Is Halal Pork… Possible?

The writer Aymann Ismail, a practicing Muslim, grew up not eating pork. But as he got older, he became curious about why eating pork was a line that even less observant Muslims wouldn’t cross.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

  If you're the kind of person who plans vacations around where you're gonna eat, Scottsdale belongs on your list. And look, whenever I go somewhere, my priority is on eating things that are the specialties of that region, eating things that I can't get at home. So when I'm in that area, I'm looking for the specialties of the region, like authentic southwestern and Native American flavors, modern Mexican cuisine, and as basic as it sounds, homemade, fresh flour tortillas. There's nothing like it, and you can't get them like that in the Northeast. And there is such a farm-to-table culture in Scottsdale, inspired by the Sonoran Desert. Everything is so fresh, the peppers, the spices, it is so vibrant. And Scottsdale's just got a great vibe. It's one of those places where breakfast becomes brunch, happy hour turns into dinner, and every patio has another amazing view.

• 0:45Dan Pashman?

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• 1:28Dan Pashman?

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• 1:46Dan Pashman?

  So, tell me about your relationship with pork growing up.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Ooh, did you just ask a Muslim what their relationship to pork is?

• 1:55Dan Pashman?

  I did.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Wow, wow, Dan, stay woke.

• 2:05Dan Pashman?

  This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. And before we get to the show, I have a question for you. Do you have a food dispute that needs to be resolved? A burning food hot take that the world needs to know about? If so, I want to hear about it. Send me an email or voice memo to [email protected]. Tell me your first name, your location, and your food dispute or hot take. And you might hear yourself on an upcoming episode of The Sporkful. Again, that's [email protected]. All right, let's get to the show.

• 2:41Dan Pashman?

  I think it's fair to say that most of us grow up with rules or customs around food, right? Things you aren't supposed to eat, things you're supposed to eat a lot of, things you only eat in certain situations. And those rules can become a big part of who you are. And when you become an adult and start your own life, you need to decide whether you'll keep following all those rules. You may start to wonder what it would mean if you challenged them, or to change who you are. This is what the story we're sharing today is about. Ayman Ismail is a staff writer at the website Slate, where he often writes about his Muslim family and what it means to be a practicing Muslim in this country. Ayman grew up in Newark, New Jersey. Both his parents emigrated from Egypt. And he says that when they came to the US to start a family, one thing was a very high priority.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  For them, it was really important that they raised us to be good Muslim kids. And they they expected that Islam would be our guiding light in this crazy world. And, you know, in a lot of ways, it was. I'm thankful for it. But at the same time, it was much easier for them to teach us what we weren't versus what we were. So a lot of my relationship to Islam, early on at least, was very much, okay, you're Muslim, so you don't drink alcohol, and you're not going to have a girlfriend, and you're not going to have sex before you're married, and you're going to just do all these Muslim things. But really, how you express and practice your religion is all the things that you don't do.

• 3:58Dan Pashman?

  And Ayman says he learned early on that one of the biggest things you don't do as a Muslim is eat pork.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  It occupies this very real space in our minds all the time. You can't just avoid pork. You need to avoid all the pork products. And like, there's things like gelatin that brands will like sneakily just put like pork products into your Pop-Tarts. And so now you can't just go to the store and buy Pop-Tarts. You have to read the ingredients and then see where the sneaky pork is.

• 4:28Dan Pashman?

  And as a kid... Growing up Muslim, did you feel tempted by pork?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  No, um, why would I? I mean, a lot of people tend to make a big deal about Muslims not wanting to eat pork. But like, yo, we got lamb, we got, dude, we got kufta.

• 4:47Dan Pashman?

  There's no shortage of delicious foods.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, everybody's like, oh, bacon's the best. I'm like, have you had a rack of lamb? Are you gonna compare that, are you gonna compare those two? No, you can't, you can't.

• 5:00Dan Pashman?

