When Ruby Abdulla moved to Charleston 32 years ago, she and her husband started looking around the grocery stores for halal foods - the only foods that are lawful for Muslims to eat.

"I have to tell you - when we first came here, we couldn't even buy bread," said Abdulla, a realty agent with Old Colony. "Sunbeam bread was the only one that had vegetable oil. The rest of the bread had lard. Cookies - we couldn't buy those, either.

"But things have changed quite a bit."

As the Kanawha Valley's Muslim population has grown, a couple of locally owned stores have started carrying halal foods. The foods must contain no pork or alcohol, among other things, and the meats must come from specially slaughtered animals.

But almost always, those foods are trucked in from out of state. Almeshia Brown, an agriculture extension specialist at West Virginia State University, wants to change that.

Brown is Muslim - and she says she has to buy about 60 percent of her groceries over the Internet.

"Why couldn't we keep that money here in West Virginia?" she asked.

Brown is part of a statewide project to teach the West Virginia public - including farmers, stores and restaurants - about the potential cash cow that is halal food.

"We've got to educate farmers," said Teresa Halloran, a marketing specialist with the state Department of Agriculture, who is part of the project. The department is working on both halal and kosher certifications for West Virginia foods, from honey, salsa and bread to goat, chicken and beef.

"This is an avenue to [farmers] to distribute their meat," Halloran said. "Rather than taking it up to Pennsylvania for slaughter, they could keep it in the state."

Dara Seybold, a researcher at Charleston Area Medical Center, moved to Charleston with her family from the Washington, D.C., area a year ago.

"I didn't really know what to expect in this area" regarding halal food, she said. "It's been pretty difficult ... My [6-year-old] daughter just asked me for lamb ribs. Where we lived before, I could just go five minutes down the road and get them. She misses those a lot."

And it's not just meat. "It's foods you might not think of," Brown said. "How about Jell-O? We can't eat Jell-O." Some gelatin is derived from pig's bones, or from the bones of non-halal cows. If gelatin is listed in an ingredient list, and the food is not specifically labeled halal, Brown will not eat it. "We can't eat marshmallows, because they might be made with swine gelatin," she said. "I even order my desserts online."

At times, people have decided against moving to the Kanawha Valley simply because their foods were not readily available here, said Abdulla, the realty agent.

"I am in this business of settling people - finding them new homes," she said. Most of her Muslim clients have been doctors or engineers. "Whenever they call me, the first thing they ask me is, 'Do you have any halal stores? Can you buy food easily?' And when they found out it wasn't available, they didn't come."

Halloran, from the Department of Agriculture, recalled a Huntington doctor telling her he was unable to recruit another doctor to a hospital there. The recruit "did his research and could not find halal foods here," Halloran said. "He did not transfer here."

When Ruby Abdulla moved to Charleston 32 years ago, she and her husband started looking around the grocery stores for halal foods - the only foods that are lawful for Muslims to eat.

"I have to tell you - when we first came here, we couldn't even buy bread," said Abdulla, a realty agent with Old Colony. "Sunbeam bread was the only one that had vegetable oil. The rest of the bread had lard. Cookies - we couldn't buy those, either.

"But things have changed quite a bit."

As the Kanawha Valley's Muslim population has grown, a couple of locally owned stores have started carrying halal foods. The foods must contain no pork or alcohol, among other things, and the meats must come from specially slaughtered animals.

But almost always, those foods are trucked in from out of state. Almeshia Brown, an agriculture extension specialist at West Virginia State University, wants to change that.

Brown is Muslim - and she says she has to buy about 60 percent of her groceries over the Internet.

"Why couldn't we keep that money here in West Virginia?" she asked.

Brown is part of a statewide project to teach the West Virginia public - including farmers, stores and restaurants - about the potential cash cow that is halal food.

"We've got to educate farmers," said Teresa Halloran, a marketing specialist with the state Department of Agriculture, who is part of the project. The department is working on both halal and kosher certifications for West Virginia foods, from honey, salsa and bread to goat, chicken and beef.

