The halal choice

MOST students don't give much thought to the type of meat in their meat pie, but for Fairfield's Muslim students it couldn't be more important.

Thankfully about 40 primary and high schools in western Sydney are now serving halal food in their canteens, and Prairievale Public School and Bonnyrigg High School are two of them.

Prairievale Public School principal Kylie Donovan said the school had a Muslim community and most things in the canteen were already halal. "Everything the canteen gets in is halal," she said. "The meat pies are halal as well as low fat.

"It wasn't such a conscious decision for the school to do it, it's more so that that's what we get from the suppliers."

Halal Certification Authority Australia chairman Hajj Mohamed El-Mouelhy said it had taken a long for halal food to become accepted, but now that it was, many places were adopting it.

"Businesses have finally started to realise they can make money out of Muslims," he said.

Mr El-Mouelhy said most of the obstacles were due to misunderstandings about what halal-slaughtered meat was. "We were told initially that the number of students was not enough to warrant it, and of course some people said the Muslim kids should learn to eat Aussie," he said.

"People don't realise that a lot of the food they eat is already halal. All cheese in Australia is halal, about a third of our food exports are halal and 80 per cent of abattoirs slaughter according to halal."

He said there was no difference in taste between halal and non-halal.