By Minyi Jiang
UC Santa Barbara religious studies professor Juan Campo and Arabic language lecturer Magda Campo spoke last week on Jewish kosher food and Islamic halal food, and they prepared a chicken and couscous meal for a CalFresh enrollment party co-hosted by UCSB Health & Wellness, Thrive, and the Educational Opportunity Program. The event publicized the CalFresh food assistance program and UCSB’s Halal and Kosher Grocery Program for food-insecure students who observe these religions’ dietary laws.
“Here we can see fences and neighbors. There are some similarities and overlaps with the dietary rules between Jews and Muslims,” Juan Campo told the gathering of more than 30 students. “For Muslims, as distinct from Jews and Christians, wine is forbidden. Alcohol products are forbidden.”
CalFresh is a federally-funded nutrition assistance program that provides eligible UCSB students with monthly food benefits to spend at most major grocery stores. “We really do our best to serve students who are participants of the program,” said Rebecca Segundo, Basic Needs manager in UCSB’s Office of Enrollment Services. “You just need to be a currently enrolled student at UCSB. You do have to demonstrate financial need, and then you just need to either maintain a halal or a kosher diet, that’s self-reported.”
UC Santa Barbara Religious Studies professor Juan Campo talked about Jewish dietary laws at a recent lecture on behalf of UCSB Health and Wellness. The event alerted students to the CalFresh Halal and Kosher Grocery option.
Jewish dietary rules come from the Hebrew Bible, and they are referred by the Hebrew word kashrut. “Kashrut defines kosher, which means food that is clean or pure,” Campo said. “There has to be an animal that fits well in the sphere of the universe, and it has to be properly slaughtered… with the name of God invoked at the time of slaughter.”
When explaining a ban against mixing meat with dairy in Judaism, Campo referred to a passage from the Hebrew Bible. “You shall not boil a kid, a baby goat, in its mother’s milk,” he said. “Milk is understood to be some source of life. The goat takes life from the milk, but it’s considered to be a violation of God’s plan for its creation to kill a kid in its mother’s milk.”
Observant Jews view dietary rules as God’s commandments, he said, that sanctify daily life. “They are part of establishing the uniqueness of Jewish identity among all the different people of the world.”
Islamic dietary rules are stated in the Quran and the hadith, which is the collection of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. “What is forbidden is meat that has not been properly slaughtered. Pork is forbidden explicitly in the Quran,” Campo said, adding that failing to drain an animal’s blood during slaughter is forbidden in Islam, as it is in Judaism. “What is also forbidden is food consecrated to other gods.”
Campo said that when Muslims first began to immigrate in large numbers to the United States, there were no butchers that could slaughter animals according to the halal slaughtering rituals. “So the [Islamic] religious authorities ruled that it’s okay to eat kosher meat,” he said.
UC Santa Barbara Arabic Lecturer Magda Campo cooking a halal chicken meal with her students at a UCSB Health and Wellness event to promote its Halal and Kosher Grocery Program.
Following the talk, UCSB Arabic lecturer Magda Campo cooked a halal chicken recipe with students. “The chicken is halal in Islam [and kosher] in Judaism,” she said, adding that in the Middle East, all those who cook meat wash the meat before they cook it. “It doesn’t matter what religion you come from.”
Magda Campo recalled when she and Juan were in Port Said, Egypt, visiting a friend for Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of the Sacrifice. “The sheep ran away, jumped over the fence of the terrace, and fell over a house that was built up next to them,” she said. A worker nearby saw the sheep falling down and ran to it to make sure that was still alive so the slaughter would comply with halal practices.
UC Santa Barbara Arabic Lecturer Magda Campo sharing her stories while cooking halal dishes at a recent event that promoted the UCSB Halal and Kosher Grocery Program.
“The sheep was not dead yet, so he asked our [hosts] to hand him a very sharp knife… He slaughtered the sheep, and uttered a little prayer on it,” she said. “We had the sheep that night for dinner.” Campo explained that it is prohibited to eat an already-dead animal. “So if that sheep were dead, we couldn’t eat it. But because it was still alive, they slaughtered it immediately.”
The UCSB Halal and Kosher Grocery Program provides weekly no-cost grocery bags — around a dozen meals per bag of nonperishable halal and kosher certified items — to students keeping halal or kosher diets. Bags include couscous, falafel mix, pasta, lentils, dried fruit, vegetable broth, granola, tuna, soup and more.
“We also do some special things for holidays throughout the year,” said Rebecca Segundo, who is on UCSB’s Food Security and Basic Needs Task Force, “We are just coming off of a Jewish New Year, so we were able to incorporate some special products into our kosher bags for that time period.”
Juan Campo and Magda Campo joined UCSB in the 1980s, and together they teach a course titled Food, Religion, and Culture in the Middle East. “We talk about food from the religious, cultural, geographical, political, economic, and agricultural point of view,” Magda Campo said. “When you eat something from the tradition in which you are raised, it’s part of you. It’s part of our religion, the politics, the economy in which we live, the agriculture, the water,” she added in a later interview. “We hope CalFresh and the students get the message that if you are Jewish or Muslim, there are rules about food [in these religions].”
Minyi Jiang is a fourth-year student at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in Middle East Studies and pursuing a minor in Professional Writing. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.