  Ayman spent his childhood in a pretty insular Muslim community. He went to a Muslim private school where his mom was actually one of the teachers. So he wasn't exactly gonna stumble on a plate of bacon at a friend's house. Ayman liked school, he took it seriously. He started studying the Quran, and he came to a realization. There's the rules on paper, and then there's the rules in practice.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  One of the things that I discovered when reading the Quran was that there was so much to say about like, backbiting and like, talking about somebody without them knowing that you're talking about them. God describes it as eating the flesh of your, your sibling. And that is so widespread in every single community. All we do is talk shit. And that's like something that everybody, that I do, you know? I talk shit. So it's, it's really hard for me to hold something like, don't eat pork, and don't backbite in the same way because God talks in the Quran so much more about backbiting than not eating pig. But it's so easy to avoid pig and it's so hard not to backbite.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  So you, you tend to see that people will latch on to certain rules more than others.

• 6:06Dan Pashman?

  In other words, even though the Muslim prohibition on pork is not a huge focus in the Quran, it's a huge deal in daily life with tremendous cultural significance, especially for Muslims in America. When Ayman was 11, he started to understand why. He left his religious school and transferred to a public high school. He was the only Muslim student there, which made him an outsider. And right away, the other kids zeroed in on the fact that he didn't eat pork.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  It was definitely a game for them where, you know, there would be like pork on the lunch menu, and they would try to like, throw it into my food or throw it into my mouth. You know, little kids being little kids, and it was sort of a game for them.

• 6:43Dan Pashman?

  Ayman played along. He says it didn't really upset him. But then, just days after he started in his new school, 9/11 happened. Those attacks affected his family personally.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  You know, as a kid who grew up in New Jersey, whose dad worked in New York and was in downtown New York when the towers came down. You know, we thought my dad had died because anybody from this area knows like the phones weren't working, the tunnels were all closed. Nobody got home that night. Everybody came home like days later. And so we thought he had died. And it was one of the most horrifying experiences as Americans, but we're Muslim. So other people have embodied that, you know, that horrible terrorist attack. And they sort of leveraged it against people like me who were here. Then Donald Trump says shit like, and Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  And people outside of New Jersey believe that.

• 7:40Dan Pashman?

  Aiman says he didn't feel any hostility in his school after the 9/11 attacks. Even when someone wrote in his yearbook, "Thanks for not blowing up the school, terrorist." He took that as a joke. But for Muslims across the country, things were a lot more serious. In the years after 9/11, Muslims experienced a wave of hate crimes, some of which had a common thread.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Calling it desecration, a Muslim civil rights group is demanding a weekend incident in Las Vegas be investigated as a hate crime by federal authorities. Surveillance video shows an unidentified man meticulously putting bacon on the doors of a mosque.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  After their morning prayer, members of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro came out their side door to find spray paint and bacon put on the door and on the ground in what's being called a hate crime.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  The mask of a pig head and a sign that targeted Muslims was found at the Islamic Center of Greater Austin and Austin Peace Academy.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  That's a real part of America that thinks that will spontaneously combust if we go near it or touch it. Meanwhile, I'll think to myself, what a waste of a pig head. You could have eaten that thing. You know, why are you leaving bacon on the door handles?

• 8:48Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  That's food. What are you doing?

• 8:57Dan Pashman?

  After high school, Ayman went to Rutgers University, where he tried to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. He joined a band and played gigs in New York. He worked at the college TV station and as a videographer. After graduating, he got into video editing and then started getting interested in journalism. And there was one person whose work he admired so much that this person became the reason Ayman decided to become a journalist.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  I'm Anthony Bourdain.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  I write, I travel, I eat, and I'm hungry for more. So good. You know, but one of the things that Anthony Bourdain loves is pork, you know? And he'll do a lot of trips to places where they'll just get the big pig on the spit, and they'll roast it, and he's just describing this thing like it's heaven. And I believe him. And it just looks delicious, the way that they roast the pig, you know? And that was sort of my gateway drug through, and I use that term very real here, because it does feel like a gateway drug, where it opened me up into all these different kinds of travel shows. I really loved David Chang's show on Netflix. I'm gonna blank on the name. Oh, Ugly Delicious, yes. So good. He did an episode about pork,

• 10:07Speaker 01

  where he would go all across the country looking for like the most authentic pork. You can't just cook a rack of ribs and then call it barbecue. And he, like, the pit masters were-

• 10:17Dan Pashman?

