james_nicoll

So they're expanding their definition of the Ethnic Vote?

I wonder if any of the people complaining have a clue about how animals are slaughtered on a non-halal compliant production line. Of course knowing how clueless some people are this controversy may be the first time they actually realise that the poultry and meat they eat comes from an actual animal.

Paging Mr. Sinclair, Mr. Upton Sinclair, to the white courtesy phone...

PQ agriculture critic André Simard seems to have understood that halal and kosher meats are not suitable for vegetarians - and he disapproves. Perhaps he's hoping for a soybean version?

Wierdly, I listened to an NPR report on Morning Edition today about the same controversy being stirred up in France by the far right. The locals interviewed mostly blew it off as loony political posturing.

There are suggestions that's where the PQ got the idea.

What, they can't come up with their own paranoid racist theories?

Xenophobic networking.

Feh.

I'm guessing they were complaining about the drunk Hassids last week for Purim?

You know, I'll be perfectly happy to eat meat that's certified halal or kosher for one big reason. There will be someone present for whom following all those pesky sanitation rules is more than just a job.

I'm reminded of an old Medical Detectives episode wherein a hyperthyroidism epidemic was tracked to a meat plant that had changed ownership and decided to no longer prepare kosher beef. It turned out that when they stopped properly bleeding the meat they were having a harder time telling if they had removed all of the thyroid and other bits you don't necessarily want in your food.

There may not actually be someone there besides the regular factory workers. There was a controversy last November in the US when it was revealed some turkeys were halal, and hence could warp the precious bodily fluids of Americans. As i remember it the one factory had the required prayer on a tape loop so some poor guy didn't have to stand there reciting it a zillion times a day.(The cranks in this case were worried that the prayer was in effect a magic spell that could do some horrible thing to them.)

Wait, these people were complaining that the turkeys were contaminated by _evil Jewish magic_? They should be forced to take a time out sitting in the corner wearing duncecaps.

Bruce

Well, evil Muslim magic when you're talking halal. It's one of the bemusiing thing about a lot of conservtave Christians. They don't think the religious practices of others are false and don't work, they think those practices can have just as much power as Christian ones, but are powered by Satan and so on instead of God.

It's funnier when you consider that in at least some cases, observant Muslims are advised to seek out kosher food when halal options are not available. I thought the big moral righteousness argument was all about the Christian, free market west standing up against the onslaught of totalitarian, intolerant, infidel-slaughtering Muslim east...

Before 2001, they were more generally inclined to be freaked out by Hinduism than by Islam. There's something about a great big pantheon of gods in multifarious shapes that doesn't sit well with nominal monotheists who go through life frightened of demons.

Shouldn't saying grace cancel out the devil-power? Unless they have fallen prey to the Manichean heresy, anyway...

Bruce

Well, it might... Hearing the prayer over and over again might just make them more tolerant.

If you can automate religion with equipment, can't you just have another tape loop to de-halalize the stuff for those who care? I'm sure some religion somewhere has an appropriate prayer.

Automated religion strikes me as a great business opportunity as well. Can I automate the Mormonization of the Dead? The LDS spend a lot of resources on that currently, it should be worth $$. A "communion machine" would be of great convenience to many Christians. Catholics would probably a appreciate a confession app that allowed them to tell their smart phone their sins for evaluation and penance by Goog^W I mean the Sanctified priest algorithm. I'm sure some simple market research would turn up many more...

We're heading into Billion Names of God territory here, aren't we?

I was thinking more along the lines of the Electric monk, but sure.

Religious automation is at least as old as externally powered prayer wheels - it's just that modern automation has so many more possibilities...

For the Mormons there's Sheri Tepper's Grass.

I wonder how you industrialize the prayer bit.

There is a great scene in the documentary Number Our Days about a community of Orthodox Jews in Venice, California, which shows a kosher bakery. The dough is prepared in one room and the ovens are in another. The employees take the uncooked loaves from the Dough room on trays, run at top speed through the Rabbi room where a man in a tallit and yarmulke keeps up hour after hour of drive-by Hebrew blessings, and race onwards into the Oven room. Industrialized Kosher food assembly line!

This raises an interesting question: If done at sufficient speed, a given portion of dough has a chance of sneaking by while the rabbi is taking a breath. Is it still kosher if it hasn't been exposed to the appropriate phonemes? Or perhaps we're taking our cues from John Cage and 4'33" here, and assuming the room is permeated with the *meaning* of blessing rather than the physical evidence of it?

I just wish to say I am amused by the Rabbi Room, and the image of drive-by blessings.

I wonder... Are they going to force the meat to be unclean by having satanists come in and unbless it... Just to make sure?

I personally don't care if some one says magic words over my food, either on the kill floor or at the dinner table.

I used to work at a pork production plant (in the office), and the described electro-stunning, then bleeding out was the method used for three thousand pigs a day.