The documentary of the week | Seal on the menu: are you ready to eat seal?

Tender, tasty, nutritious and rich in iron, seal meat could occupy more space in Quebec cuisine, says the documentary Seal on the menu. However, the negative image that has stuck to whitecoat hunting since the 1960s still has an impact, notes director and screenwriter Guillaume Lévesque.

Almost 50 years after Brigitte Bardot’s visit to Blanc-Sablon, during which the actress accused Canada of animal genocide, the seal hunt still does not have good press. The images of the time were indeed striking: the slaughter of the whitecoats seemed cruel and the contrast between their white fur and the blood on the snow was striking.

“If I had been 20 years old at the time, perhaps I would have been sitting on the ice floe with the animalists, but we are no longer there,” assures Guillaume Lévesque, director and screenwriter of the documentary Seal on the menua nuanced film which pleads for responsible exploitation of the “seal wolves” populations of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Guillaume Lévesque is originally from the Matapedia valley and became interested in seal meat after spending a day with chef Kim Côté of the Côté Est restaurant in Kamouraska. He first tasted a seal meat burger ironically called the “Bardot Burger” and was then seduced by the seal loin.

He found it tender, tasty and not too “strong” compared to other wild meats. “I asked myself: if it’s so good, why don’t we eat more of it? », he said during a press presentation held at the ITHQ. Seal on the menu provides answers to this question and defends the idea of ​​making more room for this meat in our restaurants, and even at home.

A “supervised” hunt

Guillaume Lévesque said from the outset that he did not want to approach the subject from a hunting perspective, but rather from a culinary point of view. It recalls the practices that were current a few decades ago, but above all seeks to argue that things have changed.

“We are no longer there,” insists the director, referring to the scenes of “massacres” of whitecoats whose carcasses were abandoned on the ice floe once the skin had been removed.

The hunting of baby seals is prohibited and that of adult specimens is “very supervised”. “We have an obligation to do better. So much the better,” says Gil Thériault, director of the Association of Intra-Québec Seal Hunters, in the documentary. Guillaume Lévesque shows this a little by going hunting with a Madelinot butcher, Réjean Vigneau*, who has made it his mission to make seal meat known: his way of proceeding is no different from sport game hunting. .

Seal on the menu does not debate the relevance of eating meat or not, even if its producer herself calls herself vegetarian. Rather, his point is to argue that an interesting food “resource” exists in eastern Canada, that it could be developed and that its underexploitation also has harmful effects on the environment.

There are around 10 million seals in the east of the country, according to specialist estimates, and their presence exerts significant pressure on the ecosystem. These marine mammals eat phenomenal quantities of fish and, according to them, reasonable hunting would have no significant impact on their presence in our waters.

Seal on the menu addresses the issue from the perspective of terroir and defends the idea of ​​responsible exploitation which could go beyond table products. Its fat – about 65% of the animal’s weight – can be used to produce an oil rich in omega-3 and its fur can obviously make boots and mittens that keep you warm. Without being an activist, the documentary filmmaker has chosen his camp and defends it. Will it help to sway public opinion?

Saturday, 10:30 p.m., on ICI Télé as part of the show Doc Humanity

* No relation to our journalist