Food
and Drink

So do muslims have to eat a different kind of food?

Well, everyone eats a different kind of food from someone else.

Around the world, humans eat all sorts of different things,

mainly what they can find growing around them.

And there are all sorts of different fruits that grow in different places, that are easy to eat,

and there are some things that take work before people can eat them,

like the grains from grasses

like wheat and corn, and rice and barley,

which need to be cooked.

And because people get bored with things so easily,

they learned to cook things in all sorts of different ways to make their food taste differently.

They roasted it in fires, and baked it in ovens,

and boiled it in water and fried it in oil.

And they mixed together the different kinds of foods that grew where they lived,

and cooked them in these different ways,

and came up with all sorts of delicious tastes that were only found in the way those people cooked things.

And many of those different kinds of cooking, with their different tastes can be found in Scotland today,

as muslims have come here to live

and brought with them the ways that they would have cooked things where they came from.

So it's not just all the different kinds of curries from South Asia that are popular all over Scotland.

In the cities you can find restaurants that serve wonderful food

cooked in the styles found in Malaysia, and Turkey,

and Arab countries like Morocco.

But people don't just eat growing things.

And there are some things that humans just can't eat,

like grass,

that animals can.

So one way to use the grass as food is to eat the animals that eat it,

but that can only be done by causing pain to the animals by killing them.

So muslims have a special way of killing animals, that is done to cause them as little fear and pain as possible,

while at the same time remembering that God gives us life and makes us die in our turn.