Islam is the world's second largest religion, with 1 billion followers worldwide and 1.5 million in the UK. Halal is an important and integral part of Islamic life and its rules are outlined in the Koran.
There are three categories of foods which are either:
* Halal, or foods that are lawful
* Haraam, or foods that are forbidden
* Mushbooh, or foods that are 'suspect' and cover a grey area between Halal and Haraam.
Other words you may come across are Makrooh, meaning 'religiously discouraged' or 'disliked', and Dhabiha, meaning 'slaughtered according to Islamic method'.
Main dietary practices
* No pork is ever eaten. This includes pork-based foods such as sausages, bacon and meat pies.
* All other meat is permitted, but it must be slaughtered according to Islamic law. Mainly it is thoroughly bled after slaughter, and the name of Allah (God) must be pronounced at the moment of slaughter. Certain forms of death are unacceptable and blood products are not acceptable.
* Alcohol is not permitted. This may seem irrelevant to nursery diets until you realise that, for instance, vanilla flavour is extracted with alcohol.
Alcohol is also used in some medicines.
The rules share many elements with Jewish kosher practices (see Nutrition, 27 November 2003) but are not quite as complicated, since it is not forbidden to eat or cook dairy foods with meat foods. However, kosher-certified foods are often eaten by Muslims, as they are easily obtainable and also fit the dietary laws of Islam.
What can and can't be eaten
In practice, a nursery's vegetarian menu should satisfy the requirements of most Muslim children and their parents (see Nutrition, 18 September 2003).
In addition, fish can be eaten. Otherwise, it is quite easy to simply avoid pork, and meat from a halal butcher is readily available in some areas.
Some larger junior and senior schools which use off-site catering and which are situated in neighbourhoods with a large Islamic population will have halal meals available via that route, but most nurseries don't have access to this sort of facility.
While there is a large and easily available supply of kosher-certified convenience foods, there is not quite the same availability of halal-certified convenience foods, though this is changing.
Processed foods
The complications come when a traditional mode of eating meets modern food technology. Common ingredients in food processing can come from a variety of sources. For instance, mono-and di-glycerides are fatty substances which can come from vegetable oils, beef fat, lard or marine oils, but this is rarely specified.
Those from vegetable and marine oils are halal, while that from lard (usually from pigs) is haraam, and beef fat is mushbooh. By eating a properly put-together vegetarian menu a Muslim child can avoid animal products like gelatine (used in a wide variety of foods including frosted cereals, ice cream, yoghurt, dairy drinks, chocolate and sweets) and ensure that only vegetarian rennin (used in cheeses) and soya lecithin (an emulsifier common in products such as sauces and ice cream) are consumed.
Labelling laws, which can be vague, don't help. For instance, if an ingredient makes up less than 5 per cent of some products, such as in chocolate, it can be omitted from the label and, in this example, the product be labelled pure chocolate. The price of this costly ingredient is often cut by including vegetable or animal fat.
The way round all of these problems is to use products labelled as 'suitable for vegetarians'.
Below is a list of ingredients which fit haraam/mushbooh categories: Haraam (forbidden)
* Alcohol
* Animal fat
* Animal shortening
* Collagen (pork and bacon)
* Gelatine/kosher gelatine
* Lard
* Pork
Mushbooh (grey area/suspect)
* Cholesterol
* Di-glyceride/Mono-glyceride
* Enzymes
* Fatty acids
* Glyceride
* Glycerol/glycerine
* Glycogen
* Hormones
* Hydrolysed animal protein
* Pepsin
* Phospholipid
* Rennin/rennet
* Whey This article has been sponsored by the Organix Children's Food Advisory Service, where Suzannah Olivier is the consultant nutritionist RESOURCES
* The UK Muslim Food Board www. tmfb.net for information on UK certification. A useful (US) site is www. muslimconsumergroup.com.
* Children's Food Advisory Service Pack for Nurseries www.childrensfood.org
or for info on the quality of school catering and how to improve it www.
foodforlifeuk.org
* Suzannah Olivier is the author of several books including What Should I Feed My Baby? and Healthy Food for Happy Kids, visit www.Healthy Food4HappyKids.
