This year is Canada’s sesquicentennial (try saying that quickly three times, or even once!) celebration. People, organizations, and businesses are signaling the year-long event in many ways; Parks Canada, for example, is making 2017 Parks Canada Discovery Passes free to all Canadians, providing access to national parks, historic sites and marine conservation areas all year.
One Vancouver restaurant, Edible Canada, already known for highlighting Canadian cuisine, is paying special attention to foods that are uniquely significant within Canada for this year’s special anniversary, and they don’t seem shy about raising debate. They have decided to put seal on their menu, citing its historical and cultural significance and its sustainability as a food source.
Some, however, including the Vancouver Humane Society, have expressed their opposition to the restaurant’s move, calling on the public to ask the restaurant to change their menu.
People have many reasons for the choices they make about the foods they consume: nutritional value; health; moral concerns; beliefs connected to Faith; cost & availability; environmental impact; sustainability; concerns about practices in agriculture and animal husbandry, concerns about over-processing and even fraud.
We are likely to make different food choices for ourselves for different reasons. Maybe we can’t (and maybe we shouldn’t) make those choices for others. But maybe people mostly make choices only between a set of options that are made easily available to them. Maybe talking about the reasons some folks object to certain menu items while others do not can prompt us to pay some attention to the choices we make and the reasons why. If we listen and if we put some critical thought to a headline-getting topic like this, maybe we can have some productive discussions about other issues too.
Would you order a dish made with harp seal at a restaurant? Should it be on the menu? Your thoughtful ideas are welcome.
harp seal
yes
I think it’s OK to eat harp seal because we don’t harm their population and some people like to try something new so it can be a good serving,Also The government allows harvesting seals.The restaurant serves seal on special holidays and it’s located in Vancouver island, many cultures are allowed to have harp seal.the arctic there are over 1,000,000 harp seals.Harp seal are very plentiful.
no
The Inuit takes every part of the animal/ mammal,(even the eyes) but if the restaurant just takes the meat then they’re not using every part of it’s nature’s food source. one time in music Ms.Con talked about this restaurant and there’s this one soup that’s called shark fin soup but what they do is, they’ll cut the fin off and throw the shark back in the water. I didn’t understand why would they do that just for the fin but they’re not using anything else other then that. Harp seals have families too, and we are treating them differently as if you are not the same as them or there are just animals/mammals,also I personally think some people don’t care about things with the climate change nor some don’t think its real. during climate change it could destroy their home.
monthly yearly
approximately 3,200 400,000
I am glad that you seem to have tried to consider the issue from more than one perspective, but I can’t tell where you stand on the topic. I am also having a hard time understanding the relevance of shark-finning to this issue. There might be a point to be made there, but you’ll need to make the connection more clear for me to understand exactly what you’re getting at.
OK I’ll try to do that in my final.
l would not order seal on the menu.
l believe that we should not have seals on the
menu , because there’s not that many types (and or) seals of that species.
You remind me that one of our visitors from the Vancouver aquarium mentioned how some of our local orcas were having trouble because of there being less salmon available. I wonder whether we ought to be second-guessing our use of salmon. (And I wonder what the health of the populations of salmon is like compared to that of harp seals.)
I think it’s OK to serve the harp seal because there so many of them that we won’t hurt the population. The government allows the people to harvest thirty thousand harp seal per year.The harp seal is a good source of nutrition,It is rich in protein, iron and iodine.
You seem to have thought about this carefully. Please point us toward your information sources so we can all find out more.