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Portland schools say they're the nation's first to offer daily halal meals for all ages
Jun. 14—At Lyman Moore Middle School in Portland's North Deering neighborhood on a recent Wednesday, students streamed into the cafeteria in waves for lunch. Alongside classic offerings like hot dogs and baby carrots was a halal-certified beef and bean burrito. One student who grabbed it was sixth-grader Radiya Ahmed, 12, who said she eats halal at home and now takes the cafeteria's new certified option almost every day. It's a choice available to all students in all grades at Portland Public Schools since a districtwide rollout in April. "I like burritos and it's good that it's halal," said Ahmed, who prior to the rollout was eating cheese pizza for lunch every single day. Other Muslim students were skipping the meal entirely, school leaders say. The program was born out of a drive to provide meals for the district's growing Muslim population and a desire to bring culturally relevant food to school cafeterias. For years, Portland school officials say they and families have worried that Muslim students just aren't eating lunch at school because of a lack of halal options. Now, students can select a halal-certified meal every day and three days each week it's also a vegan meal, like a chickpea curry or veggie burger. The district and its partners believe Portland is the country's first district to offer daily halal-certified school meals for all K-12 students, something made possible because of the district's central kitchen structure and a partnership with local organizations including the Halal School Meals Network. "This is something that has been identified as a priority by our community and students," said Jen Montague, Portland's food service director. "It is challenging for students to succeed when they are hungry, yet many of our Muslim students — a number of whom come from low-income and food-insecure households — couldn't eat our free school meals because of the lack of suitable halal options." Halal, an Arabic word meaning "lawful," describes a way of eating observed by a majority of Muslims — free of pork and alcohol and following standards of cleanliness around food preparation. Lyman Moore Principal Darralynn Jones said Muslim students, some struggling with both hunger and isolation from their peers, have been excited about the halal options. She also heard positive feedback from parents who previously had to pack a lunch for their children every day. CULTURALLY IMPORTANT MENUS In 2017, Portland school administrators and parents became concerned about food insecurity in the district. That kicked off a needs assessment, in partnership with the Cumberland County Food Security Council and other organizations, that led to the development of culturally important menus and the goal of introducing foods that are familiar to students from immigrant backgrounds into the lunch menu. Chefs like Khadija Ahmed, who runs the African food pantry and market Food For All Services, were invited into schools to work with food service staff to develop those menu items. "We were just getting overwhelming positive feedback from students, hearing that they loved the recipes and they were so happy to eat things that reminded them of their home cooking," said Zoe Grodsky, school food systems manager with the food security council. "But we were also getting feedback from students that they were excited to see the recipes, but couldn't eat them." The problem was, even though the meals were familiar, they weren't halal. "We were seeing that Muslim families just weren't trusting that the food would meet their cultural and faith requirements," said Jim Hanna, director of the food security council. As a result, some students weren't eating lunch at school. The council reached out to imams and hosted focus groups with Muslim families to better understand their needs. Ahmed founded the Halal School Meals Network in early 2023. She had also worked with Westbrook schools, where the food service director reached out with similar concerns. That school district now provides halal meals at the high school level. Her organization provides resources like recipes, training, education and coordination with a third-party halal certifier, the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America. Ahmed, whose own children attended local public schools, said as a parent and immigrant, food equity is about much more than hunger. "Students of color are expected to perform twice as better as their white counterparts, and we are talking about kids who are coming into this new space where the people that are serving their food don't look like their mother," she said. "And then the food we are serving is not food that their bodies recognize, because it is not their culture." PORTLAND ROLLOUT Portland piloted a halal meals program at Amanda C. Rowe Elementary School in April 2024. The district had already eliminated all pork products from school meals, and then worked with the Halal School Meals Network to certify its central kitchen and figure out how rollout could look in each individual school. Montague said the district submits a list of foods it hopes to use to the third-party certifier, who then traces the production history of that item to determine if it's halal. Local, certified meats are the most difficult to source, so the district currently uses pre-produced burritos and popcorn chicken, although Montague hopes that next year they'll be able to introduce more scratch-made halal meat and vegan dishes. Ahmed has already developed a number of halal recipes for schools to use. Montague said food service staff have been instrumental in making the rollout possible. Across the district, about 4% of meals that have been