari’a law. The word halal means ‘permitted’, so halal food is anything that sharia allows people to eat. The animals have to be slaughtered in a particular way, whereby the blood is drained out of the living (and normally conscious) animal, while an Islamic prayer is spoken over them.
