True patriots.

There’s nothing more Australian than a Four N’ Twenty pie; it’s the food staple of choice at the Ashes, the NRL Grand Final, on road trips and at the school canteen, and it’s been a vital part of Our Culcha longer than Menzies was in the Lodge.

What most people don’t know is that some Four N’ Twenty meat pies and sausage rolls are also halal, meaning they’re prepared in such a way that doesn’t make them inappropriate to eat for people who follow Islamic dietary restrictions.

For people who think “halal” means “infested with evil Muslim food magic”, this is all the excuse needed to go apeshit bananas and flood the Four N’ Twenty Facebook page with semi-deranged posts about how Four N’ Twenty’s preparing their pies in a certain way is tearing the country apart.

Some of the complaints are due to the perception Four N’ Twenty is bowing to “Islamic pressure” — because a company creating a different range of products to reach more consumers is a crazy idea, apparently — while a lot of people use the “argument” that the slaughtering methods used to attain halal certification, whereby the animal is not stunned prior to being killed, constitutes cruelty to animals.

This kind of ignores the fact that, according to the RSPCA, the “vast majority of halal slaughter in Australia” involves animals being stunned in convention with national standards, or that Orthodox Jewish law requires similar practises to ensure meat is kosher. The part-time animal welfare activists on the Four N’ Twenty page seem to have passed the kosher thing by, though, in much the same way that many people in Bendigo suddenly became experts in town planning when a mosque was proposed in the town.

It’d be pretty easy, if you were a marketing person at Four N’ Twenty, to get the heebie-jeebies over a lot of people publicly saying they’ll “never buy your product again” and give in to the pressure. Instead, Four N’ Twenty have been calmly defending their halal range and refusing to remove it from circulation. Check out the Four N’ Twenty comments on the Facebook posts below:

This has been going on for a while, but it’s ramped up a lot in the last few days. Thankfully, Four N’ Twenty are now getting a lot more praise than condemnation for how they’ve handled the situation.

Onya, Four N’ Twenty. True Aussie legends.