  After watching a bunch of these shows without ever actually eating pork, Ayman became a barbecue snob.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Pork is. But you don't really know how serious and emotional this is until you hear a pit master talking about why they're picking the juices up from the bottom of the tray with a syringe and injecting it back into the pig while it's cooking. Like, something like that, where they're talking about their soul, and they're talking about what is authentic American, what isn't. All of that still rings true to me, even though I've never tasted it.

• 10:51Dan Pashman?

  As a kid, Ayman had no interest in trying pork. But once he started binging all these food TV shows, he couldn't help but feel curious to really taste it. He started to wonder, are other Muslims curious too? In 2021, he decided to write a story about it for Slate and began interviewing people, recording the calls for his article. Hey, it's Fogel, man. Sorry to interrupt my wife. How you doing?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Oh, man, amazing.

• 11:14Dan Pashman?

  This is Amin talking with Wajahat Ali, who's the author of the book, Go Back to Where You Came From and Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American. Wajahat has also thought a lot about pork.

• 11:24Speaker 05

  There was a cheese pizza at school, and I took off the pepperoni and ate it, which I don't do anymore because I thought it would be fair. But then there was a small sliver of pork that I convinced myself with red sauce attached to the side. And then I ate it, and it was delicious. But it wasn't worth it because for the next two weeks, I was racked by guilt. I was convinced I was gonna go to hell.

• 11:46Dan Pashman?

  At the time, Wajahat was just seven.

• 11:49Speaker 05

  No matter where you go, I've traveled and talked to many Muslims. It's just one of those interesting cultural demarcations where you could be snorting cocaine off a stripper's belly while taking shots of vodka and engaging in a threesome. But you'd be like, no, bro, I don't do pork. Like, you know? Like, this is one of those taboos that you realize is something that we just do not do.

• 12:16Dan Pashman?

  Amin talked to another Muslim who asked him not to use her real name in his article because she admitted that she once tried bacon. He wasn't writing this story because he planned to try pork. It was really a way for him to analyze and unpack this taboo without breaking it. And then...

• 12:32Speaker 06

  I'm here to announce the latest addition to the Impossible family: Impossible Pork! The launch of pork is...

• 12:41Dan Pashman?

  That is Pat Brown, founder and CEO of Impossible Foods in a promotional video. Impossible Foods, as you probably know, is one of the biggest companies making plant-based products that are supposed to look, smell, and taste just like meat. They add the molecule heme to their Impossible burgers, which makes it look like the burger is bleeding and gives it a meaty taste. In 2021, just as Amin was writing his story, Impossible Foods announced that they were launching vegan ground pork, pork in air quotes. This meant that Amin would have the chance to experience something very close to ground pork without ever actually eating pig.

• 13:19Dan Pashman?

  Now, Impossible Pork wasn't in stores yet, but Ayman wanted to answer the question for himself. Whenever it is that this product becomes available, should he try it? There's one person he knew he had to talk to, someone who he could turn to for real advice. His former teacher at the Muslim school he attended as a kid, Nadia Ismail, who you'll recall is also his mom. In a phone call, she explained that it's not just about the pork. It's about the importance of observing rules.

• 13:44Speaker 07

  We need rules in our life to follow, to guide us, to make us better human beings, to help the people around us.

• 13:55Dan Pashman?

  Ayman's mom understood that technically Impossible Pork has no pork. But for her, it's not just about the letter of the law. It's about the spirit of it.

• 14:03Speaker 07

  I was wondering why. It's just halal to eat it because it doesn't have any pork in it. But why?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Her thing is, don't eat it. Because if you're eating it, you are entertaining something that could potentially lead you down a path where you try something not good. So she's like, why even roll the dice even if the chances are slim? Don't I make good enough food for you? Like, that's sort of her take.

• 14:30Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  And her take was also, you kids are spoiled. When she first got to this country in the 70s, there wasn't really a halal market anywhere. But now, they're like right next to the other meats in any supermarket. There's always like a halal section. So she's like, you guys got this, and you're still wanting to try pork? Like, what's wrong with you? So there's definitely a struggle there because wanting to eat it feels incredibly hypocritical because not eating it is so ingrained in how you perform Islam, especially in a non-Muslim country. And so avoiding it, it's a little bit of what makes you a Muslim here.

