For cooking classes – “Halal compulsion”: uproar over shopping list at school

Read the ingredients carefully, give preference to cheap brands, chop off what you bought (sic!) – the list for cooking classes at the Felixdorf secondary school in the Wiener Neustadt district does not sound unusual.

But point 7 upset many people. Here the teacher writes that because of the large number of Muslim students it is important to buy only meat products in Turkish supermarkets (see facsimile above). This ensures that only Halal-certified meat is served.

Great outrage on the internet
For many parents this went too far. Not primarily for religious reasons, but because many people immediately think of animal abuse when they think of halal meat. In any case, the outrage, especially on the internet, was too great and the Education Directorate had to pull the cord quickly. “Immediately after we became aware of the letter in which we did not reach an agreement, we had an urgent, unambiguous, admonishing conversation with the educator,” says a spokeswoman in response to a ‘Krone’ request. The school management immediately withdrew the entire content of the letter and sent a new letter to the parents.

Think only of regional products
The Education Directorate also points out that only regional production should be taken into account when purchasing food. “Such unauthorized parental information from the teacher is absolutely not the line of the Lower Austrian Education Directorate and will be rejected in the strongest possible terms,” it says.