Sasha Erfanian, Centretown News
The Arctic Food Fair running at the Museum of Nature during March gives Ottawans an opportunity to try exotic northern delicacies, such as this bison slider.As the sound of Inuit throat singing fills the room, 16-year-old Brenna Alfred takes a bite of seal pie at the Museum of Nature.
“It’s kind of like fishy and a little gamey, but it’s really good though,” says Alfred, who’s used to the taste of elk and moose but who had never tried seal before her visit to the museum earlier this month.
As a Mohawk from Kahnawake, a reservation near Montreal, Alfred says she wanted to support other indigenous people by savouring Inuit flavours.
Chef William Carter is cooking up seal pie, smoked Arctic char, partridge berry jam and other northern delicacies for two weeks this month as part of the Museum of Nature’s Arctic Food Festival.
Carter says he grew up eating seal pie in Newfoundland and learned to smoke Arctic char in Nunavut.
“I think we need to do everything we can to find local products,” Carter says. “The Canadian Arctic is very much a local industry.”
“It’s all part of bringing Canada together,” says Joel Marc Frappier, director of food services for the museum’s in-house caterer, Gourmet Cuisine.
The seal was hunted in Labrador and sourced through an Ottawa fish seller, as were the fish and fruits on the tapas-style menu, Carter says.
Charlotte Qamanaq is a cultural worker at Ottawa’s Tungasuvvingat Inuit community centre in Centretown. She says she’s pleased the museum is serving the staples she grew up eating in Nunavut.
“Ottawa is home to the largest Inuit population outside of Nunavut. We have over 2,000 Inuit living here,” she says. “The more the city knows about our culture, the better it is for everybody.”
Exposing the public to how Inuit eat might reduce the stigma associated with their diet, she says.
“We like to eat our food raw or frozen. And that’s not generally how people eat meat down here,” she says.
Qamanaq and her colleagues try to keep the freezer at Tungasuvvingat Inuit on Laurier Avenue stocked with caribou, seal and arctic fish.
The centre buys what it needs for cultural events from hunters in Nunavut and then has the meat flown down.
That can be a challenge. The shipping fees airlines charge are “ridiculously expensive,” Qamanaq says. And it can be difficult to transfer money to the hunters, since some small communities in Nunavut don’t have banks.
But not having “country food,” as Inuit call their traditional foods, would be worse than the trouble of getting it.
Qamanaq says she loses her appetite if she goes too long without her traditional fare, but it’s especially important that elders are able to get the foods they’re used to.
“A lot of times when they get sick they need to eat country food to feel better.”
Country food also keeps Inuit in the south connected to their traditions and helps them cope with the culture shock of urban life, Qamanaq says. “Just to be able to have a little bit of country food is very comforting for Inuit.”
Buying food hunted in the Arctic is good for Inuit on both sides of the tree line, Qamanaq says.
“It really helps local hunters a lot when they get paid to go hunting and then it helps the Inuit in the community here to get country food.”