"This is an avenue to [farmers] to distribute their meat," Halloran said. "Rather than taking it up to Pennsylvania for slaughter, they could keep it in the state."

Dara Seybold, a researcher at Charleston Area Medical Center, moved to Charleston with her family from the Washington, D.C., area a year ago.

"I didn't really know what to expect in this area" regarding halal food, she said. "It's been pretty difficult ... My [6-year-old] daughter just asked me for lamb ribs. Where we lived before, I could just go five minutes down the road and get them. She misses those a lot."

And it's not just meat. "It's foods you might not think of," Brown said. "How about Jell-O? We can't eat Jell-O." Some gelatin is derived from pig's bones, or from the bones of non-halal cows. If gelatin is listed in an ingredient list, and the food is not specifically labeled halal, Brown will not eat it. "We can't eat marshmallows, because they might be made with swine gelatin," she said. "I even order my desserts online."

At times, people have decided against moving to the Kanawha Valley simply because their foods were not readily available here, said Abdulla, the realty agent.

"I am in this business of settling people - finding them new homes," she said. Most of her Muslim clients have been doctors or engineers. "Whenever they call me, the first thing they ask me is, 'Do you have any halal stores? Can you buy food easily?' And when they found out it wasn't available, they didn't come."

Halloran, from the Department of Agriculture, recalled a Huntington doctor telling her he was unable to recruit another doctor to a hospital there. The recruit "did his research and could not find halal foods here," Halloran said. "He did not transfer here."

The man who was doing the recruiting was Jewish, said Brown. When she spoke with him, she asked him if he ate kosher. He said no - because it was too hard to find kosher foods here.

"It's a problem for both Jews and Muslims," said Brown, who has included a rabbi on her steering committee.

The Department of Agriculture works with both rabbis and Muslim leaders, to provide kosher and halal certification to West Virginia producers who want it. "They don't have to pay thousands of dollars for out-of-state certifiers - because, you know, you have to pay the travel expenses," Halloran said. "It's done locally and literally at no charge."

Halloran said officials got interested in the issue when they attended specialty-food trade shows, and they noticed that kosher and halal foods had an edge on the competition.

"Every little plus you have like that helps boost the marketability of your product, when you're shipping it nationally or internationally," Halloran said.

At a small, independent grocery store in Kanawha City, customers buy 100 pounds of halal goat and 150 pounds of halal chicken every week.

And that's not counting the Islamic holy times of Ramadan and Eid, when demand rises even more.

"This case is all halal," said Meena Anada, indicating a large floor-to-ceiling freezer case full of halal frozen dinners, breads, chicken nuggets and the like. Another case held packages of halal chicken and goat, halal beef frankfurters and halal chicken and beef bologna. A tour of the store revealed halal oxtails, gyro meat, ramen noodles - even halal gummi bears.

Non-Muslims buy the food, too. On this particular day, Pancho Morris, who oversees the state magistrate system for the Supreme Court, stopped in to buy some goat - a favorite of his mom, who is from Jamaica. Anada said some of her non-Muslim customers choose halal food because they believe it is healthier: The animals are raised without chemicals, hormones or steroids.

"We go to D.C. two times a week, and I always have special orders," Anada said. "Boneless chicken breast, ground chicken, ground beef, stew beef, lamb - there is absolutely no trouble getting halal food here in Charleston anymore."

But it almost all comes from out-of-state - or so Anada thought. "Once, when we were picking up halal meat in D.C., we saw a truck unloading," she recalled. "It had a West Virginia phone number printed on the side."

Brown, Halloran and others would like to see West Virginia producers start bypassing that middleman. In North Dakota, for example, a consortium of farmers and Muslim businesspeople has started raising and selling halal food locally, Abdulla said.

"My son is in Minnesota. He eats the North Dakota halal food all the time," she said. "They have already built a big slaughterhouse and have cashed in on this concept of serving the Muslim people.

"This is very big business."

Reach Tara Tuckwiller at t...@wvgazette.com or 348-5189.