• 15:16Dan Pashman?

  Ayman was conflicted about whether or not he would try Impossible Pork when it came out. He put all these mixed emotions and the quotes from Wajahat Ali and his mom into his piece. In September 2021, it was published on Slate with the headline, "Impossible Pork is Testing My Faith." The article struck a nerve.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  You know, I was given a lot of grief by some Muslims that I know. Ever since that article came out, I still get emails from angry Muslims being like, "You're sending people down the wrong path and that you're making it harder for some people to want to be Muslim now."

• 15:49Dan Pashman?

  But a day after the article came out, Ayman also got a different kind of email from Impossible Foods. They wanted his address.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  And they sent me like five pounds of it, something crazy. It was like this huge block of just fake meat. And I stuck it in my freezer and I didn't tell my wife about it. And she came home and she was like, "What the hell?"

• 16:11Dan Pashman?

  It was one thing to resist temptation when the Impossible Pork was theoretical. Now the stuff is in Ayman's freezer. What should he do? Later in the show, we'll check back in with him. But first, another story about the real conflict around fake meat. Because Muslims aren't the only ones who are struggling with Impossible Pork. That's coming up. Stick around.

• 16:40Dan Pashman?

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• 18:07Dan Pashman?

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• 19:14Speaker 08

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• 19:50Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. Last week on the show, backed by popular demand, The Sporkful Dating Game. We set up some lucky Sporkful listeners on blind dates and recorded it all. But you know, first dates can sometimes be a little awkward. So he brings up dissecting a cat. That's a choice to bring that up on a first date. Like, what does that do to the vibe?

• 20:11Speaker 08

  I think it changed the vibe a little bit.

• 20:13Speaker 09

  I would recommend most people don't discuss dissection in a first date.

• 20:17Dan Pashman?

  So, did we help some Sporkful listeners find true love? You'll have to listen to find out. The Dating Game episode is up now. All right, let's get back to the show.

• 20:27Speaker 10

  My mom's side is Jewish. My dad's side was not. But my dad was sort of, he called himself a born-again agnostic. Like, he just, he did not care about religion. And my mom wanted us to be a Jewish family, so that's what we were. We weren't like a Christmas tree and menorah family. We were just a menorah family.

• 20:44Dan Pashman?

  This is Leah Koenig. She's a food writer and cookbook author who lives in Brooklyn. She grew up outside Chicago in a family that was Jewish, but as she says, not super observant. On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, when Jews are supposed to fast all day, Leah's family would go to temple in the morning, then go out for corned beef sandwiches for lunch. Her family ate plenty of non-kosher foods at home, like shellfish.

• 21:07Speaker 10

  But my mom drew the line at pork. Pork has a much, much higher level of power and guilt associated with it, for sure.

• 21:16Dan Pashman?

  Why do you think that is? Of all the rules in Judaism that your mom could have chosen to hold on to, why do you think that was one of the few?

• 21:23Speaker 10

  Pork has a kind of sad history for Jews in that it's been, pork has been weaponized against Jews many, many times throughout the centuries. One of the grossest examples is during the Spanish Inquisition, when Jews were basically told in Spain and Portugal that they had to either convert to Catholicism... Be killed or leave. One way that like people had to sort of prove that they were no longer Jewish was to eat pork.

• 21:53Dan Pashman?

  And Leah says even before that, back during the Middle Ages in places like Germany and Austria, Jews were depicted as a race that came from pigs.

• 22:01Speaker 10

  There are these frescoes or paintings that called Juden Sau that literally depict Jews like suckling at the teat of a mother pig. And it's literally as disgusting and as violent sounding as you are imagining. And some of those paintings still are hanging in like churches in Germany.

• 22:21Dan Pashman?

  In 2018, a member of Berlin's Jewish community went to court to try to get one of these images removed from a church, but the court ruled against him, keeping the painting in place.

• 22:30Speaker 10

  Was my mom aware of all of these specific things when she was making her decision? Probably not, but there is this kind of inherited trauma around the violence of pork and Jews that I think gives it a much greater hard and fast no than some of the other other laws. I always joke that like Jews are not breakfast meat people. Because if you're, you know, anywhere in America, if you go to a diner, if you go to a Denny's, whatever, like there's sausage, there's bacon, there's breakfast ham. Like I don't think I've ever had meat for breakfast in my entire life unless you count smoked lox. Because like there's just not really a Jewish breakfast meat in the same way.

