Quoted: Anthony Bourdain sticks up for Canadian seal hunting after Mario Batali boycotts our seafood

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Should these chefs boycott all Japanese products over whaling? Chinese over finning? Where do these tactics end? Canada [is] an easy, PC target.

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—Anthony Bourdain took to Twitter yesterday to speak out against chefs Mario Batali, Michael Symon and hundreds more who’ve joined Chefs for Seals, a culinary crusade against Canada’s commercial seal hunt. The campaign gained steam last week when 42 current and former recipients of Food & Wine magazine’s Best New Chef title publicly pledged to boycott Canadian seafood until the controversial practice is stopped. Bourdain, who once dined on seal meat for his series No Reservations, calls the campaign’s slew of high-profile signatories “good-hearted” but “wrong.” Among his counter-arguments: the thriving Canadian seal population; the thousands of Inuits who depend on the practice for their day-to-day survival; and the sheer hypocrisy of the chef-driven movement (here’s one of Batali’s foie gras recipes). As for environmental concerns, Bourdain’s response is equally dismissive: “The combined carbon footprint of the 40 odd chef signatories is equal to a small African nation.” Zing.