If you eat veal at an Italian restaurant or goat at a Middle Eastern restaurant, you won't run into protests over the meat you are eating. Add some seal to your diet and you might get a side of protest.
My search for a seal burger in Newfoundland came up short when I traveled there in 2015. Thanks to a relatively new restaurant in Toronto, I wouldn't have to go that far to finally score some seal.
Ku-kum Kitchen in the Davisville neighbourhood in Toronto specializes in all sorts of meats common to the indigenous diet such as elk, caribou, and goose. Salmon and trout are also on the menu, but we've learned that fish doesn't draw the level of protest as meat attracts.
The owners point out that the seal meat comes from a commercial source from professional hunters, as opposed to an indigenous hunt. The source of that hunt has drawn some of the protest against serving seal.
From my limited knowledge, since the indigenous population is limited in how they can use the whole seal to make money to survive, fewer seals are being hunted through indigenous hunts. Those people who would benefit financially from selling items such as mittens made with sealskin would also benefit if more restaurants in the Canadian south would serve seal meat. The prices at Ku-kum Kitchen are much higher than ones you will see at Swiss Chalet or Boston Pizza.
For the record, I don't know if I will like seal. I might not. But I feel like that trying seal will help me understand a population that I am slowly learning about in this world.
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Traveling to Newfoundland in 2015 helped awaken me to the issues behind the seal hunt. Seeing Angry Inuk at the 2016 Windsor International Film Festival added to my knowledge and my interest.
I agree with the protesters that I would rather have seal meat from indigenous hunters. The protest mentality did lead to the reduction in indigenous hunting, so I do have less sympathy for the protesters.
If I were up in Iqaluit in Nunavut, and someone offered me seal, I would try it. That appears to be the spirit of Ku-kum Kitchen: these are foods eaten by Canadians even if they live far away from Toronto. Given the price of the food that is flown into Nunavat and the other Canadian territories, they should be eating more animals germane to that region.
We can learn so much about any society through food. Saltless bread, tripe, and rare steak can easily be found in Florence and Tuscany in Italy. A goat stew might lend some perspective as opposed to a beef stew in North America. I would rather have seal than tripe, but I might like both foods.
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The current menu at Ku-kum Kitchen has an Arctic Trio appetizer with beet-cured salmon, seal tartare, and smoked rainbow trout for $22 Canadian. In earlier reports, the seal tartare came with crostini and a quail egg. Sounds good.
There was a counter protest against the original protesters. The counterprotest was design to educate those protesters about the realities of the indigenous diet. Too often, the indigenous population in Canada and other countries is ignored or forgotten. Eating the indigenous food of any population is a great way to understand.
photo credit: Ku-kum Kitchen, Toronto
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