Sirius XM Podcasts

So tell me about your relationship with pork growing up.

Ooh, did you just ask a Muslim with the relationship to pork is?

I did. Wow, wow, Dan, stay woke.

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 hello at sporkful.com. 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 hello at sporkful.com. All right, let's get to the show. 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 challenge them. Would it change who you are?

This is what the story we're sharing today is about. Amin 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. Amon grew up in Newark, New Jersey. Both his parents emigrated from Egypt. And he says that

when they came to the U.S. to start a family, one thing was a very high priority. For them, it was really important that they raised us to be good Muslim kids, and 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 a 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. And Amon says he learned early on that one of the biggest things you don't do

as a Muslim is eat pork. 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 there's things like gelatin that brands will like sneakily just put

like pork products into your Pop-Tarts. And so you can't just go to the store and buy Pop-Tarts.

I have to read the ingredients and see where's the sneaky pork is.

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

...