Food & Wine’s Top Chefs Pledge to Protect Seals

Each year Food & Wine magazine honors 10 up-and-coming culinary specialists as the “Best New Chefs” of the year. Since the magazine’s inception 25 years ago, more than 40 of the selected chefs are now participants in the Humane Society of the United States’ Protect Seals Campaign, in which each individual pledges not to buy seafood products from Canada until the country stops sanctioning seal slaughter. “I look forward to celebrating the day when Canada’s commercial seal hunt is a thing of the past and am honored to find myself in the company of so many wonderful chefs who feel the same way,” says James Beard award-winner Suzanne Goin, who is the executive chef at Lucques and Tavern in Los Angeles and a 1999 Food & Wine Best New Chef honoree. The HSUS reports that approximately one million seals have been slaughtered in the past five years, and 97 percent of the slain marine mammals are younger than three years old.