Eating to save the environment - 3rd November 2023

Silo's a restaurant in London. It prepares meals with invasive species. These plants and animals are from other countries. They're dangerous to other plants and animals in the UK.

The restaurant wants people to eat these species. This can save the UK's environment. Chef Douglas McMaster says they taste delicious.

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 restaurant serves the signal crayfish. They're from the USA. Farmers grow them on fish farms. But they escaped.

Professor Karim Vahed says they're killing UK species of crayfish.

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."

The restaurant can't buy these plants or animals. It has to look for them in the wild. Then they can make the meals. It takes many hours to prepare one meal.

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 knows that invasive species are dangerous. But he says that eating them is a bad idea. This will make them popular. But McMaster disagrees.

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."