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Posted 07.04.06 Ozone Park Shop Thrives as Halal Meat Demand Rises The Queens-Times Ledger By Tim Stelloh An ear-splitting howl filled the kill floor as Imran Uddin clasped a goat's hind legs and pinned them to a metallic slaughtering bench. The cry lasted only a few seconds, but sounded as if it could blow out a window. Standing on the other side of the bench, beneath a hook laden pipe that runs the length of the kill floor, Mohammed Shabir said a blessing twice as he leaned the goat's head back and sliced its throat with a black-handled knife. The blessing, "Bismillah Allahu Akbar," or "God the Merciful, God is Great," is why Syed Islam, the customer purchasing the goat, has been coming to Madani Halal slaughterhouse in Ozone Park for the past three years. He wants to make sure the meat he buys is actually "halal"-that is, that a Muslim has blessed the animal before slaughtering it. Customers like Islam have been responsible for a surge in the number of halal slaughterhouses in the New York City area in the last decade. The state Department of Agriculture has issued 79 licenses for small, state-regulated slaughterhouses like Madani Halal in the past seven years. In the early 1990s, there were not even two dozen slaughterhouses in the five boroughs. Today, there are 80. Uddin, 28, takes his job as a manager and slaughterman in this growing industry seriously. He always blesses an animal before slaughtering it, and he says he wants his animals to be as comfortable as possible when they die (he follows this Muslim custom by laying larger animals, such as goats and sheep, in the slaughter bench as opposed to hanging them as many conventional slaughterhouses do). He has no patience for what he called "ignorant people" who "think Purdue chickens grow on trees," and he often scolds non-Muslim restaurants and butchers for advertising halal meat. "A lot of people take advantage of the term 'halal' for their own financial gain," Uddin said as Shabir stuck a hook through the 85-pound Show Goat's hind leg, letting it dangle as he skinned and disemboweled it, separating the fat from the meat and dumping the organs and intestines in a pile in the corner. Islam, the customer, stood a few feet back, watching Shabir work and nodding in agreement with Uddin. Uddin is short and stocky with a shaved head and a slight, well-kept beard. He wears beat-up carpenters pants and a baseball cap tilted to the side. Dozens of goats stood in the stable a few feet away as he spoke. "There are other chicken markets around here that advertise halal meat," he says. "But they're owned by Hindus. How can a Hindu have halal meat?" Uddin wasn't always this serious about halal meat. Before taking over the slaughterhouse in 2002 from his father, who had considered selling the five-year-old family business, he was an advertising executive at McCann-Erickson. He studied advertising at Clark University in Massachusetts, and had planned on a more conventional life. But he was sick of the corporate world, he said, and jumped at the chance to be around Muslims again. Uddin, whose father is Bangladeshi and mother is Puerto Rican, says that when he grew up in Ozone Park, halal slaughterhouses were extremely rare. But, he says, the explosion of South Asian and West Indian Muslim communities has created a demand for live animal markets where customers can watch the slaughtering process. "I remember as a kid," he said, "there were only a handful of slaughterhouses. We used to go to one, I think it was owned by a Jewish fellow on Belmont Street in Brooklyn, and it was the only place we could get halal chicken because my father would slaughter it himself. That's one of the reasons he started this place." Madani Halal is on 94th Avenue, one block from Atlantic Avenue, and sandwiched between a Verizon building and an empty storeroom. The slaughterhouse is divided into several, fluorescent-lit rooms-the area for goats and sheep, which is divided between the stable, the kill floor and the cutting room, and the three rooms for birds and ducks. In the bird room, in a glass trophy case attached to the wall, is another of Uddin's passions: cricket. Next to a framed letter from the Red Cross thanking him for a donation to the Indian Ocean tsunami relief effort, are jerseys from the two local teams the slaughterhouse sponsors. Next to those are a couple of trophies-one for the New York Bengals, another from the ISO Cricket League. Every Sunday during cricket season, Uddin, says, he watches his teams play. Beyond the trophy case is what customers see when they first enter the slaughterhouse's mesh front doors: hundreds of birds and ducks packed into the 22 metal crates that line the slaughterhouse's main room. There are roasting chickens, gray chickens, roosters and layers. There are hen ducks, black pullets, heavy fowl and Guinea hens. There are baby whites and baby grays and broilers. They arrive in 18-wheel trucks from Lancaster County, Pa., and they die with a slice across the throat in "the silver cone," a funnel shaped object that keeps them still. They're run through a 180-degree scalding machine, which loosens their feathers, and a plucking machine before they're skinned, gutted, cut and sometimes singed with a blowtorch for flavor. The process takes about five minutes. But before the birds are slaughtered and sold, they caw, coo and flap, and their stink reaches halfway around the block. (So far, Madani Halal's only complaints have come from the Verizon workers next door who say the smell is disgusting, according to Tanya Fulton, who's worked at Verizon since the slaughterhouse opened.) Goats, on the other hand, are the majority of what Uddin sells, and he carries two varieties: Texas-raised Show Goats and Boer Goats. The entire goat-slaughtering process-killing, skinning, gutting and cutting-takes about 15 minutes, and customers, who pay by the pound, typically walk off with everything but the hoofs. The organs and guts are cooked into curry, says Islam, while the meat lasts him about one month. But not every customer at Madani Halal is Muslim. In fact, many of Uddin's customers are Chinese and Latino. Regardless, he says, every animal is blessed before it's slaughtered. "They know it's fresh, they know it hasn't been frozen," Uddin said of his non-Muslim customers. "But you don't have a choice. Everything we sell is halal." |
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