served since April are halal-certified. Montague said she expects that number to rise as the the district continues to build trust and relationships with Muslim families, and improve the variety and quality of its halal menu. She meets monthly with the Muslim Students Association at Deering High School to discuss the program. "And one of the most important things we don't want to underestimate is how important it is for other students to better understand what halal is," Montague said. "It's taking the mystery out of that for the entire school." School districts don't collect data on student religion, but a 2021 survey of Portland students and families revealed that about 10% of students observed a halal diet, and that population is growing. A 2024 survey showed that more than a quarter of high schoolers follow a halal diet or prefer to. Ahmed said halal certification has brought increased attention to food systems in Portland schools that also benefits other dietary restrictions. The vegetarian and vegan meals are now thoroughly certified to eliminate cross-contamination or animal byproducts. She is currently working with schools in the Lewiston-Auburn area to roll out a similar program. Ahmed said the beauty of halal is that non-Muslim students can still eat it — certification just levels the playing field for food access. Copy the Story Link
Al Jazeera
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Harvard talks free speech but silences Palestine
It stands up to the Trump administration, but bows to its own billionaire donors. At Harvard, Palestine remains unspeakable. My sister was standing with a few other students under the dim glow of Harvard Yard's old lampposts, casually smoking and chatting. 'Oh, you're Palestinian?' one of them asked as he leaned in to light his cigarette from hers. 'My cousin is in the IDF [Israeli army].' Then he placed the cigarette in his mouth backwards, the lit end burning between his teeth. 'This is how my cousin smoked while shooting Palestinians at the border,' he said. 'So those idiots couldn't see the flame.' That evening, shaken, my sister called our parents and later reported the incident to her resident tutor. She searched for a way to file a formal complaint but found none. Arabs weren't considered a 'protected class'. In the charged political climate of late 2001, hate speech like this wasn't just tolerated – it was invisible. More than two decades later, little has changed. A report released in April 2025 by the Harvard Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias described a 'deep-seated sense of fear' among Muslim and Arab students, faculty and staff. The campus climate, the report noted, was marked by 'uncertainty, abandonment, threat, and isolation'. Nearly half of Muslim students surveyed said they felt physically unsafe at Harvard while an overwhelming 92 percent of all Muslim students, faculty and staff revealed that they feared professional or academic consequences for expressing their personal or political views. Advertisement Harvard has fashioned itself as a free-speech warrior on the national stage for refusing to negotiate with the Trump administration on its sweeping demands for the university to drop its diversity, equity and inclusion measures and punish student protesters. However, inside Harvard's campus walls, we have seen President Alan Garber oversee a systematic erasure of teaching, research and scholarship about Palestine, at a time when more than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands more have been forcefully displaced and are facing starvation under a relentless Israeli siege. Long before Harvard evaded a hostile takeover from our billionaire president, it capitulated to the demands of its billionaire donors in matters of student discipline, campus speech and academic freedom. Sign up for Al Jazeera Americas Coverage Newsletter US politics, Canada's multiculturalism, South America's geopolitical rise—we bring you the stories that matter. Subscribe Your subscription failed. Please try again. Please check your email to confirm your subscription By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy protected by reCAPTCHA To please its right-wing donors, Harvard adopted a one-sided conceptualisation of campus safety, in which speaking up against Israeli state violence towards Palestinians is considered threatening. As a result, university administrators rush to address anti-Semitism on campus, as they should, but they also censor and eliminate speech and scholarship which is critical of Israel in the name of fighting antisemitism. Meanwhile, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia are less than an afterthought. University administrators remain silent as students, faculty and staff experience doxxing, harassment and death threats for speaking up about Palestinian human rights. They have shared international students' information with the Department of Homeland Security, as students on nearby campuses have been abducted by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, detained and deported for objecting to Israel's international law violations. Advertisement Beyond turning a blind eye to intimidation and abuse, the university's leaders also routinely take action to erase Palestinian speech, scholarship, advocacy and views. Last year, the Harvard Corporation, the university's unelected governing body, overruled the faculty and barred 13 seniors from graduating for protesting the genocide in Gaza, breaking with decades of disciplinary precedent. The university has banned the only undergraduate Palestine advocacy group twice, through inconsistent enforcement of the university's ambiguous and 'ever-evolving' event co-sponsorship policy, which, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warned, 