• 23:13Speaker 10

  I never feel more Jewish than when I like go to a diner with friends and like they're all having sausage and I'm having just just the pancakes.

• 23:21Dan Pashman?

  Leah did try pork a couple of times as a kid, but she doesn't really remember it. When she was 17, after a lesson on meat production in her high school science class, she gave up meat entirely. Food started becoming a bigger part of her life.

• 23:34Speaker 10

  My vegetarian identity was very much a part of who I was. And actually it also. As I sort of got more interested in the Jewish side of my identity, which happened kind of in college and after college, being a vegetarian was my way of keeping kosher. So for me, vegetarianism kind of took on this like spiritual power or resonance.

• 23:58Dan Pashman?

  When Leah got married at 26, she'd been a vegetarian for nearly a decade. Her husband was modern Orthodox Jewish, so he ate meat, but only kosher meat. Over several years, they both changed some of their food rules. He'd go to non-kosher restaurants, and she began eating meat again.

• 24:14Speaker 10

  I wanted to eat meat in this way that felt kosher and also sustainable and took into consideration like animal ethics and things like that. So pork wasn't really an option because there wasn't, obviously, there wasn't kosher pork. And I'm sure there was ethically raised pork, but I needed both.

• 24:33Dan Pashman?

  Today, Leah has turned her love of food into a career. She writes modern Jewish cookbooks and reports on food for places like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Tablet, an online magazine of Jewish news and culture. Back in 2021, her editor at Tablet got in touch and said, "Hey, there's a new product coming out called Impossible Pork. Why don't you look into it? Write an article about it." As Leah would find, it's become a very polarizing topic in the Jewish community. Now, for more observant Jews, for food to be kosher, it's not enough for it to not have pork or shellfish in it. Even if it has no meat at all in it, the food still has to be certified kosher. One of the main groups that grants this certification is the Orthodox Union. You may have seen their OU seal on a bunch of foods. It's a U inside a circle.

• 25:18Dan Pashman?

  Impossible Pork asked the Orthodox Union for the seal, and the union turned them down. But the reason had nothing to do with the ingredients.

• 25:26Speaker 10

  When they had given a beef bacon product a couple of years ago certification, they got just inundated with calls of people being like, "What is this? Why did you give a bacon product a certification? Can I eat this? What is it, pork?" People were very confused. The reason that they didn't give certification to Impossible Pork is because they didn't want to go through that rigmarole again. And they basically were like, "We see that there is nothing not kosher in the letter of the law about this product, but from an optics point of view and from the consumer's point of view, we don't want to give people a heart attack seeing an OU on a product that says pork." And from what I understand, they had, they went to Impossible and basically said,

• 26:09Speaker 10

  "If you change your name to make it more clearly, um, not real pork, we will give it certification." But Impossible Pork, for I'm sure, good reasons, decided they didn't want to do that.

• 26:20Dan Pashman?

  So the rabbis said, "If you'll change the name to, let's say, Impossible Fake Pork."

• 26:24Speaker 10

  Yeah. Or Impossible P Y R K, or like, you know, something like that.

• 26:29Dan Pashman?

  Right, right. Or Impossible Soy Pork, or something, right, that communicates it. Um, then they'd be okay, but simply by calling it Impossible Pork, they felt like that was gonna be too confusing for people.

• 26:39Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 26:39Dan Pashman?

  What do you think of that?

• 26:41Speaker 10

  Uh, I mean, I think that kosher certification in general sometimes doesn't give people a lot of credit to be smart, informed consumers. If you're gonna put something in your body, if you're gonna bring something into your kitchen, you need to at least have enough awareness about what it is, that you can like, make that decision yourself, right? Like, there's nothing, you can turn around the package and see the ingredients right there, and there's nothing, any, anything close to a meat product, let alone pork product.

• 27:11Dan Pashman?

  But that wasn't enough to persuade the Orthodox Union. For her article, Leah also talked to an Orthodox rabbi named Shmuley Yankliewicz, who's vegan and runs a Jewish animal advocacy organization.

