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Eat out to help out - 3rd November 2023

London-based sustainable restaurant, Silo's serving up invasive species on its menu. It's introducing a unique dinner series based on destructive non-native invasive species to the UK's ecosystem, such as the grey squirrel and Japanese knotweed.

The motive is to spread awareness and preserve the local ecosystem from the detrimental impacts of these species on the local flora and fauna. Silo's head chef Douglas McMaster expounds.

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."

Silo's dinner series plates up the signal crayfish as one of its culinary ingredients, an American species introduced to UK aquaculture as a food source. Known for its ability to escape, the creature's wreaked havoc on the native white-clawed crayfish. This gives credence to entomologist Professor Karim Vahed's claims of the devastating impacts non-native species can have on local 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."

As these are not the kind of ingredients to be found in the local supermarket the Silo team have had to resort to foraging in the wild, which in turn aids in bringing back some balance to the local ecosystem. The major disadvantage is that this dramatically increases meal prep times.

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, for Professor Vahed the consumption of invasive species could be a double-edged sword. The entomologist fears this will exacerbate the problem if people develop a taste for them, thereby increasing demand. Nevertheless, McMaster begs to differ.

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."

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