'raise[s] the specter of viewpoint discrimination'. In a little-publicised Title VI settlement from January, the US Department of Education found that Harvard failed to meaningfully investigate or sufficiently respond to 125 cases of discrimination and harassment reported through its anonymous reporting hotline, particularly those 'based on Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim shared ancestry'. Although President Garber has said Harvard should condemn 'hateful speech' under the institutional voice policy, this did not apply to the gruesome 'jokes' former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett made about giving students exploding pagers for interrupting his speech at Harvard Business School in March 2025. The handful of teaching and research programs where faculty study Palestine at Harvard have been censored, eliminated, or are under threat of elimination. In a matter of months, Harvard cancelled a panel featuring Palestinian children from Gaza at Harvard Medical School, ended its only partnership with a Palestinian university, and eliminated the Religion and Public Life program at the Harvard Divinity School, which addressed Israel/Palestine as a case study. Harvard also dismissed the leadership of the Center for Middle East Studies, as an 'offering of sorts to its critics', according to The New York Times. Advertisement The elimination of Harvard programmes about Palestine is especially chilling given that all of Gaza's universities have been demolished, more than 80 percent of its schools have been destroyed or damaged, and professors, teachers and students in Gaza have been systematically attacked. The UN calls this 'scholasticide' – the systemic obliteration of education through the destruction of educational infrastructure and arrest, detention, or killing of students, staff, and teachers. The erasure and elimination of knowledge production by Palestinians and about Palestine at Harvard and other universities chills speech in defence of Palestinian human rights in the US, and thus materially affects the safety of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. At this time last year, campuses across the US experienced an unprecedented mobilisation in support of Palestinian freedom, which put a spotlight on the overwhelming public opposition to Israel's assault on Gaza. Eventually, the opposition to Israel's conduct against Palestinians became so vocal that then-President Joe Biden – an ardent supporter of Israel – threatened an arms embargo against Israel if the humanitarian situation in Gaza did not improve. Today, after Harvard and other universities suppressed protests against Israel's total war on Gaza, Palestinian suffering and death are met with growing silence in the US. As public and media attention drifts away from Gaza, the pressure on American leaders to intervene – or even acknowledge the scale of the crisis – has all but disappeared. Advertisement The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recently declared that 'the humanitarian situation in Gaza is now likely the worst it has been in the 18 months since the outbreak of hostilities.' Jonathan Whittall, the local head of OCHA, stressed that what's unfolding in Gaza no longer resembles conventional warfare. 'People in Gaza are telling me they feel like it's the deliberate dismantling of Palestinian life in plain sight,' he said. Malnutrition is surging as Israel has sealed the borders to food, medicine, and all humanitarian aid for over two months. Meanwhile, scenes that should shock the world – children's bodies thrown into the air by explosions, families burned alive – have become what Whittall called 'everyday atrocities'. Both the Trump administration and Harvard's billionaire donors clearly understand the important role universities play in shaping US society and public opinion. As Harvard leaders proclaim their commitment to 'viewpoint diversity', we can rest assured that we will hear more from speakers like Jared Kushner, who spoke at the Harvard Kennedy School last year about his plan to 'finish the job' and develop Gaza's 'valuable waterfront property', instead of Palestinian child amputees whose plight might make us feel uncomfortable or complicit. It is heartening that hundreds of university presidents signed a letter opposing President Trump's attempted takeover of US higher education. But for decades, their institutions have eagerly bent to the will of billionaire donors. In just the past year and a half, these donors have shaped everything from campus speech to student discipline – even course syllabi. In this corrupt bargain, the concept of 'campus safety' has been weaponised to suppress speech on what the UN and other human rights organisations have called genocide. The language of anti-discrimination has been twisted to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs – Harvard's own DEI office now quietly renamed the 'Office of Community and Campus Life'. Advertisement This moment cannot be separated from a broader history. It echoes the 1971 Lewis Powell memo, which outlined how corporations could infiltrate US institutions – especially universities – to align them with corporate interests. Today, the 'Palestine exception' has become a key entry point for an ideological capture of higher education, decades in the making. For Harvard and its peers to resist federal overreach while yielding to oligarchic donors is not resistance at all – it's surrender. If we don't fight both forces together, we may soon be unable to fight at all. If, as President Garber wrote, 'the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity,' then he – and all of us – must demand that liberation without exceptions, caveats, or fear. For every single one of us. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
