Halal-slop

Some Bullshit over Fries: Coming to a bodega near you!

If you’re one of my long-time followers, you probably know that I’m a New Yorker. I’m not a city-slicker, but I’ve lived in close enough proximity to the Big Apple to feel its presence, so to speak. More importantly, I’ve been to smaller cities across the state and nearby states, and I’ve noticed a startling but seldom-discussed trend spreading across the northeast: the replacement of the Pizzeria and the Deli with the “food mart” or the “bodega”. An establishment which, despite being Puerto Rican in origin, is now largely run by Muslim immigrant groups. More generally, I have noticed an explosion of restaurants run by the Muslim community (no pun intended), despite Muslims being only a small share of the population.

In New York, the undisputed Bodega capital of the world, around half are run by Yemenis, despite Yemenis comprising less than 1% of the population of New York. I believe that different ethnic groups control the market in different cities, but it is very often Muslims, for similar reasons that it was very often Jews operating delicatessens in the times of yore. Both groups have dietary restrictions which must be catered to, meaning that creating a general store which caters to their restrictions allows exclusive access to that part of the market. However, as made clear by the Yemeni example, it is also clearly a non-linear ethnic niche in many circumstances. This is an arrangement where immigrants practice nepotistic hiring and informal mutual lending (often without much interest and “off the books”) between members of the in-group — be that the family, the ethnic group, or something in between like an extended clan — in order to take over a trade in some region. Other prominent examples of this include Cambodian donut shops in Southern California, motels being owned by Gujarati Patels across America, and of course, ethnic mafias controlling the trade of illegal substances or services.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that Muslims make bad or cheap food in general. If Turks, for instance, were bad at making food, then the Greeks and Armenians would not constantly be fighting with them over whose culture said food really belongs to. I have also heard almost exclusively good things about Persian food. But, both of these groups of people, upon arriving to America, seem to prefer to become dentists or plastic surgeons rather than restauranteurs… But, this is irrelevant to the problem at hand… These places do not sell Muslim cuisine per se, they sell Halal food. There are influences of their home cuisines in the food they serve, but it’s certainly not comprised of recipes passed down from grandparents or anything. The purpose of these shops was never really to provide Westerners with a taste of some other culture, but to Halal-ify pre-existing convenient food options to make them suitable for Muslims. A lot of them serve subpar, cheap non-Muslim food such as fried chicken, pizza, burgers, and a wide variety of breakfast sandwiches, and these seem to be oriented at the primarily Black urban underclass of the northeast.

Their main specialty is “some bullshit over rice”, or if you’re a real fatass, “some bullshit over French fries”. You can also get “some bullshit wrapped up in pita bread” if you’re fancy, but I’ve noticed that this item is categorically inferior to the Burrito in almost every way, so I always get pita bread on the side. The best slop offered at these places is usually some sort of hot, beef-based sandwich like the famous chopped cheese, but it’s the sort of thing that you have to be in the mood for. It’s the type of food that will either put you to sleep, or keep you up at night with the meat sweats. It’s very much a late-night meal, not something I would have on the go or something that would constitute a wholesome dinner. Oddly enough, a lot of them serve Jamaican beef patties… Bomboclaat Wallahi, my brother! Could this be a consequence of the connections between Rastafarianism and Afro-American Islam?

A lot of these places also label themselves as a “grocery”, but are barely deserving of the label. The vast majority of what they sell is cheap, pre-packaged snacks, drinks, and ramen. Some have canned goods section, but there aren’t really much quality groceries to be bought. Their array of cold-cuts, if offered at all, is gutted by the exclusion of pork, which is obviously the central meat of the cold-cut scene. The front-desk is filled with weed paraphernalia and wildly overpriced dubai chocolate, which is ironic considering how tight-assed a lot of these places are about alcohol. Many woke people lament the “food deserts” of urban America, but turn around and defend the halal corner-store to their dying breath as an “institution” of the new American inner city. Indeed, the halal-mart is exactly that, and that’s why it is proudly and unapologetically dealing in slop, because people in the new American city prefer that over grocers. I’m not even saying that as an exaggeration, just go on the Ocky Way youtube channel. Half of their videos are just celebrities making outlandishly unhealthy sandwiches out of different kinds of pre-packaged foods.

But what happens when the Mahometan is looking for a more… Refined… audience? Well, you get something akin to the fast casual restaurant. Like the bodega, it is something that they wrestle with the Hispanics for control over… Really giving a lot of credibility to that “global Latina belt” meme today, aren’t we?

The Latina Belt. Also known as: The Sotadic Zone.

But yeah, same main theme of throwing a bunch of bullshit over rice or a piece of pita bread, but it’s a little bit more advanced and often serves ostensibly more “authentic” cuisine from the “Mediterranean”. If the former category of food was Zohran Mamdani’s voterbase, then this category is Zohran himself. Vaguely, performatively oriental, but meant to appeal to bourgeois norms and not devoutly foreign in any recognizable way. God, I’ve always hated that label. “Mediterranean”. It’s more accurately called “Ottoman Cuisine”, because it seems to throw together food from all of the cultures that got raped by Turks, and that’s why you will never find spaghetti or empanadas at these places.

Anyways, this is the primary meal of choice for the aspiring tech overlords of America. It’s made in a timely manner, can be eaten at one’s desk, has a nice “homogeneity” to it, and is much more nutritious and high-quality than what they serve at the halal-mart. In fact, it really borders on a salad. It’s not “slop” in the sense that one calls McDonalds “goyslop”, more in the sense that one calls Soylent “goyslop”. It’s a meal for a man who has renounced lunch breaks, who only needs mid-Zoom-call sustenance. I can’t say I like the idea of paying $20 for some minimum wage worker to dump a bunch of bullshit in a bowl for me, but there is a sort of Laconic virtue to it all. In 50 years, we will see the dawn of “Spartan Cuisine” shops where aspiring junior associates of Silicon Valley or the Big 4 accounting firms will go during their 100-hour shift to eat blood soup and twice-baked barley loaves, while filling their giant tumblers with watered down sour wine.

It’s all a big problem. The old ethnic restauranteurs — the Italians, the Jews, the Chinese, the Greeks — are more often than not selling their shops and retiring to Florida. They don’t want their kids in that business, they want to send their kids to college. The old customers are retreating to the suburbs, or going even further afield. Halal-slop is annoying, because it makes it harder to find bacon and beer, and because not everyone constantly craves chicken doused in so much white sauce and hot sauce that it looks like it was the victim of a bukkake from a bunch of hematospermiacs. But beyond being annoying, it’s also a symptom of America’s urban decline, and the decline in desirability of small business ownership. I think it also corresponds to a problem that I have heard some right-wing Muslims express about the standardization of Islamic culture around the world. Local styles of Islam are increasingly being erased by the same “Global Riyadh” package. Now, everywhere you go in the Islamic world, from Mali to Indonesia, you will see young ladies wearing the same beige polyester hijabs made in a Chinese sweatshop. Shia-descended plastic Muslims like Mamdani praying in the Sunni manner, because it’s what they learned from YouTube tutorials, and “Peppa Pig” prayer mats...

This is what the Iranian clerics were warning about when they talked about “internal Dubai”

This is what happens when you proudly expel your diasporoids across the world, and hope that their remittance checks will keep your economy afloat. Islam is particularly vulnerable to this sort of culture decay, because there is a certain Arabophilia (and to a lesser extent, Persophilia) built into the earliest stages of the faith, but I think it did happen with Christianity as well. The decline of “local” Christianity is a subject for another post, though…