In this paper we analyze two March 2010 events in Ottawa, Canada involving the preparation and consumption of seal-meat: one an Inuit seal feast, held at a Inuit community center, in which raw seal was carved and eaten in accordance with traditional Inuit practices; the other a "seal lunch", held in the Parliamentary Dining Room for Members of Parliament, in support of the Canadian seal-hunt. Methodologically, we make use of both participatory action research and detailed textual analysis of

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... ia reports, and frame our analysis in terms of moral geographies, social and cultural values associated with food, and meaning-making systems embedded in discourses, which serve to construct and constitute particular power relations. Doing so leads us to claim that the two seal-meal events drew on and conveyed radically different meanings. The Inuit meal, though not overtly political, represented an act of food sovereignty and a claim to Inuit territoriality in the city. The Parliamentary seal lunch, by contrast, had a clear political aim, as a form of protest against the European Union decision to ban seal meat and other products. Yet, while purporting to support Inuit seal-hunting, the Parliamentary meal effectively communicated the utter foreignness of seal meat and Inuit foodways with respect to Western tastes and discourses about food and environmentalism-a fact that emerges through our ethnographic and media analysis of the two seal lunch events.