Eating Seal With the Inuits: ‘The Best Part is the Flipper’

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  08.28.08 | 10:13 AM ET

imageIs the best way to dive into a culture through its food? Justin Nobel, writing in Gourmet, was eager to find out. While in Canada, he visited Kuujjuaq, a village 900 miles north of Montreal. He decided to skip the cheese fries and pizza at local restaurants and instead headed to an Inuit home to sample “the country food”—baked caribou leg and “a hunk of seal the size of a small suitcase.”

He sampled a half-frozen purple shred of seal liver, which was “salty, smooth like sushi, and imbued with a scent of sea so strong I felt as if I were eating ocean.” Um, yum? As much as I admire eating local while traveling, I’m afraid I’ve seen The Secret of Roan Inish too many times to really get into eating cute, furry sea mammals that may have magical powers.

Photo by wili_hybrid via Flickr (Creative Commons).

Tags: Food, North America, Canada, News and Briefs

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


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