Eating away the problem - 3rd November 2023

Would you eat a grey squirrel or Japanese knotweed to help save the environment? A zero waste restaurant in London called Silo is running a series of dinners featuring species invasive to the UK.

The mission behind the meals is to highlight the damage that this foreign flora and fauna is having on native species. Douglas McMaster is the head chef at Silo.

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."

Featuring on the menu are signal crayfish, introduced to the UK from the US and cultivated in special farms as a food source. Unfortunately, they're very good at escaping. According to professor of entomology, Karim Vahed, this is a prime example of the potentially detrimental threat invasive non-native species pose to biodiversity.

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."

All the food for the restaurant, including signal crayfish, is currently foraged, fished or caught in the wild to reduce numbers and impact on the native environment. With no convenient deliveries from suppliers the preparation of just one meal can be a surprising number of hours of work.

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."

However, in spite of the concerns about invasive species, Professor Vahed isn't in favour of their consumption, believing that this may further aggravate the problem by popularising their use. Something which McMaster refutes.

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."