Blood, body and belonging: the geographies of halal food consumption in the UK

This article presents a framework for understanding how ‘halal’ food consumption is understood, practiced and experienced by British Muslims through an empirical study in Birmingham (UK). There are emerging bodies of literature in geography that analyse food/animal ethics and work recognising the increasing importance of the halal food industry. However, there is also a need to understand how ethical and theological concerns translate when scaled down to individual food choices and experiences of Muslims, as they negotiate food consumption as a minority group. Accordingly, this paper utilises qualitative data from an in-depth study to develop a framework for understanding halal food consumption from the perspective of British Muslims. Utilising conceptual literature on food/animal ethics, abjection and belonging it draws evidence into three corresponding sections: (i) Blood–the ethics of religious slaughter processes; (ii) Body–the embodied responses to ‘clean’ and ‘impure’ food, and (iii) Belonging–integral connections between halal food and notions of belonging. The paper concludes by suggesting that this framework is a helpful starting point from which to understand the ways in which halal food consumption scales down from abstraction to practice, from ethics to embodied experience.