Eating to save the environment - 3rd November 2023

Silo, an eco-friendly restaurant in London, has created a menu from invasive species. These species are foreign to the UK and are harmful to its wildlife.

The restaurant aims to reduce the number of invasive species by eating them. Douglas McMaster, who's the head chef, thinks they're tasty.

Douglas McMaster: "So the idea of the invasive dinner series is to creatively popularise species that are detrimental to the environment. So American Signal crayfish, Japanese knotweed, grey squirrel. These are all forces of destruction within our environment, they're all edible, they're all delicious. You'll have to take my word for it."

The menu includes signal crayfish which were brought from the USA. They're grown on fish farms but some have escaped. They've reproduced and are harming the UK's ecosystem.

Professor Karim Vahed thinks this is a good example of how invasive species hurt the environment.

Karim Vahed: "Invasive, non-native species are a major threat to biodiversity. Really, they're one of the major reasons, in addition to for example habitat change, climate change, invasive non-native species are another major reason for the decline of so many species that are threatened with extinction."

Silo's trying to reduce invasive species by eating them. But food companies don't sell the ingredients on Silo's menu. The restaurant collects all the main ingredients from the wild. This means the meal preparation takes a long time.

Douglas McMaster: "For a dinner like tonight, we've probably spent a thousand hours of time to bring it to reality. And that's because yeah, these are not commercially available."

Vahed's worried about invasive species but he doesn't support Silo's solution. He thinks it might make them popular with customers. But McMaster thinks it will control invasive species' populations.

Douglas McMaster: "The idea isn't to popularise these invasive species so there's so much of a demand that we allow them to become more invasive or overpopulate even further just to keep up with that demand. So, that would be the terrible thing to occur. I hope that we bring back balance within the ecosystem and then we stop eating them."