There are few books that are more important to me than Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions.
The Qur’an, of course, is in a different category. I can’t put Sally Fallon above any other religious text either.
Among secular texts, though, Nourishing Traditions is head & shoulders above any other book I have ever read. This book has had a profound positive impact on my:
And that’s just for starters. [Read more…]
Good food has a good story.
The better the food, the better the story. There might be exceptions, but I don’t know of any.
In the average grocery store, the most unusual, extraordinary, inspiring story is the story of Ezekiel bread.
Like many such stories, this one starts in California in the 60’s. [Read more…]
At your job. With your family. As a citizen.
Most important, as a Muslim. You make the time to attend classes, to study, to learn from teachers. You travel to conferences. You contribute to causes and projects.
You would do anything in your power to follow that path more perfectly.
But some things are hard to change, especially for one person, alone.
Last month, during a stretch of below-zero nights, some of our root vegetables froze. Our space heater broke, and the temperature in the storage area dropped into the low 20’s. About a dozen sacks of carrots & beets froze solid.
We began feeding the frozen carrots & beets to our cows. They feasted on them. Good quality hay is one thing, but cattle know as well as you and I: there’s nothing like a fresh meal. [Read more…]
What’s the highest potential of organic agriculture? Can organic foods support better health?
This is not my idea. I am sure Hippocrates learned this from his teachers, who were students of their own already ancient medical tradition.
In our modern age, I would add this: All food has medical effects, but not all food is effective medicine.
This is part of why I farm: because I believe food must be grown and handled with its medicinal potential in mind.
Halal is what halal is, but striving towards complementing that, and not separating it from the tayyeb aspect, that’s the direction we want to push people in…
Ramadan Mubarak! Krystina interviews Imam Khalid Latif, co-founder of Manhattan’s Honest Chops, a halal butcher shop providing hand-slaughtered, ethically raised pastured beef and chicken to the NYC community. Their vegetarian and non-GMO fed meat is sourced from farms in Lancaster, PA as well as Maryland and upstate New York, butchered and prepped on site using organic ingredients
[Read more…]
by Giovanni Galluzzo of Murujan Permaculture Design
The Stage is Set
Humanity has collectively submitted to the idea that the highest aims are material wealth and technological advancement. This philosophy of economic materialism is what shapes the infrastructure and technology of our societies and such infrastructure and technology set the boundaries within which we must operate. Furthermore, the means or methodology for developing technology has been firmly established as competitive and adversarial.
With the undercurrent of economic materialism guiding the activity of humanity, the results are imbalance and chaos between people and the environment as well as between people themselves. The consequences can be easily seen through the increasing number of warnings the natural world is revealing to us.
Journalist Najeeb Hasan has written a beautiful piece for San Francisco Magazine on ethical halal meat, profiling Ahmad Karaouni at Nature’s Bounty Meats in Solano County, CA. Karaouni runs a small-scale slaughterhouse that sources meat directly from ranchers and sells halal meat directly to consumers; a novel arrangement in a world of industrial mega-slaughterhouses and ranchers “beholden” to processors. Karaouni agrees with us that halal is just a baseline in industrial agriculture, and that consumers need to look to Islamic ethics to get meat that truly reflects what’s best about our tradition; compassion for Allah’s creation.
We had the pleasure and privilege of representing Beyond Halal at the Fifth Annual Islamic Studies Conference at Harvard in April, this year titled Communities Like You: Animals and Islam.
One of the most moving parts of the conference was the keynote lecture, delivered by Princess Alia al-Hussein of Jordan, founder of the Princess Alia Foundation. The PAF works on a variety of animal rights projects, from rescuing animals from zoos to addressing slaughter conditions in the Middle East.
Below is a portion of her talk: “Respect for All of God’s Creation: Human, Animals and the Environment”
We had a chance to pose a few questions to Munir Ravalia, a dentist, committee member at the Kingston Mosque, and an avid beekeeper, about the UK’s Muslim Beekeeping Project.
BH: I’ve read that one of the inspirations for the beekeeping project was the threat of colony collapse. Could you briefly explain this issue and why Muslims should be concerned?
MR: Colony Collapse Disorder was first noted in the USA where large apiaries (bee farms) noticed that multiple hives (bee houses–or the small boxes where bees live), were wiped out literally overnight. No one really knows the real reason and many theories are out there, but many say it has to do with resistance to pesticides. In reality, these things usually have multifactorial causes.
Muslims and all humans should be worried as bees are part of an ecosystem, so not only does it affect pollination of plants and honey production but it is a wider warning that we as humans are killing our own selves over time as we play around with nature: genetically modified crops, drug resistance, pesticide resistance, etc.
Another inspiration for the project was the longstanding Islamic tradition of using honey for its medicinal purposes. [Read more…]
