Invasive Species, or Good Eatin?

So let’s be serious for a moment. Well, I’ll be serious, and you can crack jokes, I won’t take offense. Hunger is a real problem. And so are invasive species, like the flying carp (ever see those damn things? I would not want to be standing on a boat going down any river they’ve moved in on.) So you got two problems, and no solutions. Like the American Signal Crayfish, which are stomping out the white crayfish in the UK. They’re aggressive and destructive…

…and delicious.

And that’s where our story begins, at Silo London Restaurant, a “zero waste” high class joint which features on its menu the invasive American Signal Crayfish, and (sorry) the grey squirrel, which is also invasive in the UK, also reportedly delicious.

I think we get the picture here, right? Animals are overrunning the natural digs, we’re hungry; hell, we’re hangry, so why not kill two birds here? (I’m not sure if there are any invasive, delicious birds that are worth chucking stones at, but if so, Silo probably serves them.)

So this sounds like a win-win. We can eat our problem away. C’mon, if we can eat pineapple pizza, we can certainly eat grey squirrel. And they’re probably invasive here in the upstate too but they’re just so damn cute with their fluffy tails (which might be the Filet Mignon of squirrel, who knows.) But the experts must weigh in.

“Consuming invasive non-native species isn’t something that I would encourage,” Karim Vahed, professor of entomology at the University of Derby. Raspberries to him, but he says that by harvesting them for food, we might be encouraging them to become even more invasive.

“Squirrel meat gotta be cheaper than hamburger,” says Liam Sweeny, after throwing a hundred-and-twenty dollars into two grocery bags. Could we be looking at a cheap meat for broke-ass people like me?

This is what I don’t get. Scientists say if we hunt American Crayfish in the UK, they might become more invasive. I’ve never seen a buffalo in my backyard, and I’m pretty sure it’s because about a century ago, they were hunted to near extinction.

For the record, I wouldn’t eat a squirrel. Mostly because I’m not a hunter, and if you’re a hunter, you too might know that the American Grey Squirrel is delicious.

I might try the jerky.

Written by Liam Sweeny.