• 27:21Speaker 10

  He is kind of all for products like Impossible Pork, that, you know, give people a chance to kind of live happy kosher lives in whatever way, but for him personally, um, the, the thought of eating that product just completely disgusted him. As a vegan, he has no interest in eating sort of like, any fake meat product, let alone, um, fake pork. But what I actually noticed when I was talking to people for the article, the general consensus was, "I'm down with a veggie burger, but I'm not interested in fake pork."

• 27:53Dan Pashman?

  Why do you think they weren't interested?

• 27:57Speaker 10

  I think it goes back to that kind of spiritual like hold that pork has over us. People who've decided not to eat pork have made that decision. And so they're kind of like, they don't want the wiggle room.

• 28:10Dan Pashman?

  Once again, it's a question of the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. People are saying, yeah, technically it doesn't have pork in it, but you're calling it pork. And the whole idea of it is to make something that looks and smells and tastes as much like pork as possible. This reaction gives Leah mixed feelings.

• 28:27Speaker 10

  It can almost lead to this sort of like Olympics of who's, who's like the most pious. There's this sense of like, of course I wouldn't eat it. And, um, you know, not only would I not eat it, but I like, wouldn't even, you know, go into a restaurant that, that would serve it. Or, you know, oh, I wouldn't even do, you know, take it one step further.

• 28:44Dan Pashman?

  I wouldn't even say the word pork.

• 28:45Speaker 10

  Exactly, exactly. I would like leave one letter out to make sure I'm not saying it correctly.

• 28:52Speaker 10

  It's kind of like a double edged sword. Like I like it because I think it's cool that there are some people who really take it so seriously. But I also think it can lead to a little bit of an unhealthy relationship to the laws.

• 29:05Dan Pashman?

  Leah put these mixed emotions and the quotes from the Orthodox Union and Rabbi Yankelowitz into her piece. In October 2021, it was published in Tablet with the headline, Is It Kosher to Eat Fake Pork? She thought that'd be the end of it, just one more story about this new food. But then.

• 29:22Speaker 10

  I had linked Amon's slate piece in my Tablet piece. And I think I wrote him and said, just like, thank you for, um, your great piece and wanted to connect. And then he reached back out to me and said.

• 29:36Dan Pashman?

  I was like, Leah, look at this stuff. I have it. What are we gonna do?

• 29:39Speaker 10

  And to be clear, when I was writing the piece, I had zero interest in trying it.

• 29:44Dan Pashman?

  But there must've been a little bit of you that was also just excited to try it.

• 29:47Speaker 10

  Honestly, not. Um, I was a.

• 29:49Dan Pashman?

  Curious, maybe excited is wrong, curious?

• 29:51Speaker 10

  Curious, yeah.

• 29:53Dan Pashman?

  So a Muslim and a Jew walk into a kitchen full of fake pork. Leah, Eamonn and I are all on Zoom together and they explain what happened next. Eamonn had this freezer full of Impossible pork. He really wanted to try it, but he didn't know what to do with it. He's not much of a cook. Leah was a little bit curious and she does cook. She's the food writer and cookbook author. Together, they decided to go for it. Eamonn invited Leah over. He originally wanted to make kufte, his favorite food that his mom makes. It's ground meat and spices. But Leah struck that down because that's traditionally made with beef or lamb. A pork substitute wouldn't make sense in kufte. She thought they should make something that typically would have pork in it.

• 30:28Speaker 10

  And so we ended up doing pot stickers, which neither of us had ever made. I've certainly eaten them plenty of times with chicken and other things. So I said, okay, I know what it tastes like as a dish. What is it going to taste like with this sort of, you know, fake pork flavor going on? And I guess I was a little pushy, which I didn't mean to be, but I guess I was because that's what.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. You were very convincing. You were convincing and I think you made your point and I agreed in the end.

• 30:57Speaker 10

  So that's what we ended up making.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  So I have no experience in the kitchen. So she sent me a recipe and was like, we need these ingredients. And then that's sort of where my job ended. She was like mincing and she was like cutting all the ingredients. I'm more or less watched. But with, when, watching her work in the kitchen was magical, by the way.

