If you were an alien landing in America today, you might assume that “must constantly be protesting something” was some sort of citizenship requirement for at least fifty percent of the population at any given moment.
We had the Right boycotting Bud Light over Dylan Mulvaney. The Left boycotting Goya after its CEO praised Trump. The Right boycotting Cracker Barrel after a rebranding gone sideways. The Left boycotting Hobby Lobby over funding of anti-LGBTQ legislation. The Right boycotting Disney because, depending on the day, it was pushing the woke agenda, grooming children, or operating as a Satan-worshipping pedophile club. The Left boycotting Sydney Sweeney for being unapologetically hot, MAGA, or both. Not to be outdone, Target has managed to piss off both sides of the aisle equally and completely.
This week’s victim: Tillamook cheese.
The Oregon dairy co-op began trending on X this week after shoppers noticed a new “HALAL CERTIFIED” stamp on its cheese packaging. People—mostly conservatives—are taking it about as well as you might expect. Photos and videos of Tillamook getting tossed in the trash have racked up thousands of views. ACT for America accused the company of “groveling to Islam.” Disgruntled former customers are calling for worldwide boycotts of “Al Qaeda cheese.”
It did not take a particularly deep dive to learn that the terrorists had apparently infiltrated the cheddar a full decade ago. To understand how, we need an extremely brief lesson in cheese production.
Traditionally, cheese was made with animal rennet, an enzyme that comes from the stomach lining of young calves. In 2016, Tillamook began using a fermentation-produced vegetarian version that meets both halal and kosher dietary requirements. This was not some exotic, extremist, faith-based cheesemaking move; most commercially produced cheese now uses vegetarian rennet because it’s cheaper, more consistent, and no baby cows have to be slaughtered to make a pizza.
For the better part of a decade, nobody cared. Then Tillamook put the phrase CERTIFIED HALAL on its packaging—and a good chunk of the internet immediately began crumbling under the weight of this new development. They’re clearing out their crispers, trashing their ice cream, and writing angry open letters to Tillamook, urging the company to “consider customers of other faiths when making decisions like this.”
Here’s the thing. Halal isn’t something Tillamook (or anyone else) does to cheese. Nobody prayed over the cheddar. Nobody scooped up a giant wheel and held it toward Mecca. There is no tiny imam stationed at the factory blessing every block as it rolls down the conveyor belt. Halal is simply the Arabic word for permissible. It’s a welcome sign on a gate; a green light at an intersection; a “dogs allowed” sticker on the café door.
Most of Tillamook’s cheese already met the necessary dietary requirements. The company simply took the extra step of having those varieties certified—meaning they paid someone to say “yup, you did the thing you said you did” in exchange for permission to add that word to their label.
Want to know the dirty, underhanded, America-hating reason they pursued that certification? Because Tillamook sells cheese. And Muslims buy cheese… many of them only if it has been given the halal stamp of approval.
So yes, Tillamook is pandering to Muslims, if by pandering we mean making it easier for millions of potential customers to buy its cheese.
It’s not all that different from Kirkland ponying up for the CERTIFIED ORGANIC sticker on its peanut butter because they know a certain segment of shoppers won’t buy PB without it. Or Frito-Lay investing in GLUTEN FREE certification for its corn chips, when corn chips are inherently gluten-free. (You can’t get the sticker without proving you’ve addressed the potential cross-contamination issue.) In economic terms, I believe it’s called business.
The funniest part of the Tillamook scandal is that their cheese is kosher-certified, too, which means Tillamook has apparently been pandering to two religions at once! And it’s not just a cheese thing. Everything from cookies and cereal to soda to salad dressing has carried the kosher symbol for decades without anyone accusing PepsiCo or Kraft of trying to Judaize the snack aisle. Hell, kosher is so culturally unthreatening we literally use it to mean “we’re all good.”
To be clear, kosher certification does not mean the item is healthier, cleaner, or spiritually enriched. It has not been deconstructed, reengineered, or given a special blessing. It simply means that the product has been deemed to comply with religious dietary constraints and manufacturing standards. That is it. A kosher Oreo is not nutritionally superior to the heathen ones they sell in the UK, nor has it been imbued with any mystical holiness. It’s a label—one Nabisco pays for—not a makeover. Halal works essentially the same way.
[Halal meat is a whole separate conversation, one involving religious slaughter practices and legitimate animal-welfare questions—but none of that has anything to do with vegetarian rennet or the cheese we’re talking about here. Different aisle, different cow.]
I get the instinct behind the current outrage. Of course I do. I’m as anxious about the cancer that is Islam overtaking America as the next gal. I also understand that major social and political change generally happens—to quote Hemingway out of context—two ways: Gradually, then suddenly. Is that malignancy going to metastasize in the dairy aisle? I mean, maybe. Is boycotting cheese going to do a damned thing to stop it? I’m pretty sure realistic people realize it’s not.
Here’s what I think we all know for certain: the overlords want us divided. They need us distracted. They’d love us to be furious about cheese—because every conservative who spends his Sunday filming a pepper jack funeral is also one who’s not researching his Senate candidates, preparing for the school board meeting, or reading the agenda for this week’s city council meeting. And the people making decisions about his actual community will be thrilled to encounter zero public pushback.
That’s the whole trick: manufacture the outrage, hand us something to hate, and let us duke it out with strangers over gouda while the real disease festers unnoticed.
If you’re furious that Tillamook tweaked their label, go ahead and let them know. Pen a letter, post your outrage on Facebook, vote with your dairy dollars—but don’t forget to vote with your actual ballot, too. Because they can slap “HALAL CERTIFIED” on their shredded Mexican blend until the cows come home and exactly [*checks notes*] nothing in your life will have changed. No law was passed. No rights were surrendered. No one came to your house and sprinkled Islamic confetti on your cheddar or forced you to purchase a prayer rug.
The decisions that actually shape your life are being made by mayors, governors, legislators, school boards, prosecutors, and judges. You know, the people deciding what laws get enforced, what gets taught, what gets funded, which policies govern immigration and public safety, and whether citizens actually get a meaningful say before ideology becomes policy. So buy another brand of cheese if you really think Tillamook did you a dirty. But maybe don’t waste a perfectly good five-alarm panic on a halal sticker on a bag of sliced Swiss.
Tillamook is also one of the only cheeses that don’t use a Pfizer GMO rennet in their production. 90% of cheeses on the market today use FPC (fermentation-produced chymosin) which is a bioengineered rennet. Unfortunately that process developed by Pfizer was given GRAS (generally regarded as Safe) label, so it’s not labeled GMO. I LOVE Tillamook cheese, and I don’t resent them for advertising for a bigger slice of customers. But that’s just me.
So well said - I can’t keep up with all the companies I am supposed to boycott. And I agree so much that it’s a tactic to keep us distracted.