A Song of Meat and Fire! - Eid-al Adha in 5 Pictures

Disclaimer: This post might not be for you if you’re vegan or have meat-sight problems.🙂

A few months ago just after Ramadan, I explained how we celebrate Eid around my part of the world. I think I also mentioned that we (muslims) celebrate two Eids every year and that the particular Eid we were celebrating months ago was called Eid-al-Fitr - Eid that marks breaking of the fasting period.

About a month ago, we celebrated Eid. This Eid is called Eid-al-Fitr: Festival of sacrifice. During this Eid, capable muslims are encouraged to sacrifice an animal for the sake of Allah. Most people here sacrifice cows because it’s a weird appropriation of status.

Anyways, my plan is to take you through what makes this Eid different from the Eid-al-Fitr. And this is mainly one thing - Meat!

But aside the meat, I’ll be showing you what different things happen for the meat to be processed. All through photography of course.🙂

Starting from after we leave the Eid grounds, we start prepping the meat.

We sharpen the blades first. We do that both to ease our work and not cause the animal a lot of pain.

Then we dig in (pun intended) to the inside. This is mostly where the anatomist in me awakens. Lol I do science with the cow’s body as we work our way through it.

The point is to get the meat into these small size-able pieces like what you see in the basin to share.

We start sharing from within our household, serving the women first mostly, then the men, and then those of us doing the sharing take our part at the latter part. This takes two days sometimes because aside the cows, we normally kill 2-3 sheep in addition, so there’s a lot of meat.

What about the fire then?

Well, for the soft parts of the meat, the preferred cooking method is frying. But for areas like the head and legs, you first need to roast them before they can be further processed to prevent it from rotting.

And that’s where the fire you see comes in.

Flames from cylinders can’t do this type of cooking, so we do it the old fashioned way - with coal!

An odd thing you wouldn’t have guessed by yourself is that it was raining when I took the photos of the fire.

(I put the picture of the fire first for two reasons - first because I think it’s more of a catchy thumbnail and second because I wanted to give people a warning through texts that there might be graphics they don’t want to see)

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This post has been sitting in my drafts for two months. I almost forgot about it until I found a picture of it in my gallery today. I left out a serious chunk of the photography though because I think some of them might provoke uncomfortable feelings. If you know what I mean. Lol. I hope you enjoyed this though.

Depressed🙂