• 31:15Speaker 10

  Oh, I, I remember it differently. I think we were co, really good co-coach chefs.

• 31:22Dan Pashman?

  Leah worked from a straightforward recipe. Ginger, soy sauce, scallions and dumpling wrappers. And next to all that was a big block of Impossible pork.

• 31:31Speaker 10

  And that was the moment that was sort of like, you know, the million dollar moment when we un, cut into the package and kind of touched the fake pork. And, you know, Impossible is kind of known for making things that feel. Real and it really did kind of have that kind of squishy texture of of ground meat.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:51Dan Pashman?

  So you you're wrapping them in the in dough wrappers, you're getting ready to cook them. Aiman, how are you feeling?

• 31:58Speaker 01

  I'm excited. It was all coming to a head for me. I'd never imagined that I would ever get this close to eating something that was pork or smelled like pork or tasted like pork. I've smelled it a thousand times. I I grew up in the Ironbound where there's a huge Portuguese and Brazilian community and

• 32:16Dan Pashman?

  In Newark.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, in Newark. And so there's a lot of pork in the air. It's just all it's just clouds of pork everywhere. And so I'm really familiar with the smell. And for me, when we started cooking it, I was getting a little bit of that same smell. And so I was just getting all giddy on the inside, feeling like this could be the first time in my life that I finally know what I'm missing out on. And a part of me wanted it to taste bad so that I can turn around and be like, that was nasty. There's no reason to ever try that again. Because I told myself over and over again that this was the reason that I was different from all of my neighbors who weren't Muslim.

• 32:56Dan Pashman?

  Leah, tell me, how are you feeling while the pot stickers were cooking before you had eaten any?

• 33:01Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, I think while we were making them, my hesitation sort of faded and it almost in sort of like, what's the big deal? Like, it's it just is like any other meat. And so to actually be handling it and, you know, squishing it in the bowl with all the other ingredients and wrapping it inside these little the little wrappers, it kind of it demystified it in a way. And so I was actually getting more excited to try it as we were making it.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  You know, what's really funny is that my wife was there with us. And once we like opened the packaging, I ran into the other room. And I was like, Mia, Mia, you should try this. You should try this. This is the pork. This is what we're like talking about. And she was like, mm, no, thanks.

• 33:42Dan Pashman?

  Leah, what was your husband's take on all this? When you told him you're going going to Newark to hang out with Aiman to eat impossible pork?

• 33:48Speaker 10

  He was jealous. He was like, bring me, bring me some home.

• 33:54Dan Pashman?

  Leah and Aiman finished cooking the pot stickers and brought them out to Aiman's backyard.

• 33:58Speaker 10

  We were just sitting in the sunshine. We had chopsticks and dipping sauce and it was just very lovely. Like their beautiful sun was sitting in a bouncer and being adorable. When I, you know, when I bit into the first one,

• 34:12Speaker 10

  I think it was sort of two things happening at once. The first was, this tastes really good. I would like another one. They're delicious. Let's keep eating them. And then on the other side, it was just sort of like, what's the big deal? Like, these are, these are pork-ish pot stickers. Like, what was I so afraid of? Or, and/or, what was I so resistant to, I guess?

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first bite was freaking good and I, like Leah, couldn't stop eating them. It was, they were so fun sized too. Like tiny little fun doublings. They were so cute. So we were just popping them like crazy. But the first one, I remember expecting it to taste like nothing I've ever tasted before. And it just tasted like a lot of things I've had before, you know? I needed it to taste like the best thing I've ever had, for me to feel like I would ever go out of my way to like test my relationship with a slam in this way ever again. But once you got past the first bite and you end up with like the second and third and fourth,

• 35:20Speaker 01

  all of that melts away a little bit where it's not so loaded. And then you're just enjoying the meal. And like Leah said, you're enjoying the weather and we're like talking about something else and we're, I'm like really excited about my garden and I'm just like clipping everything and force feeding it to Leah.

• 35:36Speaker 10

  Yeah, he sent me home with some beautiful chard, which we really enjoyed.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  That's what I mean. It was like, once we got past that, it was just sharing a meal with someone lovely.

• 35:52Speaker 10

  I have done, you know, a lot of work internally over the last 10 years trying to figure out where I want to fit in the spectrum of being an environmentally conscious eater, of being a Jewish eater. And so I have come to this place by, you know, being a vegetarian for 10 years, being a vegan for two of those years, trying my first meat after those years in a very conscious setting. It was actually a goat. It was slaughtered according to kosher traditions and the goat had been raised sustainably. And like that was like the first meat I had eaten in 10 years. And like that was a transcendent experience. So I kind of know where I fit at this point and where I want my family and our eating

• 36:35Speaker 10

  to fit. So this was a really cool experiment, but you know, I know I'm not going to be a pork eater. And I know I don't really want to even make Impossible Pork again. Like it didn't, it didn't change anything for me in a way that felt like I want to make space for this. And not because I want to block it out, but because it doesn't add anything.

• 36:55Dan Pashman?

  Amin, on the other hand, says he would eat Impossible Pork again. But there's a bigger reason why he's glad he did it.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  It's always been my role and my relationship with the religion to look along the margins and look for the fault lines and get us to talk about them. And particularly when we're thinking about like the Muslim American experience, it's so hard for us to have these kinds of conversations and inquiries really, outside of the context of Islamophobia and wanting to present ourselves as immovable and here to stay, basically, and solid. People are so convinced that we need to be steadfast against pork as a weapon that was used against our community.

• 37:41Dan Pashman?

  There's almost like a concern that opening up any space for kind of nuance and flexibility might create vulnerability.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's not for nothing, like, people have taken things that I've done, work that I've done to use it against Muslims. But I do still think that that concern cannot outweigh our desire for exploration, our desire for wanting to having hard conversations. Yeah, I'm, I'm still enjoyed writing and exploring halal pork. And so I'm going to continue to find things like it so that I can push for more, more awareness, at least amongst Muslims, that it's okay to have a little bit of this doubt. Let's try it and see how we feel.

• 38:29Dan Pashman?

  That was Ayman Ismail and Leah Koenig. Ayman is a staff writer at Slate. You can find all his stories there. And he has a memoir out now called Becoming Baba: Fatherhood, Faith, and Finding Meaning in America. Leah's latest cookbook is Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome's Jewish Kitchen. You can sign up for her newsletter at The Jewish Table on Substack. Now, one quick update on this story. We spoke to Ayman and Leah in 2022. And since then, Impossible Pork is still not on the shelves in grocery stores. It has been featured in a few select restaurants, but it's still not available for purchase by the general public. The company hasn't provided any update on what it might be in stores. They do have ground sausage in supermarkets, but not the straight-up ground pork. So Ayman's gonna have to keep waiting if he wants to get his hands on any more Impossible Pork.

• 39:12Dan Pashman?

  Next week on the show, the story of a businessman known as the codfather. Oh, yeah, we love a pun. In the heyday of New England cod fishing, Carlos Rafael owned the biggest fleet of boats in the most valuable fishing port in America, until an IRS sting operation brought it all crashing down. Was the codfather a folk hero, a righteous rebel, or a selfish con man? That's next week. While you wait for that one, check out last week's show, Our Sporkful Dating Game. We pair up Sporkful listeners on blind dates and record the whole thing. Did we create a recipe for love or a dating disaster? Listen to find out. That one's up now. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free

• 39:54Dan Pashman?

  music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. This episode was produced by me along with managing producer- Emma Morgenstern. And senior producer-

• 40:19Speaker 11

  Andres O'Hara.

• 40:20Dan Pashman?

  And producer- Johanna Mayer. It was edited by- Tracy Samuelson. Additional editing by Fernanda Aguero. Our engineer is- Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 40:37Speaker 11

  And I'm Harris Corleone in Miami, Florida, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

• 40:58Speaker 12

  Hey, this is Will Arnett, host of Smartless. Smartless is a podcast with myself and Sean Hayes and Jason Bateman, where each week one of us reveals a mystery guest to the other two. We dive deep with guests that you love, like Bill Hader, Selena Gomez, Jennifer Aniston, David Beckham, Kristen Stewart, and tons more. So join us for a genuinely improvised and authentic conversation filled with laughter and newfound knowledge to feed the smartless mind. Listen to Smartless now on the SiriusXM app. Download it today.

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• 41:58Speaker 09

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