Biodiverse food plants: Which gaps do we need to address to promote sustainable diets?

Abstract

With the Sustainable Development Objective (SDG) 2, the proposal sought by the member states of the United Nations is to end hunger, to achieve food security, to improve nutrition, and to promote sustainable agriculture. With the SDG 15, they aim to protect, to recover, and to promote the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, to manage forests in a sustainable way, to combat desertification, to stop, and reverse land degradation, and to stop the loss of biodiversity.

Traditional botanical knowledge: food plants from the Huni Kuĩ indigenous people, Acre, western Brazilian Amazon

“…Nutritional composition data play a key role in planning recommendations, food processing programs and other food security and nutrition policies (Jacob & Albuquerque 2020). However, such data are still scarce in the scientific literature for many of the food plants in the diet of indigenous peoples (Kennedy et al 2017).…”

“…One of the consequences of globalization is cultural homogenization, which is also reflected in a standardization of food (Canesqui & Garcia 2005), largely due to the globalization of markets, industrial agriculture, and the increased use of industrialized products (Muller et al 2010). It is worth noting that the potential global food biodiversity is estimated at around 30,000 plants, but only 15 to 200 species are generally used by humans (Jacob & Albuquerque 2020). In Brazil more than 50% of the species consumed are exotic, originating largely from Eurasia, perhaps indicating a form of gastronomic-food "imperialism" (Kinupp & Lorenzi 2014).…”

“…Knowledge of the biodiversity accessible from local food systems forms a key element when structuring biodiversity-related information concerning food plants and, therefore, for the formulation and implementation of public policies on food and nutrition security, towards healthier, more diversified and sustainable diets (Jacob & Albuquerque 2020). Indigenous peoples play a central role in achieving this objective.…”

“…Ethnobotany, as an interdisciplinary science that seeks to understand the multiple ecological, evolutionary and cultural interactions of past and present human societies with plants biodiversity (Alexiades 1996), can collaborate with this transdisciplinary method of research. In addition to the formerly pervasive tendency to focus on producing inventories of food plant species, ethnobotanical research nowadays has the highly conservation-relevant role of analyzing the contribution of these plants to food and nutritional security, the local economy and to biodiversity conservation (Jacob & Albuquerque 2020).…”

Searching for Germane Questions in the Ethnobiology of Food Scouting

“…While until the1990s food ethnobotany was centered on documenting wild food plants uses or local cultivated landraces, in the most recent decades the researches focused more also on the processing/preparations of food plants (gastronomy) and on the sociocultural meaning of the possible temporal and spatial changes of their uses (e.g., di Tizio et al 2012; Garibay-Orijel et al 2007; Kalle, Sõukand, and Pieroni 2020). In particular, in the last decades, a growing number of scholars have increasingly carried out research in the fields of food ethnobotany, ethnocuisine and ethnogastronomy with the aims of exploring the interactions between local communities, food, and the environment, as well as the evolution in the role of traditional foods in both traditional and modern culinary and gastronomic settings (e.g., Aceituno-Mata, Tardío, and Pardo-de-Santayana 2021; Blanco-Salas et al 2019; Jacob and Albuquerque 2020; Łuczaj et al 2012).…”