Menu from the New Wild

Our native biodiversity is under attack!
Invasive plants and animals are disrupting the balance of our local wildlife. Although the EU has already started addressing this issue, action is usually only taken in commercially relevant areas. It seems like natural conservation is too uneconomical, so long-term consequences are simply ignored.

So what if we make them commercially relevant while simultaneously reducing the numbers in favour of biodiversity?
The obvious next step is integrating them into the economic cycle – By eating them! Soup from the invasive Pond Slider Turtle, roasted Raccoon with shoots from Japanese Knotweed and Seeds on cream from Himalayan Balsam appear on the menu of a near future.

This three course menu and the dining experience around it serve as playful and experiential medium for a broad audience to participate in the discussion about global ecological changes and our human role within it. The special dining setup enables consumers to experience the balancing and regulating effect their eating habits have on our ecosystems.

Do we have to change our paradigms of consumption if we want to protect what we consider to be our ‘pristine’ nature? Or is this only a late justification of our own ecological mess? How do we even define ‘nature’ in the age of the Anthropocene?
And most important: how do you kill a turtle ethically?