A place to find real food
Welcome to Hunters’ Harvest.
The goal of this site is to enable those of us with appetites larger than our hunting abilities to support and connect with hunters who can supply us with the food we crave.
At this point we’re starting small and still figuring everything out. A few hunters and communities have been selected to help pilot the system, but as we learn how to make it work, our goal is to connect communities across Nunavut to the hunters who continue to sustain us.
Project Nunavut launched the first country food market event in November 2010 and in doing so proved that there is a strong Inuit demand for all kinds of country food in Iqaluit, and that there are hunters in Iqaluit and across Nunavut who are interested in meeting the needs of households who aren’t able to access enough country food as they would want.
The country food market was run on a monthly basis with support from the Government of Nunavut throughout most of 2011-2013. The markets were raucous affairs. Customers would show up hours before the official start time, and when hunters rolled in with truck loads or qamotiq’s full of country food, it would be gone in a flash. The main complaint that we received was that the market was too crazy, and that the demand was too high to deal with.
Despite winning numerous awards, and being recognized locally and nationally for the project, Project Nunavut was unable to secure any support for the market project at the end of 2013. We kept the project going on a voluntary basis for a while, but eventually decided to go back to the drawing board and focus efforts elsewhere.
In the meantime hunters have been solving their market access problems themselves. Social media in Nunavut is full of offers of country food for sale and thousands of pounds of country food is being shipped from communities with abundant country food to those with the appetite for it.
Hunter’s Harvest is our next step for the country food market.
Our plan is to start small with a select (and patient) group of hunters and customers who can help us shape the site so that it serves everyone’s needs.
In the beginning we will start with country foods with the lowest risk of over-harvesting (char, seal, turbot, maaktaaq). Behind the scenes we will be reaching out to the stakeholders in the conservation system to figure out how best to include other country foods that require a higher level of oversight.
As we figure out our systems, we’ll look to expand Hunter’s Harvest across the territory and possibly